I’ve splined out all the characters for the assignment this week. They still need a lot of polishing up, but in general I’m happy with how the shot is turning out. I did quite a lot of revisions this week.

As you might notice, I’ve changed the mechanic quite a lot, so now it should (hopefully) be pretty obvious that he is a mechanic and is working on the car and isn’t travelling with the couple.

I decided to stick to my guns with regards to the office guy and his tie. My justification for it is that because he doesn’t go on holiday a lot, his tie represents his normal environment and is a source of comfort when he is scared. I considered doing the “biting his nails” thing, but felt that it was a little cliché – I’ve seen it too many times. This felt a little different. I’ll animate the tie once his body mechanics are completely locked down. Don’t worry though, it will definitely work – trust me! ;)

This is what we’re looking at:

Girl

There’s some small polishing to be done here and there but she’s working well overall. Based on descriptions I’ve provided previously, should she be more excited than she is?

Mechanic

The new animation for the mechanic is working really nicely, it’s nice and clear and looking good.

The thumbing could be a little faster, like it’s a throwaway comment, suggesting how he isn’t bothered by the situation.

Body mechanics issues to address: His hand shakes a little FRM110-120, watch the rear elbow shape when he’s crouched down, there is a rogue key at FRM149 where his entire body shifts position before the camera cut.

Guy

Now that we have the justification, the acting choice regarding the holding of the tie can “make sense”. Even if we don’t have a whole film with which to get a greater sense of the context of the character, it’s still important to answer these questions.

One thing that isn’t clear is if he’s letting go of the tie after the first shot. Also, it might be nice if he fiddles with it a little more, to add some ‘frequency’. He needs some additional refinement in the final shot, even if it’s just some breakdown poses.

A-

So a pretty good week then! What makes it even sweeter is that I didn’t do anything other than auto-tangent the mechanic and guy on Sunday morning. That’s right; I decided to throw off the shackles of AM slavery and just hand in what I had. Animation is never finished and typically I just keep working and working until the deadline is dangerously close. It felt good not to do that for a change.

Next week I will start trying to block in some proper facial animation as well as start cleaning up the animation. I’m hoping that adding in the facial is going to provide a sea-change in the overall appeal of the shot, like it did in my last one.

Let’s hope so.

This is what I handed in:

I’m fairly happy with the results although I probably spent too long refining the body mechanics rather than concentrating on the facial animation. Apart from the stuff mentioned in this week’s critique, I think the body mechanics are basically done – at least, I’m happy with them enough to concentrate solely on the face from now on.

On to my notes from Mario:

Mouth

The syncing and read of the dialogue is still working really well. The intensity of the mouth shapes is much better during the more extreme moments in the dialogue (e.g. “what’s the”) but continue to push the asymmetry of the face further; perhaps pick points where the body is more still so it can be clearly seen by the audience (e.g. “big idea”, “can’t a girl”).

Check the lips have at least 2 frames on the ‘m’, ‘p’ and ‘b’ visimes during “my public too”.

Brows / Eyes

The brows are working well. Check the eye direction at the end; if she isn’t focussing on specific targets during the shot consider bringing the eye direction back to face front again rather than further off to screen left.

Body

The phrasing at the end of the shot is a bit broken now with the new pose. It should be a relatively easy fix though: either bring the head motion forward in the timeline so that she hits the new pose on “too!” or wait a beat (12-24 frames maybe) for the audience to catch up and then hit the new pose.

The head motion at the end has to propagate down the body.

Take another look at the line of action in the end pose. [This is something I'm going to have to bring up in the Q&A this week - I've got no idea what to do!]

Overall

Asymmetry, asymmetry, asymmetry! The intensity of the mouth is good already – just push the asymmetry, go wild! Try to think of it in terms of her character: she has to try and retain her composure in the courtroom, so if the body is (relatively) calm all the energy, tension and anger is pent up in her mouth/face.

Change the timing of the head at the end.

B+

That mark covers the facial expressions exercises as well by the way.

So overall, another pretty good week with some nice comments and plenty of things to sort out. I must admit, I was a little more slack than I should have been last week and this week hasn’t started off much better so I really need to get my arse in gear and be more efficient. Especially as I’ll be at Alton Towers this weekend! \o/

As per usual, comments, questions or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

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!

And here it is splined. It’s OK but I spent a very long time re-blocking, so I didn’t get a lot of time to clean the curves:

Overall, not massively happy with this effort, but that’s what you get when you can only really spend a day or so working on your assignment! 8) I think I’ll have to chop bits of this and the previous week’s assignment together to get the best bits for my Progress Reel!

Thanks to Karl for the suggestion to raise Stewie up at the end to really emphasise the exhaustive collapse. Great idea!

And here’s the first run at splining the shot:

As I spent so long re-blocking, this spline pass is very, very quick and dirty, but let me know what you see and I’ll try and make some proper time to polish it up nicely for next week.