Angry Chair Guy

3D Animation
Blender
~2 Weeks

Project Overview

The goal of this project was to make a short animation about a stickman getting angry and smacking a television with a folding chair.

The planning for this project started with an assignment to create a short animation to showcase what we'd learned. Figuring out what to animate was decided in the way most things are when I'm given a lot of creative freedom; The first thought that popped into my head.

And what popped into my head was a guy seeing something he didn't like on a television, and then smacking it away with a folding chair he was sitting on. The reason I went with this instead of trying to think of something else, is in part because it's easier, but also to spend as much time as possible working on the actual animation.

As for why my mind went with this particular premise? I thought it was funny.

The (slightly smudged) storyboard.

The design of the titular "Angry Chair Guy" is primarily inspired by Stick Figure Fight Animations (something I recommend checking out), with some big (if minimalistic) features to maximize expressiveness.

Having a mouth was deemed unnecessary, as his only real facial expression was a twitching eyelid, and looking angry. The eyes being as big as they are helps make this clear.

Remember a bit further up this page, about how I mentioned having as much time as possible to work on the animation? Turns out that was more necessary than I would've wanted it to be.

I know how to make a walkcycle, I know how to keyframe an object while it's moving around a scene. I did not, however, know how to properly do both at the same time. So every step Angry Chair Guy (ACG) takes was manually animated, with little interpolation in-between. I know there are ways to do it properly and with less effort, but by the time I thought about doing that I was in too deep to switch method, and I did not want to re-do the whole animation.

Pictured are the total amount of keyframes needed to animate every bone in ACG, as well as a part of the animation where the steps were too grossly jittery to look at but too finicky to animate properly. I hid them by directing the camera away from them in the final render. I also hid that the chair floated for a bit before smacking the TV

Doing some research before starting something will save you a lot of stress and effort that would have been better spent elsewhere.

Time is a valuable resource. Use it well.

Lessons Learned

Feel free to check out some of my other projects.