Week 5: Adv&Exp [George’s Class]

Class Content:

Polish/Detail Pass:

Make sure IK/FK switches are smooth, and there’s no popping

Make sure animation is following nice arcs. Might need to animate on 1s/key certain parts of body every frame to achieve this

Make sure scene/props are set up at this point

Intro to Acting:

Jeff Gabor: Animator, very animated in his reference footage, great acting. George showed us some of his progressing showreels. He’s also good at animating women, and has clearly paid close attention to the small details of how women move and talk compared to men. With newer animators, it tends to be easier for people to act out reference and animate with characters of their own gender, since its what people know better.

You need a break in the line/in the acting, can’t just be one emotion through an unbroken monologue

Even if parts of body aren’t fully visible to camera, you should still roughly (at least) animate them to make rest of body more believable. If I adjust my feet when standing, the rest of my body will follow.

When starting this shot, some things to consider:

• What is happening with the character before the shot that leads into this one?
• We should know our dialogue by heart by next week, as we should be really familiarising ourselves to it in detail
• Reference is absolutely needed, even if we’re taking our sound from a clip of something
• We shouldn’t just recreate the scene our sound is from, we should be adding our own spin on it

This week’s assignment:

1. Final polish on body mechanics
2. Audio clip we will be using added to filmed reference
3. Plan sheet (example below)

Close up shot, chest up, 1 character only.

Avoid overacting in reference, don’t move around too much.

Blue line is the sort of wave the sounds takes, emphasis on different words, etc

Come up with a little bio for the character we will be portraying to give some direction for how we animate them

Week 4 Assignment: Polish 1

I had an easier time this week compared to last week with the spline and polishing, but it was definitely still challenging. I keep running into the same issue where the animation ends up looking quite janky and jittery. I tried to follow the advice of working from the core outwards to avoid some of this, but I found it still happened a fair bit and took a while to fix. When I have more free time I would like to go through a few quick shots and work on improving this issue.

I do really like how the body movement on the opening stumble improved from last week, that portion of the shot already feels heaps better.

Polish 01 Feedback:

• Track the arcs of the hands on the shot opening, and make them more satisfying
• The arcs of the hips and chest during the fall could be improved, would be good to have them go up for a few frames before curving downwards
• The elbows and knees should be locked when weight is being put on them, currently they wobble around the floor a fair bit when the character is pushing themselves up after the fall