Term 5 Week 7: Advanced Look At Entertainment

We've had a lecture from animator Doug Sweetland, who talked through entertainment. We all have a duty to entertain our audience and keep their eyes glued to the screen. Doug explained that relying on the animation principles isn't enough, we must be able to use them as a 'bag of tricks' but in the big picture be able to tell a story.

During the week Michelle hosted our weekly Q&A, I asked a question - how do I achieve subtle overlap and breaking of joints in a very subtle acting scene without the animation looking floaty or as though the character is in water! (This is because I had been wrestling with shot 1 all day trying to get it to work!!) And the answer: Blocking in the overlap, over exaggerated, and get the timing right. Then just scale the curves down in the graph editor to get the motion more subtle. Makes sense now :)

Michelle gave us a tutorial on hands entitled 'bring them out and put 'em away'. The problem with large hands such as those on the character I'm using is that unless you use tricks to 'put them away' the hands tend to draw the audiences eye. When the audience's attention needs to be on the face, it's best to keep the hands less noticable. To achieve this its best to curl the fingers to close the hand up, it also helps to rotate the hands so that they're side on to camera, so you see the profile of the edge and not the huge shape of the palm. This also provides nice contrast when you want to bring the hands out again as you can open the hands up and rotate them back to show the full scale - thus drawing the audiences eye. Brilliant tip, I never knew this before and when you look at animated films you can see it! We looked at an example from a scene in 'Meet the Robinsons' where the villain is trying to convince the a group of people in a meeting to endorse his invention. He has huge hands - a tricky character to animate I imagine. Great example.

Here's the hand-in for this week, I've worked on shot 1 and 2: -

Term 5 Week 6: Advanced Acting - Mechanics and Acting

Week 6! Jesus already half way through the term. I thought at the start of this one - "ha, just one scene to do this term - should be easy" - It's not! God I was hoping my work would be much further ahead by this time. I feel that there it's still really just out of blocking and really needs all the 'meat' of facial expression, head and body accents. The problem I find is that I find it hard to put those things into blocking. I tend to try to just get something working and then spend most of my time in spline - working things out there. I know this is wrong and I'm going to change to get it all in the blocking from now on.

We had a lecture from animator Bret Parker as she went through a shot she did for Pixar's Ratatouille. It was a big eye opener to see how much of change there was between her initial layout and her first pass blocking. So much of the animation is roughed in and working already. She also made quite a big change to various parts after blocking as well and it really helped the shot. This has given me confidence to tare out sections of my work and try something new to improve it.

In Q&A we went through steps to take when your shot isn't going well. We also watched a documentary called Rivers and Tides. I feel the guy's pain when the sculpture./art installation breaks that he's working on.

Here's where my assignment is upto: -

Term 5 Week 5: Walk-Through: Advanced Dialogue Part 2

In Q&A, Michelle gave us an awesome lecture about the spine. We looked at examples from animated film and broke it down into two shapes. The extended spine and the curved c shape. We also looked at the hips - the hips control the movement of the spine and most of the bend in the spine is at the hips. When the spine is extended the hips must rotate so your butt sticks out and in the relaxed spine the hips rotate under. All complicated motion can still be broken down into those 2 shapes. Of course there is straight spine as well!

In the lecture Victor Navone completed his dialogue shot and showed us how he goes about refining and polishing the performance.

Here's my scene so far (mostly worked on shot 1):

And facial posing:

Term 5 Week 4: Walk-Through: Advanced Dialogue Part 1

Term 5 Week 3 - Advanced Acting - Multi Character

I will update this post with text soon!

Term 5 Week 2: Advanced Acting - Storytelling Through Cuts

Week 2 of the new term and I got my critique back from Michelle. She has chosen the scene where a married couple are decorating and the woman says she want's a divorce. This is because although all three ideas/dialogues were strong, this one had the strongest emotional beat to it.

I've had a lecture from Patrick Kriwanek about storytelling through cuts. It basically outlines how to tell a story using camera angles and cuts between shots to build a scene. As an animator you not only have to position characters and create motion but you have to tell a story. You must communicate to an audience, and the position of a camera and how you cut between scenes is just as important as the motion, to convey that story.

In Q&A we went through how to layout a scene and get the camera's set up effectively.

Here's the handin: - Layout and Video Reference.

Term 5 Week 1 - Advanced Acting - Walk-Through: "The Winds of Victory"

Hey, hey!!!

I'm back! and making my first post six weeks into the term - taking a three month break has made me sloppy with blog posting.

Term 5 has begun and I managed to get the mentor I was after - Michelle Meeker! Brilliant, I was watching her eCritiques during the break and decided that she would be a great mentor because of the advice she gives students. Not only about animation techniques but also your ideas and subtext within the scene.

We had a walkthrough lecture about how to animate an acting shot. It's a great refresher for me as during my three month break I tried to stay away from learning as much as possible to give my creativity the rest it needed.

Q&A was cool too - my class is awesome. We went over introductions, then how to find dialogue for our shots and finally creating initial ideas.

Outside of Animation Mentor my life has been turned upside down as I've just got a job as a Junior Animator at BlueZoo Productions! Wooohooo!!! I'm now living in a hotel in London's Swiss Cottage area and trying to work on a laptop in the evenings (this will have to be a very temporary living arrangement).

Anyway this weeks handin:

And stills of the ideas: -

2012 Animation Reel

My reel for 2012 : -

Animation Reel 2012 from Paul Novorol on Vimeo.

Term 4 Week 12: Review of Introduction To Acting

The progress reel!!! :-

Animation Mentor - Term 4 Progress Reel from Paul Novorol on Vimeo.

This term has been so good. I'm really glad I had David Tart as a mentor. He's been very good at pushing us to create believable characters and put emphasis on timing and planning. It's been a learning curve with the acting side of things, trying to get into character and feel what the character is feeling. I still need to practice this more and more because I can't tell whether I am really feeling it.

I think some parts of my dialogue shot are working well like the eye movements and some of the hand work. A couple of the accents where he says "fetched" and "sold him" I think work well.

I think the part where he says dog isn't working so well. This could be to do with the pose and the timing going into/out of that pose. There is also a feeling, to me, that the body lacks successive breaking of joints to loosen up the rigidity. So there are parts where more lead and follow could be added.

I'm fairly pleased with the results overall and David gave me a brilliant grade! Cheers Dave :)

Term 4 Week 11: Polish walkthrough

This week is the final week of hand ins for the term - and the process this week is to take the shot from polish to final. We had a lecture hosted by Andrew Gordon from Pixar to show us a walk through of how to polish a dialogue shot and really finesse the animation. One thing I've learnt is its important to work in a hierarchy through the body and polish the controls one by one.

My shot hand in is here: