11 Second Club October 2018 by Titi-Marian Giusca
- Titi-Marian Giusca
- Oct 25, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 26, 2018
Create your acting shot based on 11 seconds of audio.
Animation Shot Progress
Thumbnails
Usually thumbnailing is the first step in creating an animated shot (acting, pantomime, walkcycle). It helps you in understanding the staging, the rough poses and the movements of camera or characters in your shot. Thanks to it you can experiment different ideas and at end choosing one of them or through a mix of ideas get a new one which owns the best concepts of the others.
Reference & Key Poses
Once you've got your thumbnails it's time for you to practice in a real environment. Study properly your shot and find a place that fits the features your shot will be set. It's really important that the place you're acting in gives you the same freedom and limits you'll have in the one chosen. Try different ways of acting, that will be valuable once you'll put together all the different clips and you'll make the final reference. Having a good reference after just 2 or 3 times acting it's very difficult (I'll say impossible) because you need to immerse yourself in the character (how does he feel?). Usually 2 hours in a row of acting should be sufficient for a wide selection of clips.
Now your reference is ready, but I still have a suggestion for you before importing it in Maya. To simplify even more the process you could analyze the reference and try to identify the key poses. The key poses (or golden poses) are the ones that gives you a initial understanding of spacing and timing. You can identify them thanks to a simple rule called "When the action changes". Watching the reference you could see the different shapes our body takes in order to create that kind of movement. The extreme ones are our key poses. Drawing on the top of each different key pose helps us to see even more the contrast between two different poses identifying the contrast between them.
Blocking & Blocking +
Finally we open Maya, we import our assets, to create the environment that we roughly drawn in our thumbnails, the rig (I recommend to import it as a reference) and after that we are ready to go.
The first step is setting the camera and its movement. Everything we are going to animate will be visible in the camera frame. Try doing less cuts possible in order to give an easy view of your animated shot and remember to have a subtle camera movement.
The first blocking are the key poses you drawn on the top of your reference so just follow it and try to understand the weight shifting.
The second blocking (blocking plus) is made up by inbetweens. Using a plugin like TwinMachine or AnimBot will simplify a lot your workflow. Thanks to them you're going to make inbetweens that will advantage a pose or another of your choice. Now your animation is already quite smooth, but every part of the body is moving in the same time. We need some overlap.
Polishing & Final Render
The polishing is meant to make your animation natural and clear thanks to overlaps the different parts of the body will have a leader and a follower. For example the eyes will move in a direction leading the head to the same one, in this way will achieve a sense of "pulling".
During this step you're going to work with the graph editor in order to adjust the curves in the different movements. This part of the polishing is really important to reach some good movements that in a blocking phase you couldn't achieve.
In the final render we're mainly talking about lighting your scene. Based on the style you want to achieve, you'll make use of different intensities, colors and effects to add at your lights.
Shot Progression Summary
Shot progression from thumbnails to final render.
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