Gesture Animation

I thought about this topic as a new direction to my thesis, and it focuses on gesture, and or gesture drawing for animation. Not sure how this would be interlaced throughout the project, but I do find a correlation as gesture relates significantly to emotion. Below is a description followed by an example of gesture animation I found on youtube.

My topic is gesture animation. Gesture drawing is a type of drawing done quickly in life drawing classes where the student must capture the figure's pose and proportion in a rhythmic fashion so as to appear fluid. These quick drawings, on a deeper level, can also capture the feeling or emotion of the pose being displayed. One of the concepts of gesture drawing, is that this preliminary gesture drawing is the foundation for what could be a final rendered drawing. At this stage, the drawing could be created in such a way that it exaggerates the pose at hand, which then exaggerates the feeling or emotion being expressed by the model. The concept to remember is: more exaggeration equals more emotion. An intermediate student having taken a number of life drawing classes would understand this, and I believe that relating this knowledge or experience to the student's task of animating CG characters would help the student at the initial posing and keyframing stage. Before animating a CG character, a animator must plan out the main poses of the animation through various keyframes in the animation. If the student understands that through exaggerated gestures emotion is achieved, then the student will have an easier time achieving emotion in computer generated characters.