Quick Test - Emotion Change

Look Test Final from AFighting Panda on Vimeo.

So this is just me playing around and quickly doing something with the new Zoey rig from ianiamte. I decided I wanted to focus on the face and do some basic facial acting. So, I just came up with this. Spent a couple days on it, so not too bad time wise but I know I can do better.

The Work! The Work!

So I have finished my first workshop at ianiamte! Woot! Actually I finished it about 3 weeks ago and I am just now getting to posting this stuff up. I think it is time for a bit of a recap (since its been so long). My experience at ianimate so far has been pretty positive, I must say. I had Tal Shwarzman as my instructor and he was awesome. He was strait to the point and called us all out on any bull we were trying to skate by with, and I loved that. It was tough though, I gotta say my second shot especially was a rocky, rocky road. I only just got it to a point where I feel like I should be sharing it. I still got a couple tweaks to do that will be hard to notice once implemented. At least for the non animation savvy. I have met a ton of really cool people at ianimate and some just amazing talent. Really top notch guys at this place and I have a feeling most are going to be pretty successful in the animation world eventually. As for the site it was a bit of a rough start but the kinks are pretty much worked out now and everyone is settling in. We are starting to get a lot of neat rigs now which is great. Having access to some top notch, user friendly rigs is just an amazing resource. I just Started Workshop 4 last week which is full body acting. That is going to be interesting I have to say. My instructor David Hubert seems like a pretty cool guy and I hope to learn a lot form him. I don't have much to say about him yet just because we have only had a couple classes. Needless to say I have high hopes for my next couple of shots I will be working on and since I have already started my block of my next piece that enthusiasm is definitely needed. I am going to try to post more often than I did this last Workshop. That way I wont have to do a gigantic post like this again....

About my shots for workshop 3....

In workshop 3 we do two shots which are close up acting shots. We can do whatever we want and use whatever rig we want. It basically splits into two shots at 7 weeks each to complete them. Now this was pretty rough on me because of two things 1. I am a very very weak actor. I have been studying more and more into acting than I ever have before. I am very comfortable now with physical motion so acting is the next stage of my animation learning. 2. I am weak with facial expressions. I have a really hard time posing out nice appealing natural looking facial expressions. When you are doing close up facial acting those two areas are kind of important. Needless to say it was pretty rough. But I learned a ton on both shots. The second shot most of all. Probably because it was a female character and I have done so few of them up to this point. Also the whole issue of me not being a female makes it hard to really dig into that mind set. It was an uphill battle the entire time. But I think both shots are OK. Neither are ground breaking in any sense but both are fairly solid and I am proud of a lot of the work I did. Anyway I will stop blabbing. Please enjoy my shots and if you have any comments or questions please feel free to share.

New shot and a bit of bad news.

So I did a post where I showed a screen cap of a new shot I was starting which I was really interested in and was super excited about. The problem was that about two weeks ago my comp got a HORRIBLE virus. I basically lost a week and a half of animation work and completely lost that new shot. Didn't even have the set up shots I made which sucks because I felt like it would have been cool. But anyway no reason to cry over lost animation files. On another note I was skimming through some audio files and I found one that was just SOOO funny I have never seen the movie this comes from but this is really funny and I loved it so much I dropped everything to do a block on it. So here below this post is my blocking of this new shot. I don't know if its going to turn out great but I really really need to replace the dialogue shot I did at AI since it really isn't that good or at least to the level I know I am at. For when I made it it is fine but I am better than that now.

Got 30th.....sadly.

So I finished up my animation for the 11 second club for April 2010. The votes were cast and I got 30th out of 177 entries. Which sucks to be honest. I figured I was going to grab at least a top 25....bleh. Oh well just have to do it better next time. Doing a self critique I can see that I just didn't get the emotional resonance I wanted too with the final look for the female character. I really should have pushed the camera closer to her face as well as pushed the emotions she was feeling. I also feel like I could have polished a couple of moves, one in particular. If I had to do it again I would have reconsidered the leaning on a table thing. That was just a technical challenge across the board. Having to make sure that the arms and hands and fingers don't clip through the geometry was a bear to handle and took a lot of time which I could have spent elsewhere. I was also relying too much on my animation to convey what I wanted to. Though that is my primary function, it isn't the only aspect of animation, there were a lot of things I could have pushed and improved in order to have pushed my entry farther up the voting charts. Such as working on better textures and lighting, going through the trouble of finding real clothes and hair. Doing the little details such as adding some kind of text on the document the guy slides over. All of these things would have pushed the shot farther if not the animation. Overall I think its an OK little piece. It sure isn't reel material by any stretch of the imagination but its OK.

11 second club April

So I am doing the 11 second club this month, I got a pretty late start so its going to be a sprint to the finish on this one. I am trying to get the emotion to work on this scene before I go to spline because if its not working in the blocking it wont work in the splined version. I am really trying to do something more based in reality here as well as trying to do more with texture and varied timings. I have noticed that I want to gravitate towards a singular timing every shot that I do and need to break myself off of that, so that is what I am trying to do. Anyway if anyone has anything to say feel free to yell at me because I could use any input that I can get on this one.