Class 4 Progress Reel

Happy 2012!!!  One of my resolutions this year is to post more often, so lets kick it off with this first one!  I got quite busy and didn't get a chance to post my class 4 progress reel from AM before the end of the year, but here it is now!

Dimos was an awesome mentor!  I think that his background in 2D really made it easier for me to understand things as he was explaining them.  He also made time to look at my updated work in the Q&A each week which was super helpful!  He's also a super cool and fun guy.  I feel like I learned and grew a lot this term!

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!  

Animation Mentor Class 4! Part 1

So I've been pretty bad about keeping up with posting and such lately, but I'm going to try and get a bunch of stuff up here over the next couple of weeks!  First of all I started Class 4 (Intro to Acting) at AM!  The acting side of animation is a pretty big part of why I wanted to get into it in the first place so I was pretty excited to start this class!

My mentor this term is Dimos Vrysellas, which is pretty exciting for me because he started out as a 2D animator!  He worked at Dreamworks back when they were still doing traditionally animated films and got to work on Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, Spirit and Sinbad!  He worked on some 3d stuff there as well!  On a couple of the 2D features he got to work under James Baxter, so it's pretty cool to hear stories about that!  Dimos is not only a great animator, but a pretty cool guy as well!

For the first assignment of the term we got to do a short pantomime shot that showed 2 distinct and contrasting beats.  We were supposed to choose a scenario that fit our personality and spoke to us, so I decided to set mine in a fast food restaurant.  I wanted my character to go from confident and relaxed/lazy to Insecure/nervous/alert. I decided that in my scenario I would have my character leaning against the counter, start flirting with a customer and then panic when he notices that his boss is watching him.  I filmed some video reference and really got in touch with my cheesy side.  Although that never really seems to be a problem for me... :)

Apparently I'm a method actor and needed to put on an apron?  I decided against the 'Awooooga bagel eyes' (as I like to call them) and went with the cheesy finger gun off of the tip of the hat instead.  Dimos also suggested that I cut out the saunter up to the counter and just start it with the character leaning against it.  I was really glad that I took his advice, because it cut out a lot of work for me, and it wouldn't have added all that much extra to the shot anyways.

And now for some planning sketches!

I was also originally going to have a camera move to reveal the boss standing behind him, but Dimos told me that I could make it work without it.

Then I did my first blocking pass

I got some really good feedback on the first pass and for what seemed like the first time ever I didn't have to go back and completely re-block everything.  

And then there was the blocking plus pass.  I framed the camera in tighter and added a bunch of breakdowns.

The next week I started refining the animation and took it to spline town.

The last week that we had to work on this shot I did some polishing, but didn't get as much time as I would have liked to track all of my arcs and lovely things like that.  I still think that it turned out half decently though, and Dimos seemed to like it so that was pretty cool.