Class 4- Shot #2 Blocking process

I am now in week 8 of Class 4- 4 more weeks to go! We just handed in our second blocking pass of our dialogue shot, so it is still in stepped mode. My mentor also instructed us not to add the lip sync yet so it wouldn't distract from how the rest of the body was working for now. I definitely have to figure out my process for approaching facial animation with the body. First I got the main movements and timing down with the body that went along with the dialogue and then I went ahead and started adding facial expressions. I had a really difficult time making sure the character maintained the framing I wanted with this camera throughout the shot while having her walk forward and hit her mark where I wanted her to end up. It turns out I had to do a lot of cheating to get her there but I think it worked out! Here's my blocking continued pass from last week.

I got a couple notes from my mentor to fix for this upcoming week and now I can put it into full spline mode and start adding the lip sync!

Class 4- Shot #2 Planning

The time is here! We're finally getting into our first dialogue and lip sync shot. So now we have to remember everything we've learned about proper body mechanics and add acting techniques and full facial animation. Our first task was to find 3 lines of dialogue that were 10 seconds or under, had an interesting rhythm in tone and emotion, and we had to try to change the context of the shot from how it originally was from whatever movie or show it came from. We also couldn't use anything that was too recognizable. We can use only one character with a static camera.
   I started searching for dialogue early so that I wouldn't be so stressed out this week, because we also had to shoot reference video, sketch out thumbnails for each of the ideas, and do two poses from our reference on our characters with full facial expressions. Unfortunately, that didn't work out too well because it was extremely difficult to find the right piece of dialogue. There's a lot of pressure because this is the shot we're going to be working on for the rest of the term and it's my first dialogue piece to go on my demo reel. I literally spent entire days from when I woke up to when I went to bed at 1:30am searching and searching.
   So it really came down to the wire and I finally narrowed it down to my three lines. I ended up shooting my reference video from about 10:00pm- 4:00am after already not having a lot of sleep so I was a little crazy during this, but here's my audio and then below is the reference I shot.

That third shot was a last minute decision I made and I didn't end up being too happy with it. I liked how the first two came out and my mentor said the same thing. He said he'd much rather see the second one as I originally intended as a medium wide shot where we actually see a patient on a gurney but if I didn't want to do that I should stick with my first idea. I had trouble deciding whether I wanted to go the funny route or the creepy route, but ultimately I decided to go with creepy. I hope it's the right choice lol. I'm really excited to get started with this, although I'm nervous about having the character actually walking and bending over and then adding a face on top of it, yikes! Wish me luck! Oh and here are the poses I did for the assignment...

Class 4- Shot #1

Right now I am in week 6 of class 4 at Animation Mentor, so about halfway through. This class is called Introduction to Acting and I have Dreamworks animator Marek Kochout as my mentor. As well as working on a lot of more recent stuff, he's also worked on A Goofy Movie, Darkwing Duck, and Goof Troop so I was really excited about taking him as a mentor.
Our first assignment was a pantomime acting shot. We needed to show a change in emotions in a maximum of 8 seconds using a rig with no real facial expressions. I found it really difficult trying to tell a story and convey different emotions in 8 seconds. As always, we start out by shooting reference of ourselves acting out the scene. This is my reference after I received notes from my mentor and I had to reshoot the ending.

This was the blocking phase of my animation. We just find main poses from our reference and put it in stepped mode so we can get an idea of rough timing.

I didn't think I had enough time to do anything else at the end so I just had these two basic poses for the ending, and my mentor wanted me to do more. I was able to shorten other parts of the shot to get myself more time to show her acting more frantic at the end. I still have to do some more fixing and polishing, but here's how the shot turned out.