Ooooo looking forward to watching you agonize over reference and all that fun stuff :-)

Reference, reference, reference! Then test, test, test! Lol! Good luck with it all

You might find this tutorial useful too.

Direct Link

Alright, well I have my ideas scribbled down and I've acted out the scene 50+ times. When I acted it out my idea started to change as I loosened up and did some different things. The idea is still pretty simple and it might get done a lot, but I wanted to focus most of my time on strong, clear poses and well defined acting choices, rather than making sure the gimmick is groundbreaking. I am not terrific at Flipbook so I may just storyboard my shot on paper first before moving on to Maya. Sorry for the boring update, more interesting ones to come soon.

Thanks gorgon! I hope my extra planning and the use of tween machine can help me this month!
I think I have settled on an idea. Thankfully it has grown in the past 12 hours.

Final idea: an old lady is meandering toward the exit of a small, family owned food shop. She glances over and sees a free sample tray. Pleasantly surprised she sees takes a toothpick and takes a bite. She recoils in disgust and looks alarmingly at the food she just swallowed. Dialogue begins. At the "best left to the professionals" section of the audio she places the half eaten sample back onto the try with the others. Then she exits the store.

The tricky part for this is dealing with the "we" at the beginning of the dialogue, which suggests either multiple characters or that the woman is speaking on behalf of an organization or group. I thought it would be funnier to make the woman a little quirky and weird by having her walk around with a pet parrot on her shoulder. As the woman takes the toothpick the parrot very quickly leans in and takes a tiny bite of the food as well. This way when the woman says "we" she is referring to herself and her pet parrot, but it's subtle. If you pick up on it you realize that the woman is just that little bit odd.

I feel like there are enough small gimmicks in there and there is enough happening in the piece to tell a decent story.
Now, on to sketching and acting it out.

Last edited by wellings (04-03-2012 2:25 pm)

Has anyone tried to open the Old Lady Norman rig with the yellow dress, makeup and glasses? I have seen it used here once before but when I downloaded the rig it has no joints or controls for the arms and hands. Is this a glitch with the rig? Or just a problem I am having?

There are a few things I've learned over time, especially concerning tweenMachine.
1) Don't rely on it too heavily, that tends to create very boring arcs (took me way too long to realize this haha)
2) Get an arc tracker, it really helps seeing your arcs and making wonky stuff really obvious.
Good luck

Lango rocks!
all hail !

gorgon wrote:

You might find this tutorial useful too.

Direct Link

It's a part of a tutorial series from Keith Lango about the importance of strong poses.

Cheers and have fun animating for the next comp.

Oh, and fakepivot, thanks a lot for the response, you were right and I was able to find the controls for the arms and turn them on
Stina - regarding Tween Machine I figured I could use it to get the timing of my breakdowns nailed down. I noticed Ken Fountain had to go in a fix many arcs manually to make sure the movements were dynamic enough, so I figure I'll be doing that as well. One thing is for sure though, using Tween will cut back several hours of work! Also, that arc tracking you mentioned sounds like a great tool, unfortunately the link you posted is broken

Last edited by wellings (04-06-2012 4:11 am)

It's hard to give too much feedback at such an early stage, so instead I'll give you my thoughts on your last entry and why perhaps it didn't get higher. I think what really hurt it was the lip sync not being quite spot on. You need to leave the mouth open a bit longer at the end of statements, and then close it. It's closing a bit early. Also the camera move, while very foreboding, distracted me from the animation itself. I think it would have been a stronger piece without the slow truck in.

Much luck on this month! I have no doubt you can crack the top 20.

...for lipsync, just make sure to NOT animate every word... you're going to have to say the lines a lot in a mirror so you can see which words flow together using similar phonemes!

Nice Start!

Thanks so much for the critique cosmicfool!!
Okay, in response to each thing you mentioned. The camera position I have at the moment is very temporary, I pretty much had something set up that resembled my final staging but it definitely wasn't set in stone, so I love the suggestions you made. I'll get on that asap.
Scaling norman's hand, on this rig, for some reason appears to be very tricky. The geo is frozen so the only way you can select it is via the hypergraph hierarchy. So I did that but the scaling for the hands are frozen. How do you unfreeze those so I can shrink the hand?
I did act out the scene but unfortunately I've lost the firewire cable for my camcorder so I couldn't upload it. I did do it though, I promise! lol
As for the reason why she recoils from the food: well, at the moment it is just supposed to look unappealing. However now that you mentioned smell I can see how that could read a LOT better. It would be much better to have her recoil and kind of plug her nose or at least bring her hand to her nose to show that it smells awful. She could then keep her distance from the tray throughout the scene.
Thanks so much, I will get on these changes asap. Hopefully have a new blocking done in a few days

Last edited by wellings (04-11-2012 4:07 am)