That’s right, I’m in Florence visiting Marie at the moment. It’s amazing what limited access to the internet will do for your productivity! Take a look:

I’ve been concentrating almost solely on the guy as he was the least complete up until now. I’m liking the reveal and the drop down with the car bonnet. I’m still not sure how well it’s reading when he comes out from behind it though. My idea for the scene was always that the mechanic/situation was so ridiculous that it distracted him from worrying about the werewolf (particularly because the mechanic is so unfazed by the event), but it’s difficult to convey that!

I’ve still got quite a lot of work to do before Sunday. The entire last shot and the mechanic in the first two and possibly an attempt at blocking out the faces… Oh dear.

Take a look:

I’ve not looked at the guy at all yet, only the girl and the mechanic. I started with the girl as she’s only in the first 2 seconds and I’m already pretty happy with her movement. Unfortunately she doesn’t get quite as much time on-screen as I’d like, but that can’t be helped right now.

I haven’t really done anything with the mechanic in shot 1 or 2 yet. I need to come to a decision about a few key acting choices before I get too heavily into those scenes. Chris had some great suggestions that I want to run past Mario in the Q&A today. The main stuff I looked at was the pointing and I think I’ve got some pretty good physicality there.

Need to do a bit more work before my Q&A later today, but looking forward to it! Any comments, questions or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

This has the updated camera, based on my feedback from last week. Obviously, there’s still no facial animation but the basic blocking is done with a few in-betweens.

Mario went quite in-depth with his critique, which was great as it gives me some goals to achieve and something I can actively work towards sorting out, rather than just “carrying on”.

Here’s what he said in more detail:

Characterisation

Consider changing the pose/style of the mechanic’s animation when his voice changes for the line “I thought you wanted to?”, as though he was ‘playing a part’ before and now he’s broken out of the character he thought he was meant to be.

The guy doesn’t seem to feel terribly worried any more after he says “What?!”

Body Mechanics

Add in some additional breakdowns for the girl to show the change of weight during her movement; between FRM24/25 both her feet move at the same time.

Put in some anticipation before the mechanic stands up; this should help to ensure that the movement reads properly across the camera cut.

Add more asymmetry to the guy after he says “WEREWOLF?!”. At the moment his face, head and shoulders are all completely parallel to the bonnet of the car.

Minor Fixes

Watch the knee at FRM20, it’s close to looking broken.

Check the silhouettes on FRM48, where the foreshortening of the arms is creating a high “traffic area” in the hands and the mechanic’s arm in the first shot. Be careful that the mechanic’s arm and head don’t create a tangent around FRM238.

Overall

I feel like Mario is starting to get the concept now, starting to understand what it is I’m trying to attain with this shot, so that feels good. I do need to be clearer about my goals and what the characters are meant to be feeling in each shot and I should have been from the start.

For the record, I LOVE the idea of changing up the mechanic’s personality quick dramatically after the guy asks “Why are you talking that way?!”, I think it’s a brilliant idea and I’m hoping I can do it justice!

As for the guy not being terribly scared after he says “What?!”, that was actually the plan from the start (one of those things I didn’t make clear). I wanted the absurdity of the conversation to distract him from the fact that he’s just heard a werewolf that he should be pretty concerned about. I will mention this at the Q&A this week.

The other part of our hand-in this week was another facial expression:

Mario had no suggestions for improvements, but once again suggested that I’d been “cheating” by using deformers or lattices to create certain shapes: not true! Again, something to mention at the Q&A ;)

B+

As I said, I think I’m on the way up, out of my mid-term lull. I’ll certainly be attacking my blocking over the coming days to see if I can really exaggerate the characters and acting choices a lot more. I may even start tackling some of the facial animation.

Regardless, I need to get a move on with this stuff as I’m flying off to Florence for a couple of weeks to see Marie on Thursday. I will (of course) have access to a computer and (limited access) to the internet, but the more efficient I can be, the more time I can spend doing nice stuff.

Now, about those earlier nights I was talking about…

I don’t think my video reference is particularly amazing. At least, if nothing else, it does at least help to convey what the heck is going (something that a few people have struggled with in the storyboard/animatic phase), but it’s lacking a bit of character at the moment. I may shoot some more or I may just try and stay wary of the fact that the acting choices need more “oompf”.

I did do a few pose sketches to see if I could come up with some appealing shapes, lines of action and add a little more ‘character’ to each of the characters:

One of the main things I wanted to address from last week was the slight confusion most people seemed to suffer from when the camera cuts up close to the mechanic, so I addressed that in an updated storyboard.

And here’s the scene layout I did as a result of that:

It’s still far from perfect, but it’s getting there. I should point out that the awful camera move did not see any finesse at all, it is completely linear. Even so, I second-guessed what Mario would say about it in my critique and I’ve already taken it out of the next iteration!

This is what Mario had to say:

Layout

Get rid of the moving camera shot. Re-frame the action by pulling the camera back a bit such that we can see everything without having to move.

Don’t worry about the establishing shots for now. Take the first shot, pull the camera back a bit and slowly truck in so that we have an establishing shot without greatly extending the animation.

Consider adding a cut that re-frames the action on the guy and the mechanic after the girl has finished her line. That will make it clear to the audience that we’re only concerned with the two characters on-screen from now on and it will reduce the amount of animation to do.

In the last shot, don’t change the camera angle; go back to the existing shot that the audience has already seen and is comfortable with.

Overall

Pull the cameras back a bit, they all feel a little close.

B

It’s been a tough week, from both a workload and motivational point of view. Video reference tends to stress me out and takes a very long time to get right (it doesn’t help that my parents are renovating their house, so I had no space to actually film anything!). Once you think you might have something you like, you need to spend bloody ages editing it and chopping it all together. On top of that we had to do additional sketches and the layout with some rough blocking poses.

Ugh. Tired.

For your reference, here’s what I handed in last week:

I will now relay to you, all the things I need to sort out:

Mouth

• The synchronisation of the mouth to the dialogue seems to work well already.
• Push the intensity for some of the expressions – “Edgewise” has a perfect level of intensity but there are a number of places where the face needs to match just how intense the dialogue is, for example “sake” and “after all”.
• “Can’t a girl” – Needs more ‘bounces’, either with the jaw or lips. Perhaps it needs to be faster as well? Maybe reduce the jaw rotations here and concentrate on the lip shapes instead.

Brow

• All the phrases of emotion are reading really well already.

Eyes

• Generally everything is working OK so far.
• What is she looking at on FRM18?
• Add in some minor eye adjustments/movement.
• Perhaps re-time the blink at FRM30 – it happens too soon before “What’s the big idea?”

Body

• Watch that head jerk at the end of the animation – “my public too!”
• Bring the head down in the pose at FRM155 so we keep her eyes towards camera – don’t disconnect her from the audience.
• Are the eyes shut too long at the end of the animation? Changing this could involve a reasonably large modification to the final pose – something to discuss at the Q&A.

Overall

• Push the intensity of the facial expressions. Try going a bit crazy and see how far you can push it. The dialogue is very over the top so try to match that in the facial animation. Bishop has a very elastic, cartoony mouth – perhaps watch some Bug Bunny and other Looney Tunes stuff to see how they do it.
• “Can’t a girl” – Good brow asymmetry, try doing it on the mouth as well. Think about it in terms of Squash & Stretch – one side of the face stretches whilst the other squashes down.
• Remember to keep the whole face working together as one unit.

B+

There we go then! Plenty to sort out, but on the whole it’s working pretty well. There are a few things I want to discuss at the Q&A this week, such as what he meant about the ‘bounces’ because I understood about ‘reducing the jaw rotations and concentrating on the lip shapes’ and also what other possibilities exist with regards to changing the end pose as that might have quite a dramatic impact on the animation.

If you guys have any additional things you think I need to sort out, let me know!

First up, we’ve got the phonetic break-down of the dialogue:

Or rather, the dialogue written according what what mouth shapes are needed to make the sound. For example, you tend not to write things like ‘W’ (as in “what’s the big idea?”) – you actually make the same mouth shape when saying ‘w’ as you do if you said ‘ooo’. It adds an additional layer of complexity/thinking than just writing out the line using phonetics.

I’ve highlighted the most important sounds, these are the ones that I have to hit if I want the dialogue to read clearly, and also made a note of where I think there will be a pretty significant change in mouth shape over a very short amount of time (anywhere there’s a diphthong, for example).

Now it’s time for some terrible drawings!

Amazing, right? I can only apologise! It’s just a basic idea of what expressions I wanted to use over the course of the line. As long as it conveys the emotion, it doesn’t really matter how good (or in this case, bad) the drawings are. As you’ll see, I’ve actually already deviated from this slightly in my blocking phase.

Mario suggested this quick way of nailing down some basic jaw rotations – take the dialogue line and think about how open the mouth will need to be at various points and sounds.

Man, that new Animation Mentor logo thing is really annoying! Anyway, here’s my first pass of the facial animation for this shot – I’ve just tried to block in the main phoneme shapes and expressions. I know the body still requires loads of work – I haven’t touched any of that since last term, mostly because I moved house yet again this week, so I wanted to dedicated the limited time I had to just concentrating on the face. I’ve also included a ‘head cam’ shot so you can take a look at the facial animation without everything else to distract ;)

The curves for the facial animation are all clamped; I haven’t done any refining of those nor have I done anything with the tongue, cheeks or nose yet as I wanted to make sure the basic sound shapes are reading properly first. There’s also almost no eye animation at the moment (I think it works reasonably well already?) and there’s some basic blinking going on.

Thanks for reading! As always questions, comments or critiques are more than welcome!

And here’s my final polish pass from Week 11. Obviously the lip sync hasn’t been fully fleshed out as that’s part of Term 5′s workload:

It became clear to me as I was muddling my way through the first two weeks of the assignment that I had really not planned out my work as well as I normally do and as such I was floundering around trying to make it up as I went along. I think the way the first week’s assignment (planning) is laid out is also partially responsible for that too; coming up with a number of different ideas and then taking one straight into blocking the next week – it doesn’t feel like there’s time to really tie the idea down and plan it out fully before having to get started on the blocking (although clearly, you should!).

Anyway, I completely scrapped everything I’d done in the first two weeks of blocking and started from scratch (it was actually very cathartic), did new planning sketches based on the old reference and started blocking and re-blocking again. It still probably isn’t quite as far along as it should be at this stage but please bear in mind that I have tried to fit 3 weeks’ worth of work into 1!

Firstly, I went back to my old reference and really studied it properly. I also drew in some overlays to help try and establish the golden poses:

From there I drew some new planning sketches to replace the rather lacking ones from Week 6:

And from that, here’s the new version of my shot. For clarity: I’ve put all three stages of the work into one video. There’s the refining, reblock and blocking. The reblock is definitely what I spent most of my time on after I got the initial blocking stage out of the way. The refining shot at the start of the video is a VERY quick splining pass just to see how it would look smoothed – in fact, I will probably go back to the Re-block and start splining again next week.

I’m much happier with the shot now – I think it’s considerably better than it was before! I’ve been working ridiculously hard this week – hopefully the work proves it!

ps. Yes, I’m going to upload and back-date the terrible work from the first two weeks of this assignment along with the final version of my pantomime shot, which I’ve just realised I didn’t post way back when!

Oh and I nearly forgot, we had to do a new hand pose:

There’s a little too much tension in the thumb and Michelle thought I could have grouped the middle and ring(?) finger together a little bit more. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with it, especially because it’s so damn hard to get a decent hand pose out of this model/rig!

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!