Class 4 - Knowing the Cuts

After going over the audio clips and working out which one my mentor liked, and i felt had good acting moments. The audio from clip I went for was from Man on fire. The scene its self has over 5 cuts, which are nearly all medium close up or close up. But only being able to use around 3-4 cuts MAX i wanted to make sure capture in my cuts the essence of the scene and how the characters bounce off one another.

Sean has left for a few weeks and we have a covering mentor called Raquel Coelho.

Below are thumb nails, video reference and a number of different CG takes on the scene. I shot loads of video reference, and narrowed it down to three, but only uploaded this clip as i feel it covers most of the things i want in the scene.

Class 4 - Audio choices

A New task which will carry us out to the end of the term. We are now moving on to a two character shot animation. Im not going to upload here my audio choices as at a later date i might animate to them and like most of the audio wav sites now days everyone seems to have animated them. So sorry guys you will have to find clips of your own like i did :) but hey at least you can "watch" movies for a few days and class it as research :) 

Class 4 - Lips Polish/Final

Wrapping up this animation now and moving on finally. Plus two more head poses for this weeks task.

Class 4 - Lips blocking plus

AM have their new showcase here the work is amazing check it out. And no, none of my work is there lol, don't be silly pfft, your lucky its even made it this far onto a blog....

This week is the next pass of the lip sync, from my mentors notes i really just have to push the vowel shapes the lip movements and refine some head turns. Also this week we had to find images of faces showing an emotion of some kind and recreate it with Bishop.

Class 4 - Lips block out

Back again, and this time Class 4 and im already starting to coming close to the end of my AM journey and i still feel like i have LOADS TO LEARN (well i do but you know what i mean)..

My New MENTOR IS *Drum roll* Sean Ermey, You may recall this name before on here, he was my first AM Mentor, and oddly enough i have him again. Ok i never got a different mentor but hey Sean is bloody good at animation, and his Crits are fantastic i mean, some creep up into the 15 - 20 min mark. And no that doesn't mean your animation stinks it means that your getting what you pay for. A five min crit might be great on the out set but really are you getting your what you pay for!!! Anyway i may depend on your view for that one. But im really happy to have Sean in some ways as he saw from that start and seeing me again so i guess he can see how much i have improved (if any hahaha).

Well we start this term with lip sync refinements on the mouth, as we are given full access to Bishops face rig. There was an amazing video by Jason Schleifer on who to approach lip sync.

Have to hand it to the guy, he really knows how to explain "how to do it lip sync" without it seeming overwhelming and complex.

For this hand in we had to a few things, i can't seem to find one of the images on breaking down the text!!! But i still have my character drawings for the mouth shapes and the all important blocking *Oh yeah i rendered the wrong camera for hand in DOH!!! I'll have to fix that later for this blog

Class 3 - Finished

This week i took a bold step and really re did the swig from the bottle. Some of it is down to ones just to really keep that bottle on the lips. Refined more arcs and curves, fixed some spacing in places. All in all cleaning up loose ends and tweaking curves in the ye old graph editor.

Class 3 - Term Over

Class 3 comes to a close and its all over again - it goes so quick............... Next term will be even more work and will be pushing my skills further!!! Michelle was a great mentor and gave wicked crits and feedback to the class, so if you get her as a mentor your very lucky. In fact all the mentors i have had to date have been wicked.

We continue on this shot in Class 4, as we will be given another Bishop rig but with full face controls. As at the moment its just flappy mouth with very limited eye stuff...

Here is my end of term reel =O)