Will Kistler’s AnimationMentor.com Experience

Finishing up the last bit of business, here’s my final polished version of the gift animation. I will still listen to any comments, as I’m sure it can be improved before I stick it on the reel.

Present – Polished Final

Next: planning for the new project. The coming piece will be our first lip-sync animation. For this week we were required to find some audio clips that we would enjoy animating. Here are a few I ripped from 28 Days Later and In God We Trust, first two and second two respectively. Please let me know what you think. So far I can find things about each clip that I really enjoy.

Sound Clips

Just a note: the h.264 codec that we’re required to use for AM will crash a windows browser unless you have updated to Quicktime 7.0.4. Get it here:Quicktime Update

Well, this last week it was pointed out that the head nods make it look like the character is talking, but they don’t really tell what he’s feeling with that. I was going for an excited “thank you” but it didn’t really come accross. I decided to add a kiss in the middle to really show how he feels about his new present. I also fixed a few minor things that we’re looking weird.

Present, Polished

There’s still more to work on, though. Look for a final revision next week, and please let me know anything that should be added.

So, I’ve been neglecting the AM log for too long, but it’s time to set things right again. So here, in chronological order are the things that I’ve been working on for my new assignment, involving a character going through a change in emotion.

Ideation:
Sketches. I did a few poses just because the ideas weren’t really flowing. I figured I’d start drawing and see what happened.

Some are better than others.

One idea I had involved stewie getting a present that turns out to suck.

The other idea has a sneaky hunter getting caught in a bear trap.

I remember that last semester one of my classmates had done a bear trap gag, so I decided to not use that. I wanted to be original. Kenny suggested that the gift scenario could be better. To obviously dislike a gift that was given to you right as you open it is kind of rude. If the character was going to have a big reaction, the ante had to be upped.

I decided to have the character receive a violin case. This way, even though it was a gift, he would know what it was. The twist comes when he opens it to find there’s no violin inside.
First pass blocking.

Next week we had to smooth it out. I decided to start more in the middle so the character wouldn’t be starting from nuetral, he’d be starting from an emotion. Also, the ending changed a bit to add some scratching at the end.
Refining pass.

The head nod didn’t really seem clear. I wasn’t sure if it read as a “thank you.” So I added a couple more nods. Also, I cut the ending. It was adding more than was really necessary. It didn’t help the scene so it was gone.
Second week of refining.

Note: AM just switched to one standard for all students to use for video compression. To watch this video, and all future videos, you will need a reasonably up-to-date version of quicktime, one that includes the h.264 codec.

This week we’re supposed to polish it off. I’ve gotten some feedback that the new nods read as conversation, but not clearly as a pantomimed thank you. This is my big fix for the week.

So that’s about 4 weeks of assignments that I’ve not posted. I’ll try to keep the breaks shorter.