So the assignment this week was to turn this splendid piece of acting into it’s better-looking, digital brother!
It may not look it, but this animation is quite the milestone – it really represents my first foray into the world of cartoony animation! Hopefully it’s looking OK. It was fairly obvious, even before I got my critique, that there was a fairly major issue at FRM98 (of course, I didn’t spot it at 4am on Sunday morning*)!
I didn’t get my critique until yesterday morning, which once again doesn’t give me loads of time this week but my enthusiasm was boosted somewhat because the critique from Michelle was really great. I got LOADS of notes, so there is plenty to fix but overall she seemed very positive and I’ve got a great idea of what to tackle and in what order. To sum up her points:
- Beware of locking out the legs during the stretch frames. Break them in the opposite direction if it helps the line of action.
- Add an breakdown between FRM19 and 21 to better define what’s happening with the spine and head.
- Drag the screen right arm from FRM21 into position at FRM24 instead of taking it high and back away from the screen.
- Make the sneaky looks more involved and exaggerated. Perhaps just make one very extreme and just make the other one a little more obvious – get the whole body involved in the movement!
- At FRM98, bring the head/body in a downwards arc to avoid the clunkiness of the spine reversal.
- Keep the eyes on-screen whilst Stewie is looking at the apple.
- Have Stewie jump higher during the initial shock (around FRM163).
- Double the length of time Stewie spends being disgusted but get him off-screen faster.
- Exaggerate the angle of the spine during the run off-screen. Add some more tilt and really push the lines of action. Consider flailing the arms behind him as he leaves screen left.
Pretty comprehensive right? Well, it’s definitely useful to have all this to refer back to and get a better idea of how to improve the shot. Time to re-block this baby, taking all this stuff into account – then we’re onto splining the bastard!
*Yes, I may have stayed up very late trying to get the shot finished so I could go and see UP with the rest of the AM crew! It was freakin’ awesome, but I’m hoping to get some time to write about both UP and “Cloudy…” in the near future!
Thanks for reading, hope you found it interesting. Comments, questions or suggestions are always welcome!
[...] tried to cover all the notes from the great critique last week. The one main I couldn’t manage was the increased time during the squeamish [...]