Chaos Theory: First Pass

Due to the fact that I've already done the facial animation for "Cant Get Involved," my mentor felt it a better use of my time to try another piece of dialogue. He suggested I think of something that doesn't require much body animation, as I only have 3 weeks to complete the entire assignment.

The shrunken heads from Harry Potter 3 popped into my mind, and I thought it would be really fun to animate the one hanging from the rear-view mirror. I grabbed a line from Jurassic Park in which Ian Malcolm is describing the Chaos Theory, and turned on my Flip camera:



This is my favorite take, but I probably shot it about a hundred times. I prefer to shoot a few takes, watch them, decide what I liked about some of my performances, and shoot again. It usually takes three or four passes before I've got a take I like. More often than not, I don't get "a" take I like, so I scavange what I did like from multiple shots, then stitch together a "final" reference video.

I then go into sketching out the animation, finding the most important frames of the video reference (or thinking up different ones where the reference is dry). In the case of this assignment, I have no scanner and the drawings are simply scribbles, so I'm not too worried about posting them. Perhaps I'll post them later, but for now, here's the blocking:



There are a lot of complicated mechanics involved in this shot... well, actually... one: He's supported by a string attached to the top of his head. This creates some real difficulties with things such as head nods, and every motion has to have an abnormally pronounced anticipation, since he's basically swinging himself around to make any sort of gesture. However, more than a mechanics exercise, this is an acting exercise, so I've blocked out the main performance with only giving minor thought to the mechanics of his support. On my next pass, that will be my primary concern: making sure the mechanics support the acting, not the other way around.

Showcase Submission: Drone Escape

Hey All!
This is #2 of 3 clips I'm submitting to the AM Showcase! Wish me luck!!

Facial Blocking

Here's the first pass of my facial blocking and lip sync. It's still in stepped mode so it looks a little hitchy.

Can't Get Involved: First Polish Pass

It's still full of problems, but this is the first polish pass on my latest shot. I'm pretty happy w/ it so far, but of course am always open to critique :)

[Note: we don't have facial controls yet, so the lipsync is not meant to be accurate. Think of this as a pantomime to audio at this point]

Listening: Render

I've officially finished "Listening," an assignment I did for AM. I'm extremely happy with how it turned out -- but critiques are always welcome!

Hope you like it!!

iPendulum

One of our assignments is to do a pendulum animation. For mine I decided to get a little advertisement for Mr. Jobs out of the way as well.

Moral of the story: Kill Two Birds with One Stone. It may be mean, but you'll be the life of the party!

I'll post the finished ball bounce (and a whole other one) when I get a chance, but here's what I've got so far for my obstacle course:



Hope you like it! Crits always welcome!

Travis

Back to School...

I've officially been accepted into Animation Mentor! Yippieeeee! Pending finding the financial means, I will begin classes June 30th. That gives me a nice long time to sit on my butt... Actually, it works out well, as Golden Axe is currently in "crunch" mode, and things will be crazy until around May or June.

So from here on in, this blog will be solely dedicated to my progress through AM. Things'll get a little nuts, I imagine, so I may not be able to post as frequently as I'd like, but we'll see what happens!

Wish me luck!