MEGA BLOG!!

ok, so the time has come to blogg once again, I'm attempting to blogg more often, and currently setting up a side blog for personal projects, what um going to talk about today is my 11 second club competition entry. i really tried to get my projects done and dusted well in advance so i have a lot of tweaking time left at the end. i managed to fully finish the project in 3weeks along side my other projects, not sure how long i actually spent on it hours wise but ye, finished well in advance and got the final feedback today which was really good.
as always i recorded myself and listened over and over to the track to try and get into the character, after going through a few ideas i thought it would be a good idea to set in a psychiatrists room, and the main character is on a sofa of some sort. so after several recordings on the day we got set the project id come up with what i thought would be my final performance, but after the Monday feedback session i soon realise my later part of the video seemed too casual for the character. id also set myself a hard challenge of getting the character sit up from lying down on a bed.
after several block throughs, i found out it would be wiser to cut away from the character to another shot just to break up the movement so the viewer knows what happens, but hasnt actually seen the whole action.
here is a very early playblast of the action thats roughly going to happen, no detail more of just key poses

so my work process was get the first half done up to where the character sits up, this is without all the facial expressions and what not, but with general movement and very basic. it took me quite some time and testing to make it seem the character was actually pushing up his body with the use of the arm. once getting this sorted i kind of left the first half for a long time, probably till the later part of the third week, which was bad in retrospect as i really worked hard on the second half and coming back to the first half it seemed quite weak in comparison. anyway the second part for me i found a lot easier, the cut from the over shoulder shot to the clipboard view was interesting section. actually making a convincing looking tick movement was a challenge especially with the limiting joints on the rig, and making it seem like the character is actually holding the pencil. annoyingly i don't currently have the knowledge to draw a tick in maya frame for frame so i had to do this in post via photoshop frame for frame which was interesting to say the least...

back to the over shoulder shot, the character is now sat up and talking directly to the psychiatrist, the character doesn't actually have a lot of movement in this half bar the knee slap on "9 cans". i found this section a challenge also getting the anticipation and timing of this was quit a task, i think I'll talk about where i could improve later on in this post

Ok so its roughly in the second week to third now and I've basically got the movement done for the second half, all the expressive hand movements are in rather than the typical "claw" hands which you find in a lot of animations. i then check my first half and oh dear it doesn't look as good as i remembered. so guess what....more tweaking. i worked more on the arm/body lift and body speed and positioning and subtle movements in the body.

so now its reached the third week and i started to look at facial animation in advance of our Monday morning session which we would cover starting lip syncing but i saw this as a chance to get some feed back on my lip sync in advance which did help as i had to tone mine down. i found the second half of the animation a lot easier to lip sync as it was slower and more pronounced, unlike the first as its very fast and i soon realized your mouth doesn't actually move much when you talk fast.

after our Tuesday afternoon session with Georg i found out a fair bit about the connection editor in the hyper graph. this was my key to setting up my scene; this is due to the fact that the shaders that came with my version on the rig conflicted with maya lamberts, so after taking in georg's knowledge i then returned home to search the wonders of the connection editor. and woo ye! i got it sorted and started making my scene. i enjoyed this part plus i like to add silly things in, its not that obvious, but the picture in the background is the character in front of the Eiffel tower.
ok so that's basically the animation done..now to render the bad boy...took a while but this wasn't my issue, because i worked in two separate scenes, i had a lot of issues with music going out of sync with the sound file and that my rendered clips were strangely too fast when played at the same speed as the sound..even though i had made sure i set it up probably..so a minor time stretch incurred x1.2 so taking it to 25fps from 30fps which helped. but i still have issues playing it back with quiktime as shown today as uni it varies from pc to pc. my pc runs it fine but others its out of sync, so VLC media player saved the day once again and plays it nice and smooth.

completed animation below



ok where i could improve it, i know there's a fair bit of tweaking i could have done to the lip sync making it seem more realistic possibly
- also maybe a bit more body movement with the sobbing at the beginning to make it more obvious to the audience about whats going on
- i think the arm slap is quite rigid in the second half maybe a rig issue but ill blame this on me ..hehe

what i do like about the project. when running properly onscreen i think its a good piece of work, i added my typical comical part with the "crazy check" on the clip board, i like making the projects more personal to me so, doing this i find i work very well with them and get interested