'Birthday Suprise' Animation Process

For this one person dialogue shot, I chose a clip of audio from Birdman where a daughter is yelling at her father to get over himself and his past. I wanted to try my hand at a more intense shot showing anger, since I usually prefer to animate more goofy shots. This was my first time doing a full shot with dialogue for my animation class, besides the first exercise animating an extreme close-up. I tried my best to get into character and with several dozen takes later, I was able to get some takes in without laughing. Here are some of my initial thumbnails of the Dana rig (by Gabriel Salas):





Here is my reference video:


I feel that I can get into character better after drawing several expressions or poses to hit. I wanted this character to give off the feel of releasing a huge burden off her chest as if she were finally confessing what she feels. In the blocking stage, I focused on mostly her expressions and trying to convey a tense atmosphere at the end.

Blocking:


I couldn't help myself and I added a fish shocked at his own birthday party at the end. The rig was from a collaborative project from the quarter before modeled by Erin Donahue and rigged by Dara Insixiengmay. 

First Pass:


The character still felt very stiff in the neck area and the weight shifts felt off. But I was feeling better about choice to have her punch down. Also, the reaction from the fish was too much so I made sure to tone him down in the next pass.

I went into Adobe Animate to correct the arcs and poses:


I work with Adobe Animate open alongside Maya to adjust as I go. I find it useful when I feel stuck in a rut and need another way to visualize the animation. It also helps me to push my timing to be more 'snappy'. 

Final Animation:




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pirate Lesson: Visual Development to 3D

Image
WIP - Expected to finish project in Spring 2021      The senior capstone I am working on, Pirate Lesson , is about a father teaching his son to drive the pirate ship during the midst of a battle. One of my roles is as one of the visual development artists establishing character designs, concept art, and the environments. Our main struggle throughout pre-production was trying to find a style to fit the story. I was drawn to combining both 3D and 2D elements to create a painterly effect that kept creeping up in my concept art. One of our inspirations was Tonko House's The Dam Keeper due to the beautiful loose impressionistic brush strokes. I found that they had developed their own shader through creating a point cloud. In our case, however, our computer capabilities were limited due to working at home throughout pre-production and production. Therefore, Dara Insixiengmay, the producer/character rigger for the film, and I had to get creative about how we were...
Read more

'Pizza' Animation Process

Image
 Process for my 'Pizza' dialogue shot: I first began with thumb nails of the shot compositions that I wanted and some sketches to get into the character's personality and expression for the shot. I had chosen an audio from the show "The Sopranos" since the exchange between a cold and calculating police officer and offended pizza shop man seemed very humorous to me. I used the 'Maverick' rig by Ahmed Elmatarawi and added a hat and mustache rig I created to the police officer Maverick.  I then created some reference videos to follow as shown below: This helped me  tremendously to get the correct poses for my characters and to see where I could push some actions further. Once I started to block out the poses, I then went into Adobe Animate to create some draw-overs to help with splining.  After some more splining... All of this lead to my final animation: I really wish to return to this shot later to texture and light this shot in the future. Also, to con...
Read more