Death

Considering a lot of my soldiers are getting killed I knew that I would have to do a death cycle, so I decided to make one by having him getting stabbed in the back as I thought that most ninjas like to come up behind their victim where they cant be seen to deliver the killing blow. I first put him into an idle pose that he can be transitioned from the other cycles when getting killed such as the guard walk, I have also put a dummy sword in which will help me get the timings correct for him falling over.

After setting his idle pose I then went straight in and put the sword through him to show him getting stabbed and then I sorted out how I wanted him to die. I wanted to put a little bit of personality and acting into his death so I decided to have the sword stay in his chest for a small period of time which at that point he would look down and realise the sword in him and then using the force of the sword being pulled back out he would fall backwards. I came to this conclusion by (not sounding weird) looking into people getting stabbed, mainly from movie references.

I wanted to try and get the feel of the clip above as I feel he shows a lot of emotion when he gets stabbed which is what I want to try and bring to the table. I feel like I have accomplished this in the shot below as you can see that the sword has lifted the soldier up off his feet from the force of his attack which is what I wanted to portray.

The hardest thing about creating this animation was getting him to fall correct after he has been stabbed. I didn't want to make his death too eccentric as I think that it would look out of place in our final cinematic. After a lot of different tries I managed to get the fall right which brought the whole animation together quite nicely.

After showing Mitch he really liked the animation however he said that it would be very noticeable if we were to use it over and over within the animation with all the people getting stabbed and killed the same way, so we decided that we needed another death. Rather than making a whole other animation I decided to cut the first bit off so that we had just the fall meaning we could use it in a variety of ways which can be seen below.

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