#class04

It has been a while since my last update here so please take my sincere apologies for that. The second half of Class 04 was quite busy (as were all before that, I guess) and I needed some time to cool off.

The second assginment n Class 4, after the pantomime, was the dialogue shot. The concept is simple: You go and search through the internet and all your favourite movies for an interesting 10 second monologue (you'll only be animating ONE character), then you come up with an interesting setting and animate a character fittingly to create your very own fully synched movie shot.

Simple concept, hard task. This is by far the longest assignment so far. 6 weeks in total, which is a lot, but only means that a good time management is absolutely key. Animation Mentor will guide you through this, but you really have to give it all and stay on schedule, otherwise you'll find yourself not finishing.

I've seen many students fail this class and that's not because the workload is too heavy, but because they just couldn't keep their pace up over such a long period.

Anyway, here's how it works. The first thing you do is find at least 3 lines of dialogue. I would recommmend more like 5-8 and then slowly weed them out. Here's a quick checklist with some things you should consider when choosing:

Is the length of the shot inside your limit? Shorter is better.

Is there much background noise? Noise is bad.

Is it dynamic enough? Keep away from monotone lines.

Does the line make sense outside of its original context? sometimes ironic or sarcastic statements are just plain weird out of context.

Could it offend ANYONE who hears it? No insulting of races, geners, age, countires nothing like that. That's important since this probably go on your demo reel.

Is it appropriate for children? Even if you are aiming for an adult audience, keep away from topics such as Sex, Murder, Drugs, Cursing, etc.

Once you found enough you will be asked to upload 3 of your choice and your mentor will help you pick one that is best suited for your assignment. Here are some pages that provide some good audio files:

http://www.moviewavs.com/

http://www.moviesoundclips.net/

http://www.moviesounds.com/

There are many more on the internet, but I would personally recommend that you sit down and watch some of your faourite movies with your eyes closed and choose dialogue form there. With audio files downloaded from the internet you always run the risk of having lines that were animated before by someone else. There are hundreds of animation students each year and they all do this, so the best lines have ALL been animated. Be original!

From here on it's all pretty much straight forward. With your chosen line in mind you start creating thumbnails, shoot video reference, analyze and then go into blocking. Do yourself a favour and dont mind about the lip sync until it's time. It's really not that complicated and you'lll have plenty of time to do it when the time comes. Just focus on your acting and body mechanics for now.

This assignment will be very demanding for everybody, but it's the closest you can get to an actual production shot. So enjoy it and give it your best.

Here's what my result looks like:

This is after just about 120 hours of work. So yes, it's a lot of work, but there's no better way to learn.

Currently I'm in week 2 of class 05 and have just started on my two person dialogue, which will be much tougher than this one. Wish me the best of luck, this is my last assignment here at AM, after that it's polishing and fixing.

This is week 06 of Class 04 already, so I'm a little behind on my updates.

The first assignment in this class was the infamous pantomime shot. Meanig we were supposed to come up with a 10 second idea depicting some sort of emotional change in a character. For example from quizzical to angry, anticipation to disapointment, something like that.

The idea is to concentrate on story, behaviour and body language rather than pure physicality.

As always I juggled with many ideas at first, loving and then hating every single one of them. Anyway, I was able to agree on one with a simple enough story that would fit inside the limitations:

A girl finds a seemingly dead animal in the park and carefully wants to poke it with a stick, it shows no reaction so she relaxes and comes closer. The animal turns out to be very much alive, wants to play and bites her "poking device". She staggers, jumps away and then throws her stick away in disgust.

Sounds more complicated than it is. Here are my planning sketches:

And finally the finished and rendered animation:

I first created some video reference in the park, which helped em a lot with planning. In the end I modified it very much to fit my needs and get that exaggerated style and I basically only used it as a hint for timing and basic poses.