Posts Tagged ‘planning’

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Class 5 Week 5 – Assignment & Critique

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

I’ll start with the ritual humiliation first:

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:

c5w5 - Pose Ideas

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.

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    Class 5 Week 4 – Assignment & Critique – Part 2

    Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

    I had a number of dialogue options for my multi-character shot, but I decided to go with the “werewolf” clip from Young Frankenstein. I think it’s really funny and whilst quite challenging (it has three characters, after all), it should hopefully allow me to come up with some cool acting choices and do some nice facial animation. Let’s start with the storyboard and it’s animated brother:

    c5w4 - Multi-character Dialogue Storyboard

    In my critique, Mario had a few misgivings about the shot; mainly that it’s quite ambitious, there are three characters and it’s reasonably complex in terms of cuts and camera angles. Overall though, he was happy with the work I’ve produced this week, he especially like the characters/costumes I’d come up with:

    c5w4 - Character Outfits

    A

    A very busy week, but it was definitely worth it! Time to move onto blocking and video reference!

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    Class 5 Week 1 – Planning & Assignment

    Monday, April 5th, 2010

    Here’s all the sketchbook planning I did for Week 1′s assignment. This week’s lecture was conducted by the lovely Jason Schleifer, who is now Head of Character Animation at Dreamworks (a website that my ancient PC does not enjoy visiting!). Regarding the lecture itself… let’s just say I was impressed.

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

    c5w1 - Sketchbook 1

    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!

    c5w1 - Sketchbook 2

    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.

    c5w1 - Sketchbook 3

    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!

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    Class 4 Week 9 (plus Weeks 7 & 8 all over again!)

    Monday, November 30th, 2009

    Wow, what a week! As you may know (or not, in all likelihood), I’ve been having some motivational issues over the past two weeks and as such the standard of my work was (what I consider to be) much lower than normal. You’ll be pleased to know however that I successfully “manned the f*ck up” and I’m back in the game!

    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:

    c4w9 - New Planning Sketches

    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:

    c4w9 - Hand Pose (Relaxed)

    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!

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