Well, this week was part 2 of Delio’s lecture. To be honest, it’s been so long since I watch this part and I can’t remember what he talked about. Guess I’ll have to go back and read my notes again.

This week we were given a new character called “Bishop.” I was so excited to get him too! I had seen some of the previous students shots using this character and I was amazed at the range he had. This was the character that I think most of us were dying to get are hands on. There was only one hitch……this version of Bishop had his facial controls locked off. Doh! Actually it’s a really good idea to do that. Basically it forces us to get the emotion across with the body first and then the facial animation is just icing on the cake. Many beginning animators rely on the facial animation to get an emotion across, but then your animation is only so-so. If the body is clearly showing an emotion and then the facial is merely adding to that, you are going to have one really strong animation. So for the rest of this term, I will be working on this dialogue shot without facial controls. The only controls I will have in the face are: the eyes and the mouth (open and close only….like a puppet).

This week we were in charge of taking one of our clips and blocking out the shot with Bishop. I ended up choosing the Dumb and Dumber clip because it had a lot of potential for some great expressions. The Tommy Boy clip (“Which one you want….”) was eliminated because laughs are really hard to animate and since I don’t even know how to do dialogue, I shouldn’t try to take on more of challenge than I already had. The Half Baked clip (“All my life….”) was a close second, but since my mentor didn’t particularly like this one and I had no preference, I decided to go with the Dumb and Dumber clip. Alrighty then, here’s my first blocking pass: