Intro to Acting - First Dialogue Test Polishing

So here's my almost final, but not nearly done first dialogue test. CLICK HERE to see the animation (no more of this self-loading movie nonsense that takes forever):

I'm not super happy with it. I feel like I took some steps backwards in a lot of ways with this, but I blame most of that on not blocking in stepped mode (which treats the poses more like still, held drawings with no smooth computer-generated inbetweens). The copy paired method where i held sets of poses with about 4 frames worth of transition in between just confused me. It made the initial stages go really fast and the final stages really hard, but since that's the way I started the shot, I was encouraged by my mentor to finish it out that way and see what happens.

By the end there, I felt like I was polishing a turd. I was getting lots of "this looks great. just polish it" comments from classmates but not much advice on specific problems in my shot or how to fix them. Frustrating.

I had the hardest part nailed, which is acting choices. There are basically two kinds of acting choices as far as I'm concerned: weak and strong. One can have animation that's polished to the nines that has no life, no soul without effective, believable, convincing acting choices. The polish is more technical - easier to critique for that very reason - than acting, which is a much more emotional, intuitive process. So if polish is so easy to learn, why do I suck at it so bad? It's not that I don't have an eye for detail.

I'll give anyone a nickel that can answer that question for me.

I know, the answer is probably: practice, practice, practice. Or patience, patience, patience. One of those "p" words. I think it mainly boils down to finding a more systematic approach to the polishing process. I've been using the machine gun approach when I need to be more precise and organized - like a sniper.

You live, you learn.

Sticking to stepped mode on the next shot.