Class 4: Introduction To Acting

Week 6: Animating With Dialogue: Blocking
Hi everyone. Brock here. I am taking over the blog this week to help Nellie out. She is busy with the pregnancy and catching us up with all of our “To Do” list chores. Thanks Babe!

So after my concepts were scrapped last week, Nick chose the strongest of the three dialogue sound clips. I was excited because he picked the one I really liked most. I chose dialogue from the live action TV show, “The Tick.” This show is a lost gem and you should watch it.

Nick encouraged me to embrace the dialogue as a super hero moment. He told me to create something memorable. So I tried to loosen up and think about what my 12 year-old self would want to see and that is what I ended up doing.

I created a new superhero and went over the top with my concept. If I do this thing right, I will make something that will cause you to smile. THAT is my primary goal for this assignment.

I will not be posting this assignment until it is a little farther along. However, stay tuned for a teaser.

Assignment:

This week we were required to listen to our selected dialogue over and over again. It is super important that every little detail in the audio is memorized and ingrained in the animator’s mind. This includes breaths, spits and even lip smacks. This will help me know what words to emphasize and what part of each word is most important for visual legibility.

I was so lovestruck this week, can’t explain it with any words. I am just so much in Love with my beautiful wife, even when her pregnancy hormones are driving her nuts and at times cause her to feel depressed. I’m a blessed man because even during these times my wife is beautiful inside and out. 

Brock here. I am super frustrated with myself right now.

I try and watch great films like WALL·E and the Incredibles in order to learn from them. My goal is to analyze and dissect what the animators did to make the scene so appealing. I want to see what they did so right.

However, I get to the end and realize that I did not learn one thing. I got too caught up in the story and forgot to pay attention to the technical side of it.

Am I the only one that struggles with this?

Do I have to stop enjoying story and animation so much in order to learn how to do it? Man I hope not.

Class 4: Introduction To Acting

Week 5: Animating Dialogue With Full Facial

It’s go time! This is when the AM students take everything they have learned from classes 1-3 and combine it with dialogue and acting. This is the real bread and butter of the AM experience. Brock has no prior experience with lip sync or facial animation. He is extremely excited and it will be neat to see him learn and grow over the next 7 weeks.

Assignment:

This is week is one of Brock’s first dialogue assignments. He had to spend the week looking for three strong dialogue sound clips from either movies or TV shows. He was not allowed to pull anything from anything animated.

This was a very big challenge but really fun. Brock picked his top three and shot video references for each to pitch to his mentor. Long story short, none of Brock’s original concepts were chosen by his mentor. Instead, Nick Bruno picked one of Brock’s dialogue clips and instructed him to push the concept farther and deeper.

The best piece of advice this week from Nick was, “make something memorable.” This is when things got very interesting. You will see next week what Brock ended up going with.

Here are Brock’s first facial poses ever. This is also the first time he has ever used full facial controls on a 3D character. Fun! For this assignment Brock will be using a new character rig at Animation Mentor. It is their flagship character Bishop 2.0. The basic model is very plain with no clothes or character features. Brock will take this character and customize it completely to create an original one. I wonder who the character will be and look like?

This week we spent a lot of time working on Brock’s concepts for his first dialogue shot. Brock had to practice the “smug” expression a lot for one of his references to the point where his face got stuck that way. This week I was full of hope because I learned some excellent nutritional advice that will help me and the baby stay healthy during the pregnancy. Thanks Kaiser!

Week 4: Secondary Action

FINALLY! Brock and I can share the whole story.

We have not posted any of Brock’s assignments these past four weeks because we have big news we wanted to share with all of you when the time was right.

Brock and I are now going on our 16th week of being pregnant!!!

Brock’s pantomime assignment has to do with a father struggling to get his newborn to stop crying. We could not post the progress of the assignment because we planned on using the animation to surprise our parents with the exciting news. Now that Brock has finished the animation and we surprised our family we can now to share it with you.

The goal of this assignment was to show a character going through two main emotions. For this shot the two emotions are panic and peace. There is audio for this animation so be sure to turn up your volume.

This week’s lecture was about secondary action in animation. A great example of this would be if someone was talking to a friend and while they were talking they took their hand and brushed their bangs behind their ear. These little details really help the character feel alive. The key with secondary action is to keep it subtle so it will not distract the viewer from the primary action. In my example the primary action is the conversation between the two friends. The viewer shouldn’t even notice the bangs being brushed back because it should feel natural.

Assignment:

This week’s assignment was simple, add the final 10% of polish to your pantomime shot. This is one of Brock’s favorite parts of the assignments. All the heavy lifting is done and what remains is adding all the fine details that really bring the characters to life.

Below you can see what our main emotions were for last week. Brock was exhausted because he has been working full-time and coming home and working late on his school work. He is loving every minute of it though. I on the other hand had a really rough week last week. My first trimester I had severe pregnancy sickness. However, last week the pain and discomfort went from my belly to my head. I had really bad headaches all last week and it was frustrating because I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do. I would have posted my emotions these past three weeks with Brock’s but they would have been the same each week…preggy sick! Now I am on the up and up and will be posting my emotions with Brock’s.