For my weightlifting progress, it is coming together but there is still a lot to do before it can be presentable, which is my main goal for now. For the changes I have made, I finish blocking in all the key poses and get helpful feedback on them. This feedback centered around the composition and timing of the initial hold when the character has the sword above his head. The idea was to add a few extra frames of him holding and some of the arms shaking along with some slight micro movements in the legs and torso to sell the idea that one its heavy and two he is losing his balance and about to collapse. To fix the composition I did shrink some of the key pose closer to the camera and had the hole move off screen as it was not needed any more along with sightly moving the character into the center of the composition. This does look better and there no main actions happening off screen now, but I have notices that there is an awful lot of foot slipping and no traction within the feet of the character
For this week we were introduced to the idea of acting out what our characters are doing. This is something which all animators do to try and get a better feel for and performance out of their characters. I found online another reason for this which comes from a site called 8olu who were breaking down how they animated arcane as well as they did where they state “ Recreating the show’s scenes in real life is important to capture the smallest of movements that an animator might not even think about. This makes Arcane alive and believable – without any motion capture.” This may be a bit embarrassing to do and does require some effort to act out, but the process does pay off life in our first task to try and gather the key pose from a video of someone acting out a quote from harry potter. This is how you use performance ref to construct your animation. It was also used as a brief to lip sync where we had to keep track of the shapes of the women’s mouth as she says the lines. This came down to looking at the jaw and how it opens the vowels and ensuring it lines up with the timing of the audio. Overall these were the fundamentals we were to implant into our films and some of it does actually apply to the weight lift when it comes to acting out and I do think I have a better idea of what I’m looking for within the refence footage now which is always good.
The first part of this task was to mark each key frame which meant any time there was a substantial change within the woman’s posture or pose and or any mouth movements as that would help with the lip sync. We also had to be aware of the timing between each marked frame which would affect our timing within the next stage.
The next stage was to draw out this key frame in the way we did the weight lift last week with spaces between the key frames. This was just because it was exercise and it also got used to stater working in a more industry standard pipeline at the end of the day.
For the lip sync block, I decided to use footage from the movie legally blond as I thought of a way to portray a scene in a different light. The idea is that in the movie the main character is trying to prove the incomes of another charter in a court room in their own way. Though I would like to take this into a more a detective trying to work out the suspect by taking an image off a murder board and explaining it to the chief’s police officer. I do think that the police theme is going to be a bit hard to covey as the scene is only 11 seconds long, but I do like the way the board and images which will be on the board could be used as props. I may also have time to show the other charter in the scene, but that may not talk but emote with their body language. Overall, there are a few things that I will have to reconsider, but I am pleased with the idea.
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/Y74jgkzJulAp/
Then I imported some props I quickly made and the rain rig and just posed out each key frame I needed based off my performance and timing. I also tried to keep it as close to the story board as possible but, I did make a few changes to the compactions like moving her down in to frame to the center of the camera. This created the illusion that she was closer to us than she is and creates this perspective she comes away from the board.
