Another week and another eye opening lecture. This time it was about design applied to animation by Mark Oftedal. He breaks design down to it's more basic elements. He shows how a simple triangle in frame can invoke different emotions depending on where it's placed and how its oriented. Then he adds a square to establish a relationship and shows how moving these around in the frame can change the relationship. Fascinating stuff! Then he describes to us a scene from Toy Story where Woody and Buzz are arguing. He shows us how their posture and relationship to each other in frame, subconsciously directs the viewers eye to the point of interest and invokes an emotional response. Wow, I had know idea that I was being manipulated like that. This lecture and the previous one about making cuts really opened my eyes into the world of manipulation. It's amazing what people know about how the brain reacts to visuals. They know exactly how to play with your mind and get a desired response.

Anywho....below I present to you my assignment. Once again you will find facial expression practice poses and for the first time I give to you my first finalled dialogue shot ever! Enjoy. It took many many weeks to get through the whole process and tomorrow I start it all over again. This time with a dialogue piece involving two characters.....yikes! This should be interesting. By the way, this next assignment is the last assignment of the term, so for the next 7 weeks I will bore you with revision after revision. Interestingly enough, this is the last assignment before I begin work on my first short film (Term 5 and 6). I'm actually looking forward to starting on my film now. I used to fear the coming of Term 5, but after all these short shots, I'm looking forward to being able to tell a proper story.

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I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but this week’s lecture was awesome. We learned about storytelling though cuts from Patrick Kriwanek. Patrick is an editor for film and he told us all about when and while to make cuts in a scene. A cut is basically when you switch from one camera to another during a shot. When and how you do it is very important. In fact, there are set rules that everyone in the industry follows. If you break them, you’re audience will feel uncomfortable. Sometimes filmmakers will break the rules, however, when the desired effect is to make the audience uncomfortable…..like in a horror/suspense film. Anyway, really cool stuff. I can’t wait to use it in my next shot (a dialogue shot with two characters interacting with each other….yikes!)

This week we took our facial animation out of blocking and into the refined stage. I must say that the first time that I saw this version, I couldn’t stop smiling. This was a culmination of 7 weeks of work and for the first time, I got to see the fruits of my labor. I can’t believe I’m almost done with my first ever dialogue shot! Just one more polish pass, and I get to put this shot to rest.

The other part of this weeks assignment was to find two facial expressions in magazines or the web and try to duplicate them with Bishop. We will do a number of these throughout this term to give us some practice recreating facial expressions. They’re really fun to do too!

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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….

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This week was just a recap of everything from term 3. I blew it again this week because I’ve turned into a super slacker and this term ended on a Friday instead of a Sunday. But that’s just an excuse. I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute.

This week’s assignment was to upload a progress reel of all the work this term. And away we go.

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I totally blew it this week. I turned into a total slacker and missed the lecture all together. It was a lecture about Sincerity from Mark Henn and from what I heard, it was awesome! Doh! Luckily, I have a friend in AM that is one term behind me. I can wait until he gets to this lecture and watch it with him. Unfortunately, I have to wait 3 months.

This week, the assignment was to finish the body animation with a final polish pass. Here is the latest. In just a couple of weeks, we get the full Bishop character with facial controls! Yeah! I can’t wait!

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Hey remember when I said “wow!” about the eyes/blinks lecture? Well this is an even bigger WOW! This lecture opened my eyes! This was a lecture about Hands by Charles Alleneck. I really wished I had seen this sooner because I had no idea how to animate hands. I never put too much thought into my hand animation and then I wondered why my hands felt so lifeless. Charles teaches us it’s a really bad idea to just block out the body and then worry about the hands later on when the shot is more refined. Bad idea. We should make sure that while we are blocking the body, we pose the hands until they look right. Hands play a huge part in acting and they should never be glossed over. In fact, bad/lifeless hands can really kill a shot. Man, great stuff!

This week, the assignment was to begin polishing the shot. Enjoy

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This weeks lecture was about Entertainment by Mike Thurmeier. I wasn’t able to finish it, but what I did learn was important. I learned that entertainment was character driven and that it’s important to know what the character is doing before and after the shot you’re working on. Also, everything you character does must be believable and feel real. This ensures that the audience with be able to related to the character because he/she is doing something that we could all see ourselves do at one time or another.

The assignment: take our shot out of blocking and begin refining. Here’s what I came up with.

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Wow, what a great lecture. This week we learned about animating eyes and blinks from Jason Ryan. I didn’t realize how important the eyes were and how much thought needs to go into them. It’s amazing how you can use blinks at different times to change an emotion. Also the speed of a blink can drastically change the emotion. For example, a slow blink could indicate the character is tired or sad. We also learned a number of key tips/tricks including the number of frames for the eye to close/open and the many different ways an eye can transition from open to closed and vice versa. Wow, great stuff.

The assignment: take our shot from blocking to blocking plus. That basically means more refined blocking with more breakdowns and transitions. Here goes:

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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:

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This week Delio Tramantozzi gave us a lecture on how to approach dialogue. The whole lecture was a walk through of how he animated a dialogue shot from start to finish. Definitely a cool lecture and I learned a ton. I was surprised at the number of times he said he would listen to the dialogue, but since then, I’ve listened to my shot well over 2000 times. Yikes! It gets to the point where you are beyond sick of hearing it and you’re numb. Animating sounds like fun, eh?

For this weeks assignment we were in charge of finding 3 audio clips from whatever source we preferred. I ended up finding clips from Tommy Boy, Dumb and Dumber, and Half Baked. It was really hard finding the right clip that I could still tolerate after working on it for 8 weeks. In addition to finding the clips, we had to sketch thumbnails and film video reference for each clip. I apologize for sync issues with my reference, but I didn’t have my roommate’s camera as I always have had in the past. He went on vacation and took it with him, so I had to film with my webcam and then composite the sound. Unfortunately my webcam doesn’t seem to film in realtime, so it plays slower than the audio. Oh well. Enjoy.

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Wow, I really dropped off the face of the earth! After the news of my new job, I just disappeared. Well, I’m back and I'm going to try and keep it that way.

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