Chapter 2 - Experiment part 1

The past 3 weeks was indeed very super mega challenging..so, this is what happened..

Week 2 was the week when I transferred my sketches to Maya. I had to change my planning and make it simpler. It was so hard because this time around my mentor really taught me about story telling. It is not only about 'create a story' and the rest is history, but now it is about 'building a story'. It never really hits me that how our head moving, a quick look to the left, and other small, tiny detailed actions would affect our shot. Our body movement is part of the acting choices. It is easy when we talk about it, but in my case.. I definitely still have to learn a lot. Moving on to how i approached my shot. This time around, i was really impressed with the plateau workflow that was introduced on the lecture this week. I decided to try this workflow right away. During my planning and blocking pass, I felt that plateau workflow worked really well for me. This workflow helped me to figure out the timing faster and not to mention it created in between poses for me (me such a lazy **s.. tsk tsk tsk..). It pretty much made feel that i might have already done with my blocking. Below are 2 clips from week 2:

 

 Silhouette stewie, to see if the poses are readable

Original View

Looking back at my shot now, the main reason why i felt like i have finished with my blocking is mainly because the curves at plateau mode have an easing in and easing out. I was very please to see the outcome because i thought it was good enough and because it felt like all the poses are in the right place, right timing and looks like it has a quite all right spacing. Boy i was Wrong.. i guess there is not such thing as 'i have finished with my blocking' and when do we actually finish our blocking? I don't have a definite answer for that for now. I hope i would find the answer in the future. Anyway, i learnt that the easing in and easing out, they created this illusion of timing. I am not sure how i am going to explain this but in a nut shell, it felt pretty much very mechanical, very pose A to pose B kind of feeling. At that time, I of course did not realize this.

(go to part 2)

---

Chapter 1 - Slap!

Class 3 Week 1. This term is my first term with different mentor. I was indeed anxious, especially last night when i received a notification email that my new mentor just gave me a critique. This time around, we really have to consider to add some kind of story in our shot and to give the character personality. My new mentor is Tim Crawfurd : he points out right away that my works on my first 2 term did not really have personality on it. So i think this time around, i need to bring this to my works. I have no time to freak out or anxious about getting new mentor or to have adjustment period. Below are my planning sketches. I feel that i have to take and analyse more video references since my shot is not too strong and still lack of personality. Another thing that i did differently is that i didn't do pencil test and i didn't really act out the action. I thought i was going to try different approach.. but yeah.. it didn't go too well o_o.. but at least now i know what works for me.. ^^

---