Monday, December 21, 2009

Happy Christmas and all the best for 2010!

I'm visiting family during the holidays and then I'm going on a short trip to Vienna, so I won't be online much in the next 10 days :) I'm really looking forward to getting away from the computer a little... after all it has been a full year doing Animation Mentor almost without break, and there weren't many free weekends. So I do feel a bit burned out and I need to refill my batteries to come back fresh and motivated for the next term.

For those of you thinking about films worth watching in cinema, make sure to see both "Avatar" and "The Princess and the Frog". Both are extremely well done and important in their own way. Avatar brings a very believable fantasy CG world onto the screen and comes in stereoscopic 3D, while "Princess and the Frog" is the first traditionally animated Disney feature since "Home on the Range" in 2004. 2D rocks! :)

Enjoy your holidays!!

AM Class 4 Acting Assignment

Hey guys!

Last Friday was the last day of the fall term, so Class 4 (Introduction to Acting) is finished and I can enjoy a 2 week break over Christmas. The second assignment this term was a dialogue piece with one character. We had to find an inspiring audio clip from a movie, which has some emotion, pauses, an interesting voice, breaths and preferably no profanity and swearing :)

I chose a clip from "The Odd Couple" because I liked the voice and the quirky character. I'll upload the blocking, blocking plus and the polishing, although we had a few more passes to refine the shot and make changes as the mentor suggested.

There is no real facial animation yet, because AM wants the students to focus on the body language first, so the rig did not feature mouth shapes for lipsync or detailed eye and brow controls. Basically we could only animate the jaw opening, the lids closing and the eye direction. Brows and lipsync will be added in the first 2 weeks of the next term - Advanced Acting.

The big assignment next term will be a 2 person sequence with several single shots.

Ok, feedback is welcome as usual!! I hope to light and render the shot once the full facial animation is done.

Many thanks to Marek Kochout, who was an amazing Mentor throughout the term, as well as to all my classmates and AM friends. Your support and feedback helped so much!

Only 2 more terms to go...

Polishing



Blocking Plus



Blocking



Planning

For the planning we had to submit at least 3 dialogue lines, 10 seconds max, plus video reference of ourselves acting out the scenes. It was really a lot of work to find some decent audio lines that inspired me to animate. For every student going into Class 4 I can only recommend to start looking for clips early! It saves a bit of the headache...

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