Such as Dracula - Specialism Module

Titi-Marian Giusca
Feb 14, 2019
2 min read

Updated: Feb 15, 2019

The second term started with the Specialism Module aiming the development of the individual’s craft in their chosen specialism in the context of current practice.

I choose doing a Character Animation performance based on a 6 second audio from a movie.

Audio (day 1)

First of all I searched for a 6-8 seconds audio presenting a line with clear phrases, contrasting beats as well as contrast in the voice and thought process of the actor.

Chosen the audio I've been hearing to it for a long time in order to read the main accents and try to understand how to act them.

Thumbnails (day 1)

I've drawn some rough thumbnails to get the key poses.

Reference (day 2-4)

I tried different ways to perform the dialogue giving me some limitations. I imagined the first character as a sort of mystery detective, sure of himself who states that Dracula doesn't exist. In the beginning, I acted without any prop interaction apart for the desk. Then I realized that a cup could be a great object to give him more personality showing, for example, the lightness the cup was being grabbed showing his sureness.

Blocking (day 5 to 19)

Key Posing

Based on the reference I posed the character in his 3 main poses which defined the major movements.

Breakdowns

I added then other important poses in order to strenghten the 3 key poses.

The middle frames between the key poses.

Inbetweens

In the last blocking pass, with the help of the TweenMachine, I set the inbetweens where needed in order to achieve a timing good enough to switch to polishing pass.

1st pass

2nd pass

Polishing (day 20 to 24)

During the polishing pass a started looking at the acting and movements of the character based on the audio and I tried to fix the timing lost during the transition from stepped to spline (auto) curves. I then fixed different floaty movements, added lipsync and adjusted some facial expressions.