Class 3 - Week 3: Second Pass

Mark had a lot of good changes for me. All in all, he really liked my acting choices. The main things he had me look at were 1) focus (where the character was directing her attention) which has to do with 2) amount of confrontation with the offscreen character, and 3) the nuances of mood to create a truer performance that matched the tone of the dialogue better.

After getting some distance on the piece (I read people's comments on last week's work, but let the shot sit for most of the week), I realized what Mark had said in my eCritique. For as troubled and uncertain as my character is, she was in his face too much of the time in my reference and first blocking pass. So I saved the main confrontational moment for when the "you" of "it's from living with you!". That really makes that moment so much stronger than it was before.

I also simplified the hand gesturing at that moment, going for what we both felt was the stronger choice - the hand on the bed.

I spent most of my time with the end, doing many different iterations of "secrets and lies" to convey that she is confident about saying "secrets" but more uncertain and significantly more crushed and afraid of the "lies". It was really tough finding the right balance between putting enough information in there and not overacting.

I had to pull way back on the head movements. My tendency was to overexaggerate and it looked wrong - too much emphasis all over the place. But by dialing it down (a lot) and trying different combinations of expressions, I finally came up with something that felt right to me.

It's interesting how different the animation looks when it's fullscreen and when it's a tiny little .mov file.

Improving Your Work

A fellow student at AM has commented to me a few times now that I have seemed to make some big strides in Maya since the bouncing ball exercises, so I thought I'd talk a little about that.

I really don't think it has much to do with Maya at all. I think I would have floundered there at the beginning no matter what software I was using.

I think what he was seeing and responding to is a gradual understanding and application of solid animation and acting principles.

I've used Maya since it's infancy (version 1.5 to be precise), and have had a good general working knowledge of most aspects of the program. Admittedly, I never really got into the graph editor until I started with AnimationMentor, but I knew what it was and how Bezier curves worked (mostly from Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop experience) - that these curves had handles that you could push and pull and thereby change the shape of the attached curves...

I think one of the many reasons my earliest AM work sucked so bad was due to being overwhelmed and overly concerned with all the technical things.

It was as if I was looking at all the little lines in the Graph Editor representing my animation keys as if it was a scroll of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics that I somehow had to divine a meaning out of. I was racking my brain trying to make sense of it all, second guessing every step I took.

I didn't start to make significant improvements until I understood the concepts of timing and spacing better. Once you know what it's supposed to look like and a few of the tools to get you there (i.e. setting keys at the right places and having enough breakdowns) the curves don't mess up your work as much.

Towards the end of last term, my clean up was going really quick - i want to say maybe a little over an hour max for 120 frames. All of my breakdowns were in there, so I knew I wouldn't have to rely on too much curve manipulation to get arcs moving correctly.

Let me explain this a little more.

This is how I like to think of breakdowns: You want to go from point A to point B, right? So the computer is going to take the shortest route, depending on what you have your keys set to (flat tangents, spline, linear, stepped) between those two points. Now, any arc you get in between is only accidental and probably not what you want. But if you have a third point in between A and B, you suddenly have a perfectly clear idea of the general shape the curve needs to be (this comes from putting in the right breakdown in the right place). Chances are you'll have to spline these keys so that their tangents (the direction those handles are pointing) make for a smooth transition mid-curve or else you'll get jerky movement in your animation, but at least you're not shooting in the dark in terms of curve shape.

And even simpler way of visualizing this concept is to think: "2 points make a line. 3 points make a curve." You need at least 3 keys to make an arc. Otherwise you have no breakdown and the computer will inbetween it mechanically - point A to point B. (Not a very intelligent solution.)

After I started seeing things this way, the hieroglyphics actually started making some sense. I would immediately know "Okay, these tangents need to be flat", "These need to be splined", "I need to ease out of this one by pulling this handle out further", "I need another breakdown here".

I got turned on to Dave Burgess' copy pairs at the end of last quarter in Body Mechanics and that really helped me out. I was able to maintain the integrity of my poses. Just tweaking one end (enough) will give you a nice moving hold without destroying the essence of your pose.

The thing I've found you have to be careful of when it comes to this method is that it can look really pose-to-pose unless you break things up enough. There's always going to be a trade-off no matter which method you use. You can try to rein in a looser blocking style so your poses read or let the reins looser on copy pairs. Choose your own adventure.

Personally, I'm liking the structure the copy pairs method gives me. It allows me to make more creative decisions when I'm not stressing about messy keys all over the place. The further you break up your poses, the greater chance you have of getting lost in your keys, but as long as you keep things in the same general vicinity, making changes isn't too cumbersome.

However, I'm also learning that while working copy pairs with splined transitions is great for rough blocking, it's not so great further down the road when you get used to looking at splined movement with improper breakdowns and have to fix the arcs from there.

So in the future, I think that once my rough blocking is done, I'll change all my keys to stepped and plan my breakdowns and arcs from that point. I actually want less for free. That way I know my choices are deliberate and there's no auto-pilot involved.

But Mark encouraged me to try this new way for this assignment. So I have, and know what I need to change for next time.

I'm not as scared of animation anymore. And I certainly have come a long ways from where I started, but there's a long road ahead and complacency is a quick route to mediocrity.

With that said, I think I'll work on my shot now...

Class 3 - Week 2: Rough Blocking

Well, here's my first stab at my shot. My mentor, Mark Behm, emphasized to us last week to plan very, very well. To overplan. To explore all the possibilities and to draw all that out and to definitely not go with our first thumbnails. As you can see from my thumbnails, they got successively clearer and (hopefully) better.







I thumbnailed before I did my reference, except for that third page. Those were distilled down to key, storytelling poses and sketched from the reference. The first two pages were where I tried to capture the emotion of key moments.

Actually, I take that back. I had some friends come over and we all took turns going through it and filming it before I thumbnailed, but I didn't look at it. Just got some ideas and went back to listening to the audio over and over and over. Mark said I should listen to it for a few hours. I know I listened to it for at least an hour, probably a little more, over the course of several days.

So then I started feeling the words in my body and tried to sketch my ideas out in little snippets. I watched myself in the mirror, thought about what my body might be doing, while still thinking broad ideas - whole body gestures. Really, really hard thing to do, I might add - visualizing a nuanced performance in your head and then trying to get it onto paper. Nothing new though - welcome to the world of artmaking.

So yeah, like most ideas I've had, I had a very clear idea of how I wanted it to feel, but not so sure on the specifics that would get me there in an authentic way. Not super happy with the thumbnails in terms of nailing down any specifics, but that's not really what it was for anyway.

So then, I decided to film more reference. The stuff I shot earlier didn't ring true, but then I got a wild hair in my you-know-where and pulled out an old halloween costume. "I'll just put on a wig", turned into "well, a wig will look weird with no makeup", which turned into "well, a girl's face is going to look weird on a man's body"...not that I want to have to go to those lengths every time to get into a character (I mainly just did it for sh*ts and giggles, cause I'm crazy like that), but I think it really helped to get into character on a different level and I'm glad I did it. Props are always great for changing things up enough to get you out of your comfort zone and take some risks.

So then I took some time and walked around the house "in character" - and when I was ready to film, mentally I put it in the context of a bigger argument and tried to channel that specific moment within the argument as best as I could, over and over and over and over.

Another thing that helped was where I filmed it. I'm sitting on the bed in my bedroom, pretending to be yelling at my ex (I think it helps to tap into your own past experiences that remind you of the situation - you use what you can) and that also helped get a truer performance I think. I wasn't really thinking about it at the time, but being so exposed in how I was dressed also added to the vulnerability, I think. Have you ever noticed how you carry yourself differently depending on how tight or loose your clothes are?

Like my mentor said, the more depth and layers you are aware of in your character, all that stuff will feed into what you do, and you'll have a much richer performance as a result. So that's kind of where I was coming from in my approach.

I filmed dozens of takes until my delivery started coming completely naturally but not so much that I went into auto-pilot mode and lost the freshness.

It's tough work being "on" and engaged like that in such an intense, focused way - 10 seconds of desperation times 40 plus takes. I didn't take breaks, really, so I wouldn't get out of my "groove".

But after the first set of takes, I watched the footage, and then lip synched to a song that had a similar emotional tone to get some inspiration and approach the scene fresh again. Something else I tried when my face started freezing in "life-is-so-damn-serious" mode was to do a take playing the opposite emotion - you know, same dialogue, same delivery, but I acted all happy and silly. Makes for a great "acting breather", if you will.

By then, though, I could tell I was getting tired and the performance was suffering, so I called it a night and like a true procrastinator, didn't start my blocking til Sunday morning.

After blocking it, which only took about an hour and a half, I was actually quite surprised at how much emotion our muppet-style "Bishop" character is capable of with the limited facial controls it has, but then again, I was equally amazed at how much I was able to squeeze out of Stewie, too, who only had two eyes that could blink on a sphere of a head.

Anyhow, my goal is for someone to see my shot and think, "I've HAD that conversation, and that's how I FELT!"

We'll see what my mentor has to say. In the meantime, feel free to share your comments with me as well - would love to hear if the acting is convincing or not.