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 6 - Arabesque

Hello hello! i owe myself a bunch of entries D: it's kind of blurry to remember what happened during week 6 .. but, i guess i know where i was during that week :) So here we go!
I did my blocking plus on week 6. I found that i tend to rush my shot, by that i meant spline my shot way too early. The reason of that is because i could not see the in between motion on stepped mode. So what i did was i splined my shot right away and i freaked myself out. The shot went crazy the movement was not in place, it was a total mess. I decided to switched back to stepped mode.
I learnt that if we switched to spline and the animation goes crazy, this means that you probably miss in-between poses or maybe your in-between poses might be not strong enough, and from this you might know that maybe you're not ready to spline your shot. However, this is of course depends on your workflow and i'm still learning myself :) so i'm not saying that this is the correct way to do your shot, just a thought :) So i filled those missing in between poses and ended up to have key on every single key frames. Uh Oh. o_o this does not look pretty. I definitely  have to work on this.
Here are the process of my shot:

 

Blocking from a week before:

 Adding more in between:

 

i couldnt remember what was the different between this and the one above.. D:

 

non-silhouette version:

 

 departed from blocking + .. say hello to first pass spline:

 

2 playblasts of the shot, one with still camera and one with moving camera:

 

As i moved to spline.. i also learn to treat my own shot as a footage not as an animation that i need to tweak.. i dont know if that make any sense or not.. but this certainly helped me out to spot the part that feels not right.. So I submit this for week 6's assignment :)

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Chapter 6 - Oopsie Daisy

So last week.. was super tough.. my stress level was above the normal capacity. However, i learnt a lot of stuff last week, and really folks, watch lectures more than once if you could, watch it over and over again and absorb all the information like a sponge! After watching the lecture, i realize that there are couple of important things that I miss. During my planning, i focused on my characters back story, a lot. I wrote the whole story about his life, personality, where he lives, what happens, and how he handles the situation. This, however, is not enough! one important thing that I miss is I don't bring this characteristic, all of these information into Stewie. I didn't show how all of these will effect his movement. I find this very hard and this is the last week for this assignment, hopefully somehow i could still incorporate this idea, even though it's a little bit too late and i really have to listen to my mentor's critique.

So here is my first pass splining : 

This week lecture is super helpful too. It explains everything and one thing that I miss is Internal Force. This is like a hit on my head.. the external force is obviously massive - heavy rainstorm - but the internal force, the thinking, is lacking.. so .. im going to refine this shot! *pumped! :)

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Chapter 6 - The Pendulum part 3

I have finished my the pendulum assignment. It seems simple but it is not. The more i think about it the more complicated it become. I think I do quite well for this assignment though. I think the most challenging part is to figure out how the pendulum looks like on each frame and the timing. Below is my final planning and my final version of the assignment. I'm sure there will be some stuff that need to be fixed.

So I animate the pendulum on the wrong camera view -o- Lucky my friend mentioned this on my PR.. Here is the right one:

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Chapter 6 - Revisions

I just finished my obstacle assignment revision. I have to admit that I almost defeated by this one because it was so difficult! The important lesson that i got from this assignment is that I have to spare 50-80 or even 100 frame left to let the ball settle (my friend actually told me about this, but it didn't hit me until I started making my assignment ^^''). So it's like writing an essay, there should be introduction, main body and the ending. It was difficult but fun at the same time! :) Hopefully the revision looks better!

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Revision Updates:

This is a revision for my pose. My mentor suggested to make the pose look more appealing. In order to achieve that he suggested me to push the pose more by tweaking the legs position, move them apart so that they are not sitting on the same line and by doing that, the pose will look more 3 dimensional. Below are the drawing by my mentor and my revision:

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Tiny Revision for weight balls assignment :)

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Chapter 6 - The Pendulum part 2

A Sneak Peek of my planning shoot. Something is not quite right here and i think it is because i let the computer do my breakdown poses .. i have to go frame by frame and see what is wrong inside! :)

Planning:

Refining:
I did some changes so it doesn't look that boring

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Chapter 6 - The Pendulum

It's the Pendulum! I'm excited to do this one. I saw many pendulum assignments on YouTube before I attend AM and i always told myself that I dont think I could do it. Now, here i am trying to animate the pendulum! this is cool :) Sneak peek of my quick planning! Trying to keep it simple :)

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