#class05

It is January 2015 right now, so it's been a while since my last update. My apologies to everyone who has been following this blog, but I have been very busy the past months.

I graduated in December and finished my last assignment, but I'll try to catch up with all my last assignments. So the last assignment thats missing from here is the one from class 05.

Class 05 consists of only one large assignment, the infamous 2-character-dialogue. Infamous because it is very much work and it's really hard to keep looking at and listening to the same 15 seconds of dialogue for three months.

Time management is essential! While previous classes at AM have been very neatly structured it is now on you to make sure you household with your time. You have 11 weeks in total. So you can plan for 2 weeks of planning, 3 weeks of blocking, 3 weeks of splining and 3 weeks of polish. This should work out fairly well, but you have to know your own strengths. Make sure you work well structured and always keep both characters on the same level. DONT polish one character while the others one's still in blocking. You WILL have to change things again later and you really don't want to go back and forth wasting your time in the process.

The criteria for choosing your dialogue are pretty much the same as before. Nothing too well known, make sure it's clear, little background noise and make sure it's not offensive to any group of people. Also make sure to make it not too long. I scraped pretty much on the top end of things with about 22 seconds and was barely able to finish it in time. Make it 15 seconds and spend some extra time on polish.

I chose a clip from "Longest Yard" with Adam Sandler and came up with a different story to animate. And as usual I started with a storyboard. Neat planning it essential for an assignment of this length.

And the same thing again with focus on poses:

The shot is pretty much timed out at this point. I acted it out many times making sure it would work out like this. After I was satisfied I sat down and created some video reference for it. Don't underestimate this step, it is very important for later use and the filming will take quite some time. This took me about 4 hours for the filming alone and then a couple more for the editing.

It is obvious now that we will have 4 different shots inside this one film. You will need to prepare for this and plan very carefully. There will be a cinematography class at AM to prepare you for this. There are certain rules of film that want to be followed, feel free to google for Cinematography, ask your mentor or get a book on this. It's a fascinating and complex topic and knowing about it will surely help you in the future.

Book tip: Mastershots 2: Shooting great Dialogue Scenes (Amazon.com)

To get your edit working in 3D it is a good idea to start with a layout animation. The simplest kind of blocking so to say. Do not animate any poses at this point, focus only on your timing and camera. Here's what that looks like:

From this point on it's pretty much straight forward. Blocking, Splining, Polish, Polish and... Polish.

Blocking:

Splining:

Rendering:

This is the final version of this assignment. It was enormously exhausting and nerve wrecking but I got it done. Honestly I never felt too proud of it though. I still feel like it needed much more polish but its main weaknesses are much deeper. After having spent 11 weeks on this I couldn't wait to get away from it. The more time went by the more I started liking it, especially because my mentor was totally in love with it.

In my current reel I ended up removing this shot again, because I felt like it hurt me more than it helped. Sometimes you have to let shots go. This was a great assignment, a chance to learn and grow, but it never made its way on my favourites list.

In class 06 I started a new assignment to replace this one on my reel which turned out much better. I'll write about that one soon so stay tuned.