Performance Developing

After going through and reviewing our work on Padlet I was happy to see my animation being reviewed by the tutor and feedback was given in class. One note a student made was about my movements appearing clearer and more readable compared to others, another comment was given about how mine seemed smoother and had more keyframes. A note by our tutor was to consider how wide the mouth opens and how high the cheeks rose when saying the "i" sound. By getting this feedback I understood where I had done well and what needed more work. I had addressed these points later during the lesson.

this week we decided to perfect our facial animation even more and pushing its expressiveness with its body by recording a reference for more accurate expressions and movements.

i went with a group of classmates to a empty class in the university to shoot reference.
experimenting with attitude, camera location, camera rotation. slight variations to aspects like our tone and posture and nuanced facial expressions to see which had the best impact.

Demonstrating why other attitudes would not suit the audio clip, in this example, aside from being timed to the clip, it did not match the move and nature of how the "stalking you" part was said. it the original audio it was said with sudden force from the mouth and in my "sarcastic" acting, it seemed so out of place when hes casually shaking his head and the mouth out a sound from this trial and error and experimenting i see constant need for small adjustments to help push my expresson.

one benefit of watching my references is i get to see how realistic movements are such as breathing and how the breath interacts when i blow out air with the "p" sound. there is a slight push with the chest that i noticed that resulted in the head and chest rising very slightly for a few seconds for the breaths and a few frames for the "p" sounds. it only moves a few pixels for the "p" sounds and moves a centermeter or so for the breaths. I tried to minimise the big movements during the sentences as its hard to breath while talking so i was mindful of this.

Our acting teacher was called Emma, she worked in the new Beetlejuice Beetlejuice movie and will be in the next Star Wars film. Having expert advice will aid in filming great animation references for characters, whether for realistic or stylised animation.

This was a unique lesson that, although is not directly related to animation, it does influence my production of it heavily when shooting references. Even in my recent INMOTION event I went too, James Baxter constantly mentioned using high quality references.

Some advice from the actor, Emma, was that when struggling to envision a character, try to think of what bodypart they may lead with. This was a good way of understanding how they might move across a scene. A proud character might walk with his belly or chest pointing out, whereas a sad or secretive person might lead with their head down in front.

I have noticed after filming references and acting classes that I am often awkward in front of a camera. I'm hoping to overcome this with following lessons.
I have also noticed that musicals and exaggerated movement and expressions in Disney films are not what I was drawn to and watched in films. I find myself often watching films of high detail and realistic movements. I feel I need to watch more Disney films such as Klaus and Moana if I intend to do more stylised and overly exaggerated and expressed cartoon animations. I have previously been drawn to animation/CGI in Marvel/Michael Bay Transformers/Terminator etc.
I find that with acting on the spot my anxiety is high when trying to perform and I often overthink and get nervous on the spot and how to compose myself. I find that the contrast of the old voice and the young rig and the fact I'm having to force exaggerated movement into a character that I have no exterior context for makes me feel somewhat limited on where I can be creative.
Our next step was to animate some of the upper body to go along with the face, this is where our projects might start to have some originality and uniqueness, as our body and hands, unlike our faces, doesnt have to follow a certain script.
If the audio had the man shouting I would say there was a good reason to have the hands cupping or waving or pointing as well to emphasise the actions people would likely make when they are trying to get attention about somthing and shout. but hes simple just saying it, not as if there is any sudden danger. The only reason I can think would be valid to move his hand out would likely be to just point his finger out when he sais "you" to signify hes talking to a person hes with who he hasn't named but he is gesturing at them.

after filming our footage i decifered through it and edited the usable footage together in after affects using time ramps and fade transitions for a readable and clean reference that matches the audio clip.

And here is what I have so far for my animations:

This was our review week. Our task was to have the blocking in for our chosen audio challange 2 completed for review.
Luckily due to pushing myself in this module I had already completed the blocking in for this task and was working on splining, also as well as I had also gone ahead and completed the lip sync.

This week we were onto splining our chosen audio piece. I was already onto splining and used this time to increase my polish on my animation.
I also gave a classmate of mine called Darwin feedback on his animation and helped him reshoot some references. He asked for tips on what he could do to appear nervous in his animation to fit with his audio clip. I suggested maybe making his character scratch himself or bite his nails. He liked these ideas and said he would incorporate some into his animation.
He also pointed out that my eyes were a little floaty in my animation when he raised his hand, so when I got home I spent some more time tweaking the eye controls.

As you can see below, I have demonstrated myself implementing tips from James Baxter and Ollie Trotman that I have learnt about from our in-course industry lectures but also from external animation events, talked about more in detail on my PLP research page.

They shared the advice of considering the positioning of the weight of a character on the appropriate leg for the next movement. in this moment of my animation the character is turning round to his left and I need to sell the visual of him pushing himself forward with his body.

I took screenshots from the back to help us focus and pay attention to the position of the body and weight.

The first image is my character standing still while talking and standing mostly with his weight in the center ( shown with red and dotted lines), in the next image as you can see I have tried to lean him over to the left more slightly with his hips and chest ( shown with green and dotted lines) , this is to help him lean into the next action, in the final image he is already in motion by having his weight on the left, leading to him seeminly thrusting more towards the camera.

This is backed up not only from professionals and in practice with a much better looking action after, but also demonstrated in movies such as Hotel Transilvania. Hotel Transilvania is a film that was guided to me by my tutor Sanjay. After analising and researching the animation style more in depth in my character performance research page, I found many exaggerated and artsy movements with many arcs and "S" curves, which all seem to give the character more energy and livelyness to a greater degree.

Sanjay also gave me great advance in the area of body proportions and relative orientations, in regards as to which to prioritise when animating a character with unusual proportions based on reference. Do I prioritise keeping the ratios of the distances and translations of bodyparts apart the same as each other relative-wise? or do I prioritise trying to keep the angles and orients the same as from the reference? he made it clear to me that the angles is what matters more.
Initially, I thought the size ratio mattered more as a bigger character with thicker arms won't be able to bend as much so it should add a sense of realism, but reincorporating equality and putting aside reality for a minute, I would be intrinsically heavily limiting the visual impact and storytelling if I had indeed created a character that has such movement limits. From further thought on the matter it makes sense to prioritise the angles as this is what helps define shape language more.

As an example; My head on my character was kind of large, and I had some trouble making his hand point straight up as it kept colliding with his face. But in my reference, I had a very firm and rock-solid arm posture that thrusted in one piece up in the air, and it had a very strong triangle shape in the arm, which if hit with, could hurt. If I had changed the arm to be less closed and angled, the sharp and hard pointy edge of my elbow wouldn't be as pronounced and expressive or threatening. especially on a wider, more rounded and padded arm

To solve this issue I had to go into the attribute settings of the "Eye Crash Correction" by "selecting" it in the Channel box and then going to the Attribute Editor to find the limit ranges and settings of the control, which seemed like some sort of "set key" or "blend shape". And I tweaked the settings slightly to allow a bigger range for the crash fix to apply.

After changing the value from 0.92 to 0.8, it fixed the error, as you can see below:

This last week was about me polishing my animation and creating an adequate room to show off my animation.