Pantomime

This one was a challenge. I had to try to recreate a scene and express contrasting emotions without facial expression, just pure body animation. I acted out the actions in front of the mirror and in front of the camera to use it as a reference and came up with this blocking:

I had a lot of fun animating the waiter which worked like magic from the beginning. but the other guy was a different story. I had to take in consideration that only one of my character should be doing something important at a time to make the silent dialog work, but I wanted the main guy to do so much stuff that the animation was getting to busy. at the end I had to delete a lot of the details I had him doing to make the animation more readable and believable. Moving holds was another thing that I had to learn how to achieve. Too still and you would perceive the character as rigid or dead, too much motion and it would not be a moving hold, to even motion on the holds and it would feel to CG. Moving hold can be tricky.