"Sole Searching" Rough Blocking - Second Third

Click HERE to view the blocking of the second third of the short.

I added on the rough blocking on the second third of the film. Got some great feedback from David Breaux last week - animator at Rhythm & Hues. But the drill is for us to take one third of the film at a time, get it to a certain point, and then not touch it til the "next round". Not that I would get in trouble for making the suggested changes now, but since I don't show them until the next round, and it will take all of my time to get the next section done as it is, that's probably how it's going to end up anyway.

I feel pretty good about it. There are some poses I'm still not happy with. I really like the presentation of the boot by the sales clerk, though I need to add in a cool breakdown. And the timing (yet again) needs a lot of massaging. I need to make a habit of doing my blocking, letting it sit for a day, and then come back to it with fresh eyes BEFORE I turn it in. Don't want to develop a reputation for bad timing in blocking...

I'm thinking that I probably won't be doing video reference until the second pass of blocking, after the rough blocking has been approved. But once I know the main pose I'm going to hit, I can explore the mechanics of getting into and out of the actions in an interesting way through video reference.

One of the things I have a hard time with is committing to blocking. I'm always trying to come up with something stronger, more entertaining, more appealing, but that there's a road that will never end. "But I can do better!" I say, and my wheels spin for miles and miles.

So I'm figuring out that it's a better plan to do the best you can right now without biting off more than you can chew, and then concentrate on making it look really good.

It's like trying to decide what to make for dinner. Instead of reading through every single recipe in the damn cookbook, you see what you have in the fridge already, and just do the best you can with what you've got. Learn your mistakes, and do better the next time.

Onward and upward.

Something else I'm trying to be aware of as I'm animating is to make the characters specific. The film is too short to really develop things too much, but the characters still need to be individual, unique, and have a sense of personality/history.

For example, since I'll be blocking the girlfriend's performance next, I'm trying to get myself into her head a little bit. How self conscious is she about being so tall? Does she slouch a little bit to not seem so tall? What stage of the relationship is she going through? How important is it to her that her boyfriend makes the effort to equalize their height, at the expense of his "masculine" image even? What conversation have they had that has brought them to this exact moment?

That's what I'm exploring right now, and it's very rewarding. If I can make them live in my mind, I think I have a much better chance making them live on the screen.

Some sketches...

I haven't posted any sketches from my sketchbook in a while, so here you go. Hope you like them. Click on the image to see it enlarged. **Sidenote: the very bottom drawing on the last page of drawings is of a man that must have driven his Harley across the country several times over for the past 30 years. His shoulders were so hunched forward, it looked almost comical. Talk about form following function...

"Sole Searching" Rough Blocking - First Third

Click HERE to see the first pass of blocking on the first 800 frames of the short.

So things are starting to take shape a bit. Kind of feels like first day of rehearsals of a play, doing rough blocking. You're working with these digital actors that have never done this role, that have never interacted with each other before. And as an animator, I sit there and push their faces all over the place and see how far I can stretch them til they break - find all their flaws, weaknesses and strengths. Kind of like the Miss America pageant, minus the silicone and vacant craniums.

The only difference between this process and the rehearsal process I'm used to with plays and such is that with a play, you usually get several weeks to work this kind of stuff out. And you get all this influx of energy from your fellow actors - playing off of what they do and the talents they bring to the table. Animation? No more than a few days, at least in most production environments, and it's mostly a solitary affair - like doing an extremely difficult crossword puzzle.

So that's why I encourage you to give me your feedback. Let me know if something's not working or if you think something is working really well. This is the stage where big changes need to be made before it's too late, if they need to be made.

Don't be shy...

:-)

Story vs. Acting

There's a big difference between what happens in story and what happens in animation that I think is really great.

In the story process, you have to make sure everything is clear and reads well onscreen, but it's not the writer's job to tell the actor what the character is thinking, or every bit of backstory. In fact, it's better to leave that work to the actor. The story should contain all the core information, all the clues to who that character is, but the actor needs to make it specific and personal.

I love this dynamic. Every step of the production process should ideally increase the number of layers artistically while remaining true to the story.

I like to think of the story as a huge egg containing an unhatched phoenix and every element of the filmmaking process is a person holding that egg up and providing support to its development. If everything is doing its job right, when the egg hatches, something magical is created.

So back to my point, the work of acting as a support to the story is crucial. And I'm enjoying the process immensely as I start to flesh out the simple characters in my short film, find out who they are, and show them to the rest of the world.

"Sole Searching" Layout

So I came up with a title for my short film: "Sole Searching". I always like a good pun (though most I find moronic -- sorry, Dad)... I'm thinking I'll animate the titles somehow if I have time - kind of like the stylistic way the titles were done in "Monsters, Inc."

Anyhow, at the end of last term, we worked on a layout, which is the first step of production in the computer. It's where you take camera, set, simple props, and character placement, and begin to tell your story visually - working out what shots will have the most impact, where your characters are going to be, how they relate to one another, etc.

This process was a little tough in one sense, because the character models we were given to do our layouts with had no articulation set up yet, so it was truly "rough" placement. But in a way, I think that was kind of good, because the temptation to go right into blocking and not take things step by step can be too great.

That's one of the things about animation - easy to get distracted by all the hundreds of thousands of choices that have to be made. No wonder they have teams of hundreds of artists for this. Much easier to keep things moving when people have dedicated jobs. But alas, I'm an army of one and that coupled with my already ADD-like manicness makes for a lot of disarray. Thank goodness for AnimationMentor - if the assignments weren't there to keep me on task, these projects would end up like so many paintings in my garage - collecting dust.

So without further ado,here is my finished LAYOUT.

Comments, suggestions, and rude remarks are always welcome...

Short Film Animatic

So, for all of you wanting to know what I've been working on for the past three months, here it is...

Last term was all about story. It was a challenging experience to say the least. We had to work within a lot of limitations, which a lot of students seemed to really hate, but I think it was kind of freeing.

It reminded me of when I was shooting my music video back in 2001. Trying to come up with something that would be universally appealing and personal at the same time, on a very limited budget and very limited resources. It forces you to be more creative than you probably would be
had the sky been the limit.

Anyhow, here is my animatic. It was a major pain to put together. Why? I drew out the storyboards on blank index cards (there are 106 drawings. You do the math...) and I did it in a day. Then I had to photograph them all with my digital camera, import the photos into my computer, crop them and fix the levels in Photoshop, save them all out, bring the jpgs into After Effects, and then time it all out, render it to a .mov file....so, about 10 hours of drawing and another 10 putting the thing together.

Nothing comes for free.

I tried to really be aware of where my camera and characters were so that things were clear, but I made of lot of mistakes in this animatic in regards to continuity and screen direction type things.

Class 5 at AnimationMentor really helped hone my eye to be better able to tell stories visually in a clear way, mostly thanks to my awesome mentor, Matthew Russell, who just left DNA Studios (worked on the upcoming movie "Ant Bully"). His feedback and enthusiasm has made the short film class a really great experience for me.

And the lectures have really blown me away. I'm finding that I like the storyboarding process and the whole process of "story" itself to be more fulfilling to me than actually animating.

We'll see what the future holds.

In the meantime, here's my first stab at storyboarding...