Bruised, bloodied, and desperately in need of a good break, somehow I clawed my way over the finishing line and finished class four... I must say it was one helluva relief to finally get a break - after what's now been a full year of AM (whilst simultaneously working on Avatar), a breather was quite definitely in order! It's been nothing short of delicious to be able to once again go for bike rides, spend whole days curled up by the fire with a good book, and meet up with friends without that nagging guilty voice at the back of my head...
But of course all good things must come to an end, and from Tuesday morning both AM and work start again. So, before I disappear once more into the murky depths of Maya, here's how my final acting shot turned out:
In class five we finally start looking at facial animation and lip-sync properly, and my first task will be to take this shot and to start adding "proper" facials on top. The rig we were given in class four only had very limited facial controls to keep us focused on body language - we could make the character blink and open/close his jaw, but that was it. It's actually surprisingly tricky to make an emotion read when you can't use the brows, or sculpt the eyelids at all - I had to do a lot of careful head tilting and eye framing to make it work so far. By contrast, I was quite surprised how well the jaw works even without full lip-syncing - it already feels "mostly there", even though I haven't even touched the lips yet. Funny old thing, this animation business...
And of course, as is traditional, here's a reel of all my work so far at AM:
Aloha! Our story resumes on my first acting shot - which is all polished up and allegedly "finished" now. I say allegedly, because I couldn't polish it up quite as well as I'd hoped to - some unexpected six-day weeks were required at work to finally push Avatar out the door, and six day weeks have a well-established track record of playing merry hell with my AM assignments... So this one will probably need some more polishing love at some point:
At the moment we're on our first dialog shots, which is incredibly exciting! Our first task was to find three sound clips, and film ourselves acting them out. It was actually really great fun (especially the more psychotic line, which is slightly worrying!!):
Generally people seemed to enjoy the second clip the most, so that's the one that I chose to go ahead with. However, I'm not gonna post last week's first blocking of it, since it was... *ahem*... rubbish. I hit "the wall" last week, and had real trouble focusing on my assignment. Burnout is thoroughly unpleasant at the best of times, and I'm actually quite surprised this is the first time I've hit it whilst at AM. A gentle week with plenty of sleep and book-reading seemed to work wonders though, and and I'm now much happier with the direction it's going in:
It's really rather bizarre (but slightly relieving) to think I've actually passed the halfway point on AM now - nine months really has passed in the blink of an eye. It's even weirder looking back over my shots now - I can see a lot more wrong with shots now than I could when I started...
Next up is my blocking-plus ("splocking") from my first assignment from this acting class. To say I've been "bricking it" about acting would be a mild understatement - I've really had very little exposure to acting up until now, so most of the theory being covered in this class is completely new to me. Avoiding cliche is also so much harder when you're completely new to something!... It's good though, I'm enjoying being stretched. The brief for this assignment was to do a one-character shot with at least two emotional beats in it (the very definition of "open to interpretation" if ever there was one!!). I decided to eschew my tried-and-tested happy-go-lucky formula, and tried to pick something with a bit more weight to it:
So, first things first; apologies for not posting up here sooner. My web-hosting company wanted to switch me from one server to another (for reasons they know better than I), so I deliberately held back from posting during the move to make archiving/restoring it all easier. At least, that was the grand plan! I can't say it worked terribly well - as some of you noticed, the site has been intermittently down for the last two days whilst I struggled with migration pains of various sorts. The lesson here - if it's working then damn well leave the bloody thing alone!!
But hey; the site should be up and running properly now, so if you find any broken linkies then please give me a shout. I don't have much to say about class 4 so far (apart from the traditional "Oooh; ACTING!"). My tutor this term is Mr Ray Chase, who's currently based at ReelFX in the US. My first critique with him went really well; I got a lot of very helpful information out of it - not just what was right/wrong, but ways of approaching the same idea from different directions. So kudos to Mr Chase!
At the moment it's sketching and video reference, so nothing much worth posting just yet... Come Monday, I should have a nice, shiny new blocking for you all though
I must say it was one helluva relief to finally get a break - after what's now been a full year of AM (whilst simultaneously working on Avatar), a breather was quite definitely in order! It's been nothing short of delicious to be able to once again go for bike rides, spend whole days curled up by the fire with a good book, and meet up with friends without that nagging guilty voice at the back of my head...
