And without further ado….Term 4 – Advanced Acting! My new mentor is Greg Whittaker (Dreamworks). He worked on one of my all time favorite movies: Flushed Away! So cool! I know I’m going to learned a lot from him too. His whole philosophy is simple and snappy, both of which I need a lot of help with.

This week’s lecture was and introduction to facial expressions by Chris Hurtt. This guy was awesome! He was real life caricature. He had these thick eyebrows that were constantly moving around and seemed to have a life of their own. The lecture was great. All this facial animation stuff is totally new to me, so I have taking notes like crazy. This stuff is so useful.

This week our dreams finally came true…….we got the full Bishop rig with full facial setup. Wow, there are so many controls to worry about. This guy has everything. He has so much control that I’m both excited and worried. How am I do this?! There seems to be more controls in the face than there are in the body. This is going to be hard. I’m really glad that the rig is organized so well or else I would be totally lost. Plus AM gave us a video tutorial explaining all the controls. On top of that, Bobby gave us a video walkthrough of how he approaches facial animation and lip sync. His walkthrough was eye opening. He made facial animation seem attainable. He broke everything down and sort of demystified the whole process. After watching it, the fear subsided a bit.

For the assignment, we were supposed to sketch thumbnails and film reference for the face only. This was fun and a little embarrassing because I…….can’t act. I’m hoping that I can pull something out it. Here ya go. Feel free to laugh or cringe or vomit….