Best Friend shot 03, body mechanics + facial acting

Best Friend, v160   

Best Friend, v199

Best Friend: I've been doing fine polish on this shot, got feedback along the way, and worked through all notes. It's finally in a good place mechanically, dramatically, and in terms of general quality.
v160: with body mechanics generally solved, but the emotive aspects are still mostly a blank canvas.  
v199: facial animation has been included, and overall detailed polishing. What an incredible difference. (The video quality for uploads is really rough here. I'll make a better version available when I update my reel.)
The woman in this shot goes through about nine distinct emotional beats. Here's a look at some planning for four of these, to give an idea. These translated fairly well into final form. The drawings are rather rough, they're really just about defining brows, eyes, and mouth shapes:   

 

Best Friend shot 02, current progress

I last commented on this shot in August. 

Version 95, from around mid-summer. I overhauled the shot, placing the male character more center stage now. Formerly he was screen R; but it seemed a bit of a viewing strain to be passing the conversation back and forth over such a screen distance, and he had too far to travel for the grab.

Here's some overdraw I did to resolve the grabbing motion. Ref video I have for this is far too uninteresting. However, this still doesn't "land" it; the shot's fairly realistic, and this motion still needs to be toned down further for the guy. Also, his motion needs to be sudden and unexpected, so that actually calls for very little anticipation. This anticipation is way too big.

Version 130. The female character's body is now well polished, and I'm re-blocking the male character with more carefully studied details and subtleties. He's going to be fidgeting a fair bit, I've been needing to better convey a sense of nervousness with him and that will help. I filmed completely new ref video for his frames 1-245. The male character's anticipation is now more toned down.

This shot is proving to be quite complex - which isn't unexpected, of course: this is intended, as I want this to be my graduating demo's opening shot, and want to be able to demonstrate a broad scope. So there's a whole lot going on on different levels. I still haven't gotten into the facial emotive content, but it's coming along bit by bit.

Spacing analysis: Don Knotts, The Shakiest Gun in the West

Another arc-tracking study. This example of shaky motion comes from "The Shakiest Gun in the West", with actor Don Knotts.
(A longer segment from this scene can be seen on youtube here)
I tracked the tip of the gun. As an instrument, it magnifies a motion that is complex primarily in rotation; the translation would be fairly smooth. Incidentally, if this were animated it would make sense to animate this with a constraint, and it would be important to locate the COG somewhere around the middle of the gun rather than his wrist.
I think a key think to notice from this is that the shaky motion is fairly random. It does hold for about 2 frames and jump in about 1 frame, so there's a slight clustering of points. But it's more "white noise" than "pure tone" vibration.

Stewie Tennis Camp, finaled

Here's the final version of my Stewie Tennis Camp shot, which I completed in AM Class 6.
I made a frames-to-seconds chart and used Audacity to line up the sound effects after the timing was locked down. Incidentally, I later applied a 2 frame delay to get the audio to sound right. It is always best to animate to audio without a time offset, but when everything's done and over with, putting in that slight 1-2 frame delay does sometimes sound better, especially when it's a given that the camera is a bit of a distance from the subjects. Sound travels 340.29 meters per second, or just over 14 meters per frame / about 42 feet per frame. A tennis court is 39 feet from net to rear, 78 feet in total length - the assumed distance-to-camera in this shot. So, strange as it may seem, a 2 frame sound delay for this particular scene is pretty much spot-on.
Introducing audio also led to introducing a third unseen character: Pro's opponent. in keeping with Pro's girl-power, it only seemed logical that she would be besting a man, to boot. (Who knows where Kid's balls are coming from! Whoever or whatever, the source remains silent and unnoticed.)
Frames 100 - 200 were scrapped and re-done three times over before I finally got that part right. Ironic that the very segment where "nothing in particular" was happening posed a particular challenge. But then again, thinking in such a manner was perhaps the fundamental problem with that segment to begin with. Generally speaking, no moment should be dramatically vacant. "Something in particular" does now happen there, a series of subtle but clear emotional beats. 
Getting the hand-held camera to feel right took a few passes. It was initially over-active and jittery. While this may have been truer to life, it was distracting; hand-held action is best kept low-key.

Pro's hair was fun to animate. It is simply composed of AM's Tailor rig constrained to her head, a hair solution I've seen other AMmers use before. I resolved it intuitively (via "mental simulation," I like to say) by overdrawing existing playblast frames (via Digicel Flipbook), then exported and rotoscoped directly in-camera within Maya. (I used a duplicate non-animated "steadycam", because the rendercam was handheld-animated by then.) When rotoscoping like this, it helps to move the rotoscope's plane close to the camera and make it semi-transparent. Posing to the drawover is then relatively straightforward. I find it interesting that the observing mind does not appear to be very particular about the details of motion with things it does not intuitively understand, so long as the general sense of it seems to hold true. Any sort of complex dynamics (fabric, water, hair) would fall into this category, as does complex physics such as the pendulum dynamics of two or more bones in a chain. What this amounts to is a great opportunity for artistic or creative treatment in these contexts. For example, the sinuous motion of this hair in the air is not physically accurate, but it looks great this way. No physics simulation is going to obtain these kinds of results. Nor will it "know" where motion needs to be subdued and where it needs to be more active. All of which supports the point that dynamic non-living objects are also best given the art-of-animation treatment whenever possible.

Best Friend shot 01, stages up to end-class

Well, hasn't it been a while since I posted anything in here! Let's look at getting this up to speed once again.
I've finished Animation Mentor now. Had a blast at the graduation, it was great finally meeting  friends and classmates that I had gotten to know over the past year and a half.

I continue to polish my shots toward a completed demo. I'd like to share stages on "Best Friend." This became my main "final effort" in Class 6, the last class at AM. I'll share versions up to my last submission first, then I'll share polish stages and the eventual completed version - whenever that comes about.

Class 6 was busy. A lot of time was consumed polishing my Tennis Camp sequence. This was completed, I was glad to get that wrapped up at least. Meanwhile, Best Friend became the main contender for my lead shot, and I was starting this one from scratch. I challenged myself with a decent amount of activity blended into the dialogue mix, and with a relatively long clip, 16 seconds, as follows:

The clip is from Doctor Who,  Series 6, "Day of the Moon." Yep, I'm a Doctor Who fan. I liked the scenario's ambiguity. The shot seemed to have the potential for exploring the subtlety of an ambiguously defined relationship between a guy and a girl. I wanted it to remain ambiguous, so the viewer would be left guessing: platonic or erotic/romantic? 
Filming ref was a process. After failing dismally at acting out the female role - my body just can't move that way - my wife obliged and did a spot-on bit of acting for the role. I still ended up splicing together a bunch of clips to get what seemed best, and I also ended up with parallel ref versions. This is the main sequence just for Pond:

Sean Sexton, my Class 6 mentor, demonstrated a very interesting approach to blocking, where he forms a very tight sequence of poses, usually around 2-4 frames separated. While this may seem time consuming at the onset, it can be possible to capture the entire "idea" of the shot more-or-less from the get-go this way, and the shot will be well defined and will transition to splines with minimal issues. So, when I did my blocking, I tried this method out for myself:

Okay, well, not quite. What really happened was that I plugged in nicely detailed blocking for the girl in the first 100 frames or so, roughly in twoes. Then in the second 100 frames I started running out of time and it fell back to around fours. Then in the last two hundred frames it was looking more like eights... or is that sixteens? And by the time I got to the guy, I was pretty much completely out of time and reverted back to the 'ol "tentpoles" blocking method once again.
Oh well. Sean said he can block a scene in a day this way. Either it just takes practice or the typical scene doesn't involve quite so much physics and moving around, and is shorter anyway. Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of it all, time-wise. But there's no denying that the high level of detail in blocking, wherever I did have it, produced more accurate motion and reduced complications farther down the road. It's certainly very easy to deceive oneself into thinking there's enough motion-information in there when there simply isn't yet, when blocking.
Another thing that became clear about this method was that it's best for situations where you have straightforward reference to work from, and where the style of motion is fairly realistic. Splices in reference really call for careful attention to resolving the body mechanics in the scene, and those resolutions are fabricated and take more time to iron out.
Furthermore, it isn't just splices that throw this approach off. It's also re-timing. I ended up doing a fair bit of retiming. For this approach to work well, it's good to have reference frames loaded directly into a Maya viewport for easy frame-specific reference. I did experiment a bit with animating the rotoscope timing to make it fit, but ultimately the two no longer meshed most of the time.
At the end of it all, I finished classes with this version of Best Friend in my final submission:

It was still in the rough with a significant amount of work left to be done. The guy was still roughly stepped, and facial expressions had not yet been defined. 

AM Class 5, Shot 2, latest iteration

Most of the changes this week were made to the second shot in the sequence.
Assuming I don't make any major changes, I've now resolved the most difficult issues, and the rest of  the polish process is a more relaxed matter of working out irregularities and adding details.
I would like Nono to interact a bit more meaingfully with Lillian, though, in terms of her own reactions and focus.
Just starting speech animation here, jaw rotations only so far.

AM Class 5 Shot 2, coming along

This last week's submission. The first and last shots are now becoming well developed and body mechanics has been generally resolved; Charles, my mentor, has indicated that I must now focus on performance. I've already re-filmed video reference for various details.
We've only got two weeks left for this assignment! Time flies. I must also get the facial animation rolling this week. 
I'm really happy with how Nono's run-away bit has turned out. That quality level needs to be brought across the board now.
A challenge with this shot is that the motion is naturally somewhat soft to begin with. I need to tighten it up, especially in the middle. A "soft section" is a section that's wide open for subtler performance and polish work, so this region is one big blank canvas with lots of room for exploration.
Hopefully I'll even get a bit of that "jiggle settle" and "residual energy" cited by Andrew Gordan in a recent lecture on polishing our shots. These descriptions get at the more complex nature of a good settle, something more sophisticated than simply overshooting the action.
And of course, there's still a lot of the emotive and expressive content to be put in.