freelance job: AOL superbuddies - star character

Here is one of the 1st AOL 'superbuddies' that i animated years ago.

It was the first time i had to make 'blendshapes' to create the needed poses for each of the characters emotions.

These little characters would be seen next to the person who was ' IM ' posting on AOL. If the word ' sad ' appears in the text as the person was writing it.... their chosen character { in this case, the star } ... would animate a 'sad' emotion.

I had to animate each character starting from a default pose { with no emotion }, then have the character move closer to the camera, animate the needed expression/emotion, then move back to the beginning start pose again.

It was a fun extra freelance job, with each character having 21 different emotions.

It was limited as you can tell, with the file sizes only being able to be so big { or so small } but the challenge was to make it fun to see the character animate as the person typed to his/her friend online.