Class 4: Intro to Acting

First off I will get to the class 3 wrap up.... eventually. It's a bit overwhelming to sum up the entire class all at once but I'll get around to it eventually.

I'm starting class 4 which is intro to acting and this is where the fun really starts. We finally get to breathe some life into our animation. The class is setup so that you do two animations. The first one is an acting pantomime scene under 250 frames (a little over 10 seconds). We have 5 weeks to work on that assignment then the rest of the class is working on our first dialogue scene. We need to pick a piece of audio and then animate it with one character. (again it needs to be under 10 seconds) I can already tell I'm going to have a hard time picking the audio that I want, there's so many ways to go! It something I'm going to be working with for a long time, not just the 7 weeks in this class but next class we finish off the animation with lip sync. This class we don't have to worry about having the chacters lips sync up with the dialgue, that's the first thing we do in class 5. So I'm going to be working with the same piece of audio for about 3 months so it's has to be something good.

Class 4 got off to kinda of a rough start. I logged in on Monday when the site went live for the first time and looked at my calendar and saw that my class would be 11pm on Wednesdays with T-Dan Hofstedt. I had no reason to really go on the site before my Q&A since not much goes on the first week at AM. So I logged in at 1030pm on Wednesday to get ready for my Q&A and saw that my calander now said that my Q&A was Tuesdays at midnight! I immediately sent out an email to my class asking if the Q&A was last night. Within 5 minutes I got a email back saying that yes the Q&A was last night and apparently there was a technical glitch on Monday listing our Q&A at the wrong time. Oh thanks for letting me know AM! I so annoyed that I missed my first Q&A because of AMs screw up. I sent them an email complaining and saying that if something like that happens and the Q&A gets changed to send out an email to everyone to let them know. I also wasn't thrilled to have my Q&A be at midnight. Because of AM screwing up they allowed me to switch into another class at a better time without having to find someone to swap with me, so I switched in Paul Allen's class which meets at Tuesdays at 1030pm, which is much more manageable. I still had to miss the first Q&A but oh well too late now. Since I haven't had a chance to meet Paul yet I can't really say anything about him yet.

I had a bit of hard time trying to think up something that would be original for my pantomime scene. The last week of class 3 I looked at everyone's assignment in class 4 to get an idea of what people have done and to see what works and what doesn't. What I noticed to make your idea really simple so that it reads clearly. So many of the animations I saw I had a hard time figuring out what exactly was going on. The ones that worked the best only had 2 or 3 beats and you could immediately see what was happening. I tried to come up with at least 10 ideas that would work and I ran them past some people at work to get their opinions. It turns out a lot of the ideas I had that I thought were original had all been done before. One piece of advice that I got was to think "weird".

I decided to go back to the world of 8bit gaming and stick Stu into Super Mario and have him be chased by a bomb-omb. The jeist of the scene is that Stu sprints into the frame and ducks behind a big pipe to take cover. As hes behind the pipe with his head covered the bomb-omb SLOWLY waddles into frame and eventually stops and his ignition goes out. Stu wondering why the bombs hasn't gone off yet looks back and sees the stopped bomb and is relieved. It's a simple scene with two clear emotions for Stu and I think it could be funny to have Stu running so fast from this really slow bomb. Here's the reference that I shot:





And the thumbnails:


Here's the scene setup:

Class 3 Recap coming soon!

A massive recap of class 3 is in the works this week. I have a week off before class 4 starts will have something up by the end of the week.

...and that completes class 2

Wow can't believe I'm already done with class 2 and that I've been through 6 months of AM. I've really seen my animation improve in this class, even more so than through class 1. I must credit Dimos my mentor for really helping push my animation this class. The biggest thing I think I will take away from this class the workflow that Dimos has taught us. I now feel that I know exactly what I need to during each step of the animation process. The way he has us work by time I get out of stepped mode and have to start splining the animation is almost finished since everything is in our poses. It will be interesting in the next class and the classes to come to see what the other mentor's workflows are and how they will compare to Dimos'. Right now I can't see myself changing my workflow but who knows someone else's workflow might work even better for me.

Looking back at the work I did this class I still see that the main thing that I am struggling with is overlap. It still all goes back to that pendulum assignment we had in class 1 that I struggled so much with. I was never able to nail that assignment which is all about overlap and I find that 4 months later I'm still struggling trying to get it right. This is what is causing my animation to be stiff and I've had to work really hard to try and loosen up my animation. It's the one thing that Dimos mentioned in all three of my assignment. I think I am making progress but I still need to focus more on trying to improve my overlap. I'll definitely need to keep that in the front of mind as I work through my animations next class.

Speaking of next class, there is no pick list for assignments in the next class, it's all up to us to come up with the animation ideas. Once again we are doing three animation assignments and we have the option to either have three individual animations or to come up with a theme where all three animations are related to each other. I'm thinking I would like to do three animations that at the end of the class could be cut together into one scene. I just need to come up with an idea. Fortunately we get a week off so I will have some time to think about it. The one thing that Dimos recommended to us is to not get caught up in acting yet, to keep the animations about the body mechanics. We will have plenty of time to get into acting in the later classes. So time to start brainstorming. I'll leave you with my progress reel for class 2 and 1.

Assignment 3 Finished!

I finished up my last assignment for class 2. I really tried to work on loosening up the dance part of the animation, the upper body in particular was feeling kinda stiff. I've also been struggling with the last pose for the entire assignment, it really needs to be strong since it's held for so long and it's the last pose of the animation. I tried to not have it not pop so much and add a little weight to the landing of the hop into it. I've also keep some movement all the way to the end of the animation, creating a moving hold. The run in and turn around has never been a problem and has pretty much stayed as is. Overall I think this assignment has turned out the best of the bunch for this class.

Michael Jackson Dance

Here's what I submitted to Dimos for my finalized animation of the Michael Jackson dance. I thought that the final animation was going to be due this week but it turns out we have another week to finish it. Dimos recommended I still treat today as the final date for the animation and get it as close to finished as I could, then I would have all of next week to incorporate his comments into the animation. Only one more week to go in class 2 then I get a week off and I start class 3!

Starting Assignment 3

Wow can't believe I'm already starting my last assignment of class 2 it seems like it was just a month ago that I was starting AM but I'm already 5 months in. I'm finding that the more involved the assignments get and the more comfortable I get with my workflow the more I'm really enjoying the animation process. Finishing off my last assignment and blocking out this current one I find that I am really getting lost in the work, meaning I can sit down to work at it and look up three hours later not realizing where all that time went. I think it's because I'm really starting to see results that I am pleased with so it's making me want to work on the assignment even more. It's starting to feel like I know what I am doing, I hope...

So it's the same schedule for out last assignment and once again we were given a list of animation to pick from.

1. Run/Jump over hurdles
2. Hopscotch
3. Walk on a balance or high wire
4. Balance while standing on a ball
5. Butterfly kick
6. Hop on one leg, lose balance and fall down
7. Stand up from a sitting on the ground position (no arms)
8. Fast run and quickly reverse direction
9. Back flip off a box
10. Simple dance move
11. Parkour

This week we get a new Stewie rig to animate with but this time with arms! I definitely wanted to pick something that would challenge me for my last assignment with Dimos. I asked Dimos what he thought would be a good idea that would push me. I told him I was thinking about doing the fast run and change direction and he suggested that I have him do a dance at the end. Hmm combining assignments, sound like a challenge! I know the list says a simple dance move but I couldn't resist having Stu doing some Michael Jackson. I searched through a ton of stuff on youtube and got Billie Jean stuck in my head for a week but I finally found something that I liked. I went out with Bailey and shot some footage of me running and changing direction and cut that with the footage of Michael Jackson (unfortunately I can't dance like him).




As a note I know that it looks like I running the middle of a busy street that I might get run over a car but I assure you that it was the end of the street and there was no traffic. I had to do it in the street since all the parks near me were occupied with Little Leaguers since it was a beautiful weekend day. Here's the thumbnails:


All this was done 2 weeks ago and was turned in with my final animation of the box jump. This week I had to turn in blocking for this assignment. I find that the blocking stage takes the longest and most time of all the stages because you need to pose out every pose and figure out the timing for the entire animation which involves a lot of trial and error. I work for a VFX company so I've been fortunate enough to be able to go a lot of my AM work while at work mostly in the afternoons when things are slow. This has really helped me since I don't have to stay up late at night after work to get everything done. Unfortunately this week we started our summer intern program and we got about 7 interns in which means that there were no empty workstations for me to work on. Also my girlfriend's family is in town so we were hanging out with them and going out to dinner which means I didn't have the time to work on my assignment. As a result I had to basically do I marathon session yesterday to get my blocking down. I started working right after I got up around 9 and worked straight through to about 7pm to get it done. So the blocking probably isn't as polished as I would like it to be but I think it gets my idea across for this assignment.

Class 2 Assignment 2

For the 2nd assignment like the 1st I spent a week on blocking it out.




I spent the following week on blocking+ and this time around I had a much better on handle on what exactly blocking+ is and what Dimos is looking for. For the last assignment Dimos said I was missing a lot of information that he likes to see at this stage so this time around I got everything down pretty much to 2's. What I mean by this is that I did a pose on every other frame so every pose is being held for 2 frames since it is still in stepped mode. Thus my blocking+ is much smoother than the one I did for the last assignment.



For the last week on this assignment when I switched the animation into spline and started polishing was to really focus on the overlap and general flow of the animation. When you work pose to pose like I am if you're not careful it will look like the character is moving pose to pose in the final animation. You need to make sure that the character moves through the pose, he doesn't just move to the pose and stop. Overlap will really help in this area since every body part isn't landing on a pose at the same time, you have the hips landing on one frame then the chest two frames later and then the head last after that. I really tried to nail down the overlap since that has been my biggest weakness so far. I think I did a good job with it, but you can judge for yourself.





Dimos was really pleased with my assignment and said that I really improved since my last assignment, and that what this is all about right!? Getting better and learning from assignment to assignment. The only comment that Dimos gave me was to speed up the kneel down and anticipation before the jump onto the box and to tweak two poses during the jump. I made these slight changes and I think I can call this assignment done and a success!