1 Year L'Anniversary ;)

I supposed to post this on the 20th of May (19th on the states) .. well it's better than never! I drew this during my flight back to Sydney :p It's been a year since i received an e-mail from AM, i still remember that i missed the phone call as well (>,<) .. well, happy 1 year anniversary! Have a pie ;)

one of my favourite scenes from Toy Story hehee :

"you saved our lives, and we are eternally grateful" - Aliens, Toy Story

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Chapter 12 - a Cup of Coffee with Sugar

Naw... It's the bitter sweet week :')
I wrapped the week by doing some revisions for both of my shots. I'm glad that i found some flaws on both of my shots as i revisited them. I believe that both shot can still be improved as well. This term, I learnt a brand new workflow. My mentor taught us a traditional animation approach workflow. I feel that this new workflow works very very well for me. I spent a lot of time on blocking stage. I feel that i managed to put all the necessary information during the blocking stage and as the result, the spline stage   went less horrifying than it used to be. I definitely have to watch for spacing, moving holds and where the residual energy would lead the movement, secondary action, and of course the rest of animation principles as i move on. My mentor's final critique mentioned that my shot is still more on the pose to pose-y side and i need to loosen it up a bit more. The facial animation is obviously one thing that i have to improve. I feel that I lost a control over it at the beginning, but i feel that i'm catching up as the week goes by.. It is very tough but i really enjoy the process, and you know.. there is a joy when you finally see Bishop's talking! :) 'he's aliveeeee~~!' :p

I really enjoy class 4. There were only 7 of us in class and we're all got called up to the cam every week. It was very fun and our mentor is really awesome! I'm very grateful to have Dimos as my mentor this term and i appreciate everything he taught us... It was a very amazing class :')
it's sad.. but hey, the good news is i made it to class 5 yiippiiee :D

Last but not least, below are the revisions of my shot and my progress reel :

The eyes on the last pose.. i supposed to make him look psycho.. but it's so hard to achieve that :

Next try .. :( he's still not looking psycho enough .. : 

I decided to go back to the original file ... i don't think he looks psycho at the end but i hope it works :

My Progress Reel :

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Thanks Mom for helping me during the last two weeks of the term. Your support means a lot to me.. *virtual hug :)

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Chapter 11 - Polishing (?)

On week 11, I sort of got an answer for my own question that i had a year ago. I used to think that if we only had half of the body visible on our shot, that means we do not really have to pay attention to the bottom half part simply because we can't see them. Well, the answer for this question is we Do have to pay attention to this unseen bottom half part of the body. The reason is pretty clear; even though we can not see them, we should have them posed correctly. The movement that occurs in any of our body parts will effect the other the body parts, e.g. : we can not shake our head if our neck perfectly stay still and we can not raise our hand if our elbow and shoulder stay still, etc. So, if we have the right amount of information to start with, our animation would turn out better as well. I'd like to think that this is similar to making a planning for our shot. It would be a pain to carry on if the necessary information is not there. In my humble opinion, this would be one among of many other important recipes that will help us to achieve a correct, or i should say, believable body mechanics. We should also remember that we don't have to polish this unseen part to the max because no one will see it. In a nut shell, put all the information you need for this unseen part (the pose, timing, etc) but it'd be less necessary to make it super duper pretty. (i guess it'd wrong if i said unnecessary, words are tricky! hehee :p)

Week 11 was also a polishing week. The lecture showed a brand new view of Polishing! It is indeed not about making the curves look pretty, it is rather to see if the whole piece works well or not. It is a stage where we focus on the small details. I would say that polishing is the new tough stage but i think it's the fun one as well! Blocking is one fun stage and so does planning. Frankly, the whole animation process is fun (>w<). Back to my shot.. I need to get rid of the eye roll that i added on the previous week, i think there was a lot of arc tracking, especially the head arc.. it's quite hard to remember D:! but  hey, here are some of the playblasts :

Tracking the arc of the head using the tiny ball on the nose :

Get rid of the eye roll and fixed the SL hand pose; reposition the thumb :

Get rid of the eyebrow raise at the end :

Fixed SR hand hiccup around f 120 :

The one that was submitted :

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Chapter 10 - Refining

My mentor pointed out that my shot still feels very pose to pose on his critique, he mentioned that there's no life on the moving hold and i need to find a way to break the rigid feels. My friends also told me that the torso area still feels stiff and some poses are twinned. This week i pretty much refined my shot based on the feedback that i received.

To be honest, it was quite a challenge to figure out what i should do around the moving hold area. My friend pointed out about the residual energy and the direction of the body part will go because of it. I spent a lot of time acted out the action in front of the mirror and see how the body moves. I also did this to analyse the facial expression. The tough part is it is very hard to achieve the same result every time i act out the performance.. i guess it'd be a good idea to record it.

At this stage, i feel that i kind of miss one principle which is secondary action, but at the same time you don't one to add something just for the sake adding it.. i guess this will make the performance not believable.. Here are the playblasts from week 10 :

Eyebrows are quite out of control here @_@ :

Added head nods and break the W shape of the arms towards the end of the shot :

This week I had some time to create a simple set up, the props are provided by AM :)

Added eye roll when he moved back.. :

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Chapter 9 - Bounce Back

I mentioned that i missed exploring the facial expression on my previous post. This was definitely my main struggle this week. So this is what happened. Up until this point, i feel that i'm starting to understand the concept of key efficiency ('we want least amount of key for the most amount of information') and we should have control over our keys. This week i felt that i lost control over the keys. Earlier this term, I feel that i have a complete control of Stewie. Obviously because Stewie does not have full facial control. It is of course a whole another different story with Bishop :) I freaked out when i saw the facial controllers hahah! I lost control over the keys :p As I carry on i realised that I am too focused on having 'efficient' keys. Right now, i think it is more important to gain control over them. I would say that it does not matter if we have keys on every frame as long as we know what they are doing. We could always clean them up later on, no? :3

The solution for my issue was by creating character sets. I hardly use this tool because i find it a bit too complicated and somehow i always failed to create a character set. It may sound silly, i have no clue why that happened.. BUT! The most important thing is that i managed to create one, in fact More than one character set Properly heehee.. Thanks to the demo on our lecture :)

I would recommend to try out to make character sets for the jaw-cheek-mouth-nose, eyes and eyebrows. In my opinion character set makes everything look more organised. I feel that I can focus on those particular facial parts because i can only see their keys. The only flaw that i found is if we forgot to turn off the character set once we're done with it. Character set will auto key the controllers that are in the set.. (-o-;) so if we modified the other controller that is not part of the set, eg: if we have facial character set and then we modified the spine, a new key will be set on the facial controls as well. The worst case is if we did copy pairs method and then we still have, for example, eyebrows character set On. We most likely will lose the change that we've done on the eyebrows for the next few frames, because we did not realise that we still have the character set on. This happened to me... :'( i guess we have to be careful and keep reminding our self to turn off the tool before we start tweaking other controllers. I also recommend to make quick selections for the facial controls or use the GUI picker as this will help us to work faster, however, the bottom line is use anything that suits your workflow :)

Back to my shot progression which i would say went very slowly.. here are some of the playblasts, ooh and i splined my shot too *gulp! :

Added some in between keys on the arms to reduce the rigid feels :

Splined! :

I delete the keys on the eyebrows and eyes for some reasons :| i did not remember why i did it ... but i think i imported it back using animtransfer :|

I would say that as the time goes by, i start to feel less frightened by spline mode.. i guess this is a good thing :O

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Chapter 8 - One Step At A Time

It's Week 8!

I re-blocked my shot. My mentor really helped me a lot. He helped me re-building everything and tweak the poses that i had. I get rid all keys on the facial controls, get rid the in between keys and started tweaking the key poses. I really felt the pressure this time around. I occasionally felt a bit lost as well, and this is not a good indication. I have not found the proper workflow for a dialogue shot (well, duh! of course i have not.. this is my first ever dialogue shot ^^;) There was a lot of struggle and thinking whether i should do the lip sync first or should i do basic mouth shapes and then continue adding basic facial expression like it was mentioned on the brief. Meanwhile, the lectures are super informative and very helpful! My old habit of rushing in the process came up as well. This time around, i kind of force myself to add a bit of this and that on my shot, and then i began to add keys on every 2 frames, it was all over the place! Having keys on every 2 frames may work well on body mechanics shot, but i think it probably too much for dialogue test.. but i don't know! i really don't know.. there were a lot of thoughts and struggles for sure. ... :(

*breath...*inhale...Zen... So.. I followed my mentor direction to take a step back. I continue to work on my shot but this time around, I completely ignore the facial expression. My approach for this dialogue shot is by thinking this shot as a traditional 2d animation. I think about The Jetsons, Flintstones, and other Cartoon Network shows that i always watched when i was a little. The next step was to switch off all the lighting on my Maya viewport so that it will look like a 2d cartoon. Something like this:

I continue to add break down for the key poses.. i sticked to my last workflow, which was to add breakdown, overlapping action and the other principles on my blocking.. Below are the playblasts:

First Re-blocking stage, jaw opening-closing was still there. I tried not to delete them. However, we should not emotionally attached to our shot. I decided to delete all of the jaw keys as i moved forward :

Deleted the jaw keys and focus on the body mechanics :

Tracked the arcs ...

The 2d preview that i previously mentioned :

Added a bit of moving hold on the blocking :

Jaw pass, basic mouth shape, and eye brows :

During this stage, I kept switching the viewport light on and off, the 2d preview really helped me out to see if the Jaw movement works well or not... I actually have been doing this since my last shot for class 3.. the idea of thinking my shot as a 2d animation works pretty well for me..

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Chapter 7 - Hello Bishop :)

I decided to chose my Audio 1 for my dialogue shot. This audio was also the one that was chosen by my mentor. I love all 3 audios to be honest. I do think they are all fun but i had to choose only 1 audio. AM seriously teaches me to be more confident when it comes to choosing something. We had to choose theme and ideas for our shots and i learn that i have to believe in myself and my idea.. more importantly, to have faith in it. I mean if we don't believe in our own idea.. we are trying to imbued a puppet with life here.. we are telling a story.. if we don't believe in it.. then who will? D:!

So, back to my shot.. :) .. i literally smiling as i'm writing this sentence.. Hello Bishop :) ..

It's Bishop! Finally! :D i was super excited and i am actually still super excited :) Bishop's cool.. and i can write about his coolness forever, but unfortunately that is not the point of writing this entry (>w<) he is still cool though.. awesome rig :) I got to dress him up, gave him ears, clothes, shaped the nose, make him shorter.. it's really cool, it was like customizing the Sims character.. and I gotta make him alive, not the code or the computer! That is really cool right :D and don't get me wrong, The Sims is an awesome game :)

Moving forward, it's blocking stage. This time around, the blocking stage was quite difficult for me. Mainly it was because i'm very used to Stewie. He does not have facial expression. Bishop has this full facial control. It was weird to see the body moves but the face stay still. On my last post, i mentioned that i missed facial expression on my planning. This was when it started to really hits me. I did not have strong facial expression to start with.

This is what i did: I went through my video reference and find the pose according to the jaw opening and closing. At first i though this would help out the blocking process. This did not work. :( ... I feel like i was unintentionally trying to hit each of the words. I was not happy with the poses that i had, the blocking looked very unappealing and stiff. My mentor really helped me out to fix this problem. I can't thank him enough to be honest. 

I don't think i keep all of the playblast from this week.. hopefully i can find the playblasts, and below is the XSheet and an extra planning stuff.. (I really wish that i had a printer so i could print this XSheet out. I'm not comfortable writing an XSheet digitally, im more of a fan of pencil and paper when it comes to planning/drawing something >.<! )

I need to train myself to use the XSheet.. i think i have not maximise the use of the XSheet 

Breaking down the dialogue using the planning packet

I really wish that i found the planning packet earlier :/ next time, i will definitely use it for my next planning. I found that it is very useful and the video tutorial really helped me out too :) I regret i did not use it for my planning earlier. I did not upload this to my workspace, this was just a little extra stuff that i did :

and now the playblast :

yeah.. i really did not keep all the playblasts from that week... this is the only one that i found :p

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i found the missing playblasts! One has my video reference on it and the other one was just a pure mishap +o+ it looks really bad, but i will put it here for my record :p .. anyways, here they are :

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Chapter 6 - a u d i o time + some tips :)

Dialogue Shot!! Our Very First Ever Dialogue Shot!! How Exciting!! Wiiiii~~~!

All right, here is an advice.. start browsing for your audio files, Now! hehe ^^; I thought that by watching movies and simply go, 'ooh that line is good' was enough. Well, it is not. I often received that 'you are weird' stare by people near me when i have a note book and pencil when i watch movies with them. I found that very uncomfortable but ignoring them was quite helpful D: I watched more movies lately, pretty much many random movies that is on television. I found that old movies from year 1950s are very unique and inspiring. The way the actor speaks felt more stage-y and the accent is thicker for me. I hope this make any sense !:| .. One important thing, write notes about that great line that you heard on television or YouTube. Try to think about the line, try to find the pro and con about it. Honestly i regret that i did not do this when i browsed my audio files. This is something like; when you hear that dialogue line, it's so good and very fresh in our ears, but if you don't write about it asap, the 'moment' disappears and then you kind of forget about what makes the line sounds so good. I hope this make sense.. and this is a lesson learnt for me too. My peer buddy really helped me out during the process as well. She gave me a bunch of audio file source links and that was very, very helpful! I think i should share the links here as well! Here are the links:

• http://movieclips.com/
• http://www.moviewavs.com/
• http://wavcentral.com/movies.htm
• http://www.dailywav.com/index.php
• http://www.moviesoundclips.net/movies.php
• http://www.moviesounds.com/
• http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-websites-film-buffs-fill-famous-movie-quotes/
• http://www.soundboard.com/category/Movies.aspx#5

Hope this will help you guys too! :)


I would say that my struggle this week was pretty much due to the lack of equipment. I had no scanner, no adobe photoshop and i forgot to bring my camera to record my reference. I usually plan my shot on my sketch book and scan them. I was worried cause i initially took a photo of my sketchbook. It's not super bad, it's just a little bit unclear :( But thanks to technology; long time ago a friend told me that there is a scanner application for smart phones (CamScanner) and that app saved my life! :D well, basically i took a photo of my sketchbook page using my phone, but this application helps to crop and skew the image so it looks like it is scanned, not much different quality wise, but hurray! and then i found photoshop software on my parents PC, so i can resize and enhance the images! so, double hurray! Dropbox was simply a life saver as well :O As for the camera, thank god my laptop has a built-in web cam :O! I remember that this week was pretty hectic cause i misunderstood the brief. The brief was clear, but it was me.. After the q&a, i thought we only had to do 1 reference for 1 audio that we like. I was WRONG! so few hours before the submission time was super hectic and i was panicking.. but glad that i made it -o-! A lesson for myself: keep your ears open during q&a >.<!!

Some feedback that i received said that most of the audio that i chose had background songs. It did not really cross my mind before but i will definitely keep this on my note! To sum it up :

• Make sure that the audio is clear
• If it's possible try to avoid distracting background noises or music
• Find an audio that has nice beats, accents, and has contrast in the emotion
• Maybe try to avoid depressing, negative lines, there should be no swearing and/or faulty language cause it may make the audience uncomfortable when they watch it
• Find the audio that you like, if you have favourite actors and movies, try to find audio files from that movies/the actors.
• It'll be a good idea not to watch the original shot of your audio files. I personally feel that if i see the real character, it will be hard for me to get rid of his/her image from my head. For example, when I see Dorothy from Wizard of Oz.. and I happen to like her dialogue line a lot.. in my case, it is quite hard for me to get rid Dorothy image from my head and as i listen to her line, i could still see the character in my head.
• Try to avoid lines from famous movies and animated movies.
• My class 3 mentor once suggested to try to find audio from interview. The reason is because the conversation on the interview is not staged/planned (compare to movies/tv series). I think this is a really great idea cause sometimes there is that candid moment that happens during interview.. and i think it'll be fun to animate this spontaneous moment :) From memory, i think he also suggested to find audio from documentaries..
• One tips from my mentor and my peer buddy, we should not choose the audio that has the exact time length as the frame limit, in this case is 240f. Make sure that we'll have room before and after that audio.
• An advice from my peer buddy too (and I quote her): "choose an audio in which you can add gestures and movements which will sell you dialogue even more"

I hope i cover everything here.. I had a blast that week and shooting video reference was fun. My parents laugh at me when they saw me acting out the shot and when they saw the reference. It was a pure joy :D I have some images from my planning too:

Audio 1 : "I'm a trained killer you know, I can kill you with anything in this office, you want to die by post-its? Cause i can make that happen!"

Audio 2 : "To learn my teachings... I must first, teach you.. how to learn.."

Audio 3 : "I'm the ogre, Nish... How would you like to be eaten? Baked? Boiled? Shish-kabobed?"

What i missed here: i did not have much planning for the facial expressions and this really affects my shot..

Also, no.. i will not upload my reference video here heheh.. i'm a bit shy to share it here.. ^^;

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Chapter 5 - Blurry

Hello hello, it's been weeks since the last post, apologize for the absent! :O
I went on a trip a month ago.. i flew back home, yay! :D it was really good to be back to home, well it always good to be home :) So winding the clock backwards to week 5! That would be my last week for my ghost shot.. Honestly, it is hard to remember what happened that week, but i'm trying to remember and reliving week 5!

My mentor feedback was of course very helpful as always. I remember that i had moving hold issues on the previous weeks. During this week I pretty much refined my shot, the moving hold, the jump backwards and the hand movement. Here is one of the problem that i often encounter. Every time we move, you now, one arm moves that way and the other arm moves that other way. I often get so lost with how that other hand will move! Will it drag along the body or will it make some unique gestures!? This part is unfortunately has not been resolved up until this point :( .. any suggestion guys? D: So in this shot, the problem were on the screen right arm and hand. I think i had to keep coming back to my video reference and see what happened. I really do not want to acting it out again cause that fell hurt my back haha ^^; So people, put a mattress and bunch of pillows if you want to act out something extreme! ^^; Back to my shot, i would say that going back to the reference and tracking what happened to that other arm and hand was helpful. The other thing that i did was by thinking about the arc that the hand made and just trying to feel if the movement correlates with the rest of the body. This was the solution that i came to.

Obviously, the shot still needs to be refined and polished. I managed to animate the brush tip as well! I was surprised to find out how this tiny details could make that much effect to the whole shot. The brush tip really helps to make the shot alive! :)
Here are some of the playblasts from week 5 :

Trackin' that arc~ :3

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Chapter 4 - Noodle Time

It was half blocking+++++ and half first pass splining. There were some changes that needed to be done after i received my critique. I think this time around i spent a lot of my time on my blocking and i did not bother to try out splining the shot just to figure out how does it look like. This was something that I did during my third shot last term. I got carried away and continue to work on spline and it was really really hard!

Back to present time. There are some changes on some poses at the beginning of the shot. I did not realize that the previous pose that i had was not appealing enough :O ! and this is a really great point that my mentor told me on the critique!! I completely forgot about the principle of Appeal! i will keep this in my mind for my next shot in the future (omg we're going to use bishop!!! :D).

My first pass splining felt wrong in so many ways. This time i tried out non-weighted tangent. Honestly, it was really easy to make the curves look all neat. One thing that i learnt from my progress on week 4 is, i know that maybe a lot of people have mentioned this, we should not make our curves look all neat and tidy bluntly. I did this last week :( .

This is what happened last week. I used non-weighted tangent in graph editor. As i refined the curves, i felt pretty unease because i can't adjust the tangent handles like i normally do if i used weighted tangent. I remember it was mentioned in one of the lectures, that we should not adjust the spacing in our shot using the curves. I sticked to that line and told myself that i'm gonna try this new method and see what happened. So i refined the curve and pretty impressed because it was really easy to clean up the curves. This my friend, was the evil in disguise. I somehow did not realize this at all. I noticed all the wrong stuff in my shot when i was on the plane, hours after I submit the assignment +_+ . My shot fell flat and lifeless, there was no moving hold, stewie stops abruptly when he hits the poses, and many more :( . I was probably 36000 feet above the ground and i was so devastated inside the plane -o-! I came into one realisation that if the non-weighted tangent gave an easier way to clean up the curves, this could mean that everything that we put during the blocking (timing and spacing, etc) is most likely near perfect.

This perhaps is a very logical thing and maybe i should have understand this earlier. I heard a lot of people say that we should look at the action that is happening on the screen, not the curves on graph editor (Having said this, i do respect the people that use a lot of graphic editor on their workflow). Ironically i have mentioned this to a lot of people because i thought this is the right thing to do. I guess the reality really hits me this time around and i'm really glad that i experienced this, now i really know that we can not abuse graph editor like what i did and our priority should be on the action that is happening on the screen. I really feel that we should monitor both of the screen and the graph editor. The best way to put this and like what my mentor told us, use graph editor as an assistant.

One last thing that i learnt from my long blocking stage is time and spacing. I think i sort of find a new side of these two principles. I can't really explain about it cause i'm still unsure. I'm really looking forward to test this on my next shot.. o_O..

Here are the playblasts from week 4:

one part that i like on this blocking ^^

not too sure if i used this one for splining.. it has huge pop..

Spline! O_O!

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In honour of splining week, 

let's keep moving forward, have fun, and don't forget to eat! :d

Happy animating! :)

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Chapter 3 - Blocking + + + + +

I continued blocking my shot on week 3. This week i tried to add as many information that i need for my shot. Couple things that I considered to add were overlapping action, drag & follow, arc, timing & spacing, clarity of the poses & silhouettes, details on hands-fingers. I tried to add a bit of moving hold by altering the next pose slightly. However, i did not think i did it well enough and i think it is kind of hard to add moving hold during blocking stage. There is one bad thing that I notice on my workflow. I tend to focus on the first part of the shot and then i lost a large amount of time to refine the second part of the shot. Unfortunately, this happened again :( . I was very focus on the first half when he is kneeling and did not spend a lot of time for the part when he gets up and jump. I'm currently trying a new way to work on my shot. I guess the solution for this problem is to be discipline with my own time :| ... These are some playblast of my progress from week 3 :

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Chapter 2 - The House of Haunted Keys

I started my blocking last week. After the lecture and the class, I really want to try a new workflow. This time around I really pay attention for the amount of key that i put in. I really tried to make sure that each keys flows nicely, I believe that I have to put more breakdowns this week. I also found out that I did not exceed the frame limit, in fact it was pretty close, I had my shot end at f240 on my planning and I have it ends at f230. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing cause for some reason I don't trust the numbers. I feel that it better to trust the instinct and the feeling instead of the numbers.

A little bit off the track here. I think next time I should analyse the video reference that has a correct angle. I think this would make the drawing stage easier. Looking back at the drawing, i think some of the shapes there are not correct..but at the end of the day, i think this all come back to our ability to analyse the reference and our body mechanics :O .. Here is the blocking for my shot.. there are tons of stuff that need to be refined here D: 

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Chapter 1 - Intro

Class 4!! Woooo!!

Congratulations for everyone! We make it to class 4! Half way through the program folks!
I'm glad that i make it this far :) Honestly speaking, it was hard to keep myself motivated and staying in front of computer for 24/7 did not help at all. One thing that hit me, i realized that i have to have a life beside of studying. My biggest fear is to start to have a feeling that this is a burden, which I clearly don't want that to happen and I won't let it happen because to hate the stuff that you want to do in your life is just silly :| Back in my uni days, i encounter some people and including myself said that it's a love and hate relationship with Maya or with whatever we dealt with. I guess if you love to do something, this thought should not exist. So, from now on, there is no such thing as love and hate relationship :) Let's fill everything with Joy! *cheers :Dand um .. a quote from my favourite writer, "The greatest expression of rebellion is joy." - Joss Whedon
Unlike last term, I feel less anxious when this term started. Last term i was very anxious because it was my first time to have different mentor! I guess this pretty much explains why i feel less anxious :| So, moving on to this new term.. we all have new mentors for sure.. and get ready for the big reveal .. ... .. My New Mentor .. for Class 4 .. is .... .... ... *wait for it ... .. .. ... ...
It's Dimos Vrysellas everyone!!
I remember I watched his lecture back in class 2 and it was really really great, i still remember the last line that he said on that lecture! .. but i'm not so sure if i could or should say it here.. :| oh well.. let's carry on~
So this week, we have to plan our shot and it should have contrast in emotion. I think this is harder than it sounds. I always want to create something that is unusual. I don't know if this is a good thing or not :/ sometimes.. actually most of the time, my ideas are a little bit hard to be understood by a lot of people.. and this has been going on for quite awhile :| i brainstormed some ideas and i have my brainstorm pages here:

I had couple ideas such as concert ticket, prison break, home alone and toilet idea. I had to narrow it for sure. Some of these ideas were based on personal stuff, except for the prison an toilet! or .. maybe just the prison :| anyway! i decided my theme which was home alone. At first i was going to do a shot about a kid who thinks that she has to protect her home when the parents are away. I like this idea, however with 250f frame limit.. i doubt that i could set up my story. My class 3 mentor teaches me a lot about setting up a story and i learn that setting up a story would need a decent amount of time. I also had an idea to have 2 characters on my shot. I have a doubt about this idea so i decided to mail my mentor and he suggested to keep it simple and to use only a character. I went back to my sketchbook and just wrote down couple ideas, kind of make a list about what usually happens when someone is home alone (see the second page above). After couple hours of random YouTube browsing :| the Ghost idea came up.. Well, the story that i'm about to use for my shot has never happened before in my life. However, i believe i saw and heard something in the past .. D: So, i guess this still counts as personal experience and i decided to use this idea. 

Before I started my planning, I had already have this image of a person drawing, painting, and i think he's actually writing calligraphy in his home office. He's either an artistic European uncle with funny hair or mid 30 Japanese hero look writing calligraphy. In the end, i lean more into the artistic European uncle with funny hair inside his.. living room. (In my head now i have him living inside a mushroom house ... uh well i have funny imagination -o-" ). 

The next step was preparing my character. I finally able to do something i have not really done nicely before, which is customizing Stewie! I did not customize the whole body, I only re-shaped his head and this strangely made me happy :) I finally made that big round head thinner :D

This time around i took my video reference first. I set up my living room so it would look like the setting that i want to have on my shot. Afterwards, I narrow down the shot that i like and i did something new here. Instead of finding my key poses and draw it right away, I frame through my video reference and analyse what is happening on the body. This is something that i learn greatly from my previous mentor. I wrote notes beside the poses that i trace. Yes i traced the poses instead of drew them. As I carry on, i realized some problems on my planning. Half of my body was covered behind of the table and the shot was shot from front view. I feel that we should avoid this angle if we can, the reason is because orthographic view would give less dimension for our character. So i decided to shot another reference from 3/4 angle and sketched new poses in 3/4 angle and use my first drawing/tracing as my reference. This time around i didn't do 2d test.. I sort of want to test my timing skill.. which unfortunately is still very off :( I almost went over the frame limit here. I was worried because the video reference itself went for approximately 20s for each takes. On the following week, i found out that i still have some space. We'll talk about this on the next post. Here are the drawings and the character:

first drawing/tracing :| 

new planning

the artistic European uncle with funny hair

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