Revisions, Revisions

Assignment Revision

Well, the third Q&A with Charles Alleneck worked for me. It was great to finally "meet" my mentor. Uploading my first assignment, however, was a bit of a nightmare and I was pretty much a basket case, trying in vain to get everything to work right. Ended up staying up til 4am that night - well, morning - and sending Charles an email that was 7 paragraphs too long... Uggghh. It was tragic. He liked my pose though and had a few suggestions to strengthen it even further - pulling the shoulder up and across, strengthening the silhouette and dipping his head a little lower.

A huge lesson I learned doing this pose was that you have to mentally treat 3D animation as a 2D medium. The kinds of questions you need to be asking yourself are, "Is this graphically the strongest it can be?", "How can I exaggerate the pose to get the right feeling?" NOT "Would this hold up in real life?" - because at the end of the day, every shot on the screen is a 2D image, and you're trying to capture the feeling of the thing rather than the reality of the thing. Also i learned the value of "pushing the pose" - making it as clear and as powerful as it can be, taking out the ambiguity, otherwise the audience will wonder, "What is going on?" Now it's perfectly fine to make the audience wonder WHY something is going one, but the WHAT should be clear.

I'm going beyond realism and really emphasizing the exaggeration right now, and I predict that eventually I will bounce back to somewhere in the middle. But now is the time for me to be learning the "rules" and how to operate believably within a traditional, animated world.

Then, after I learn the rules, I intend to break the hell out of 'em and see how far really this animation thing can go...