Here is my first animatic exploring the camera cuts. My intention is to reveal the gag (they are talking about the pumpkin) at the end of the piece, the camera cut from 3 to 4 seems to be abrupt but the audience should be able to catch up when the characters turn around.
Class 4 session 04: Multiple characters (Storyboard)
This week we start the Multiple Characters assigment, this is like a mini movie that allows us to start playing with camera cuts, at least 2; and more important to keep on exercising our story skills.
Anim notes: -Sound seems to be 2 frames off overall -F43 drop the Jaw a bit more on "Say" -Have a "oo" shape on CHRIStmas -There's 3 accents overall, SAY--CHRISTMAS--MISERY
Class 4 session 02: Polishing the Facial Animation
Dimos Vrysellas gave me a good critique on the last assignment, mainly on the eyebrows and eyelids, the mouth he said it was good. Although I went into it and keep adding an expression in it, trying to portray she is worried by how the mouth is shaped. I think I might have pushed it a bit too much.
This is a pretty cool assignment, I never though about it myself but it make sense to try to duplicate actual facial expressions and push them from there. Again, subtle expressions are the toughest ones, a lot of tweaking and a lot of time!
I've added eyebrow animation first, I am trying to stay away from "swimmy" animation by having no more than 5 in-betweens within the facial expressions and having slight drifts, visible in the graph editor but not that much in the animation.
On the first half of the shot I played with the mouth facial rig, I still don't know how all the controls work, what it does and what doesn't. I need to get familiar with it.
Shheesh!, it's been a while since I drew some faces and I'm shocked to see my lack of face anatomy understanding, even if they are cartoony drawings you need to know your stuff.
Here are some possible facial expressions for my shot, different faces for different moments on the shot, there should be a maximum of 2 emotions in the entire shot, no more.
For the next two weeks we'll be refining our existing shot but this time just the face. The setup they have at Animation Mentor is impressive, its something like this:
We have an actual Maya shelf from the school that contains various tools, for this term we have a new tool that replaces the character's face with a new one that has all the controls for it, including a complete face library, it keeps the original animation intact. This sounds very simple to describe and to make it work is even simpler. Adding a complete face rig its just a click away, no need for anything else thanks to the technical artists.
Animation Mentor is putting a lot of effort on the technical side, giving us the right tools so we can animate instead of trouble shoot technical issues. Hats off to the school.
My new mentor is Dimos Vrysellas. A Canadian animator that spent a decade working in the United States, his big break into the industry was when Dreamworks went to Sheridan College in the search for the best classical animators.
We had our first Q&A session with him last Monday, he is a pretty cool guy; an energetic animator that easily kept the class alive. He gave us a warm welcome to AM and to the animation industry. Lots of things to learn from him, his resume and career are pretty impressive, don't miss his website!.
