Pantomimes, Monologues and Voice Replacements, oh my!

About time for another update. The pantomime assignment went well; I definitely learned a ton from it and I was amazed as to how much time I spent fixing mistakes in blocking when transitioning to splining. It helped me greatly with my workflow and I'm adapting it all to the next assignment to something that I feel is a better fit for me (eg. building in offsets in key poses rather than doing it after the fact, personal preference but it seems to vibe.) Here's the final version, tho a revision is still in the works.

Things are really beginning to click. After obsessing the past 3 weeks over the last assignment and the new one, I'm beginning to have a series of "Ah ha!" moments which is boosting my sense of self confidence but I'm still remaining very humble about it all. I've definitely reached a new echelon in my personal development for which I am grateful, but there's so much more to learn. It also just occured to me why at AM we spend so much time on so few assignments; spending 5 weeks on an 11 second clip seems absurd at a glance, but in retrospect it's brilliant. It forces me to push my work and see what's wrong with it at the finest levels of animation and subtleties, instead of producing a massive repetoire of so-so shots, as I'm particularly used to.

In terms of the new assignment, it's our first dialogue piece, a monologue rather, so one character, a new rig and the challenge of real acting. After sifting through many many carefully picked clips, I chose one and shot more video reference than I ever have previously to test out different ideas. I decided to go with a serious, emotional clip as most people tend to go with something humourous, but I figured I could get more out of it with a solidly conveyed piece. With that said, it has it's risks and rewards as I'm learning; far less forgiving over a funny shot, but I believe in myself I can make it shine. Here's my first pass blocking attempt at it, halfway through the second pass, but I won't post it yet.

Further development on my charitable project, have many rendered shots and the base of it is complete, a lot of fine tuning still yet to do. The script has undergone some serious changes to increase the length and overall power of it, so a lot of things are being reworked and reshot. Also an amazing learning experience and one I'm not soon to forget. As an additional test and personal curiousity, I did a little experiment with multi-channel sound editing. Largely because I haven't tried before and I wanted to see if I could. By and large it seemed to work and proved to be more challenging than I had previously thought; no copyright infringment intended this is simply a test but I successfully removed Robert Downey Jr's voice and replaced it with my own. Victory!

Here's the near polished version of my first acting (pantomime) assignment, it's been quite an evolution. I rendered this out to test the lighting and occlusion, all in all worked pretty well. It's down to the last 10% of polish to put that often imperceptible oomf into it; if you ask me, also the trickiest part.

In lieu of Ironman and my seemingly undying interest in visual effects as well, I messed around with making a HUD much like the one featured with Tony Stark. Much of it was done through the aid of a tutorial, but the experience was all together new and I learned some invaluable tricks and techniques. Here's basically what I got. I want to reshoot the footage and splice myself into Ironman, but after rewatching that sequence, I'd have to be really crafty with the audio... if I can get the music on it's own track then I'd say it's possible and totally worthwhile.


Coraline comes out this weekend, very exciting, and new Monsters vs. Aliens posters are released. If you have no intention on watching that film then shame on you! It should prove to be thoroughly enjoyable for all ages. Dreamworks has finally learned from past mistakes, all the power to them. March 27th, mark it down.

Many other things in the works, but I don't feel obliged to talk about them right now; they're not in any real state of public displayability, so I'll hold off until my next post.