Animation Mentor Class 4! Part 2

For our second assignment of Class 4 we got to do a single person lip dialogue shot!  We had to find a clip between 5 and 10 seconds long to work with for the next 6 weeks of the class.  We were only allowed to work on the physical movement of the body this term as the actual lip sync and facial animation is something that we get to tackle at the beginning of next term.  

I had to find 3 different audio clips to choose from, film video reference of myself acting them out and do some thumbnail drawings for each of them.  I had a hard time narrowing the clips down to 3, I started off with about 12 of them...

So I picked my 3 lines.

Did my video reference.

 And my thumbnail drawings for each clip.

Dimos helped me settle on clip 2, and we decided to cut off the end where he says "I don't want to go back to London."  Dimos also gave me the awesome idea to make the character homeless and standing in front of a cardboard box which would be his new home.  The shot would start out closer in and then move back to reveal the box house while he's saying "Residency Issue"

So I shot some new video reference with that idea in mind

And then I did my first blocking pass.

Getting the camera move to not look like garbage was a little difficult.

Then I did my blocking plus pass and added in some breakdowns.  I also moved the camera in tighter in the beginning and gave him some suitcases and a bucket to go with his box house.

We also had to do a hand pose that week portraying anger.

I kept getting weird bends in the fingers and had a little trouble with it.

Then I started refining and added in yet more breakdowns.  I also started adding in some up and down in the jaw movement.  Dimos got me to break up the arms a bit when he gestures to the box at the end so that they weren't quite so similar.

We also had to do a 'relaxed' hand pose.

The next week I did some more refining and took this baby to spline town!

And the hand pose of the week was 'surprised'.  It didn't turn out as well as I would have liked.

The final week we had to work on this shot (for this class) I did a bunch of polishing on the hands and tried to add a bit more movement into the upper body to make it less stiff.  I also tried to smooth out my arcs a bit.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it's working so far.  I'm pretty excited to get into the facial animation next term and finish it off!  I'm even more excited that we get a 2 week break over Christmas though... I love my school and animating but it can get exhausting!