Today I would like to celebrate Jason Schleifer's Grease Pencil script, Blogger word verification, pillows, and Poland Spring bottled water. Poland Spring is the best freaking bottled water on Earth and it's a shame that I can't find it anywhere in North Carolina. I like it so much that I cart home gallons everytime I drive north. Pillows are huggable (especially the one JeanJohn sent me last year for my bday ^.^) and oh yea The Pillows are a great band (well, they were a couple years ago around the time of FLCL anyways...they were rather bland before that and I've no idea how they are now). Blogger word verification saves me from ickidiculous comment spam (sorry guys about the extra step for adding comments...but comment spam is evil and endless). And Jason's GP just rocks!
So this is an overdue weekly AM post, mostly because what I spent so much time working on last week is crap and it took me that many days to finally get beyond that mentally and get a clearer picture of what to do next. The mentors are always emphasizing !!PLANNING!! as the ultimate piece of universal advice and I've definitely learned that lesson the "fun" way by experience many times, especially last quarter.
Last week though, I must've had an extended brain fart and couldn't clarify any shot ideas in my head or on paper so I ended up just jumping ahead anyways and blocking out my shot in 3D without a comfortable idea of where I was going with it. All the warnings from the first week on avoiding cliche, making sure things are natural, skipping the obvious choice, and coming up with unique ideas ended up so jumbled in my head that I was stuck on confusion over how the heck the obvious choice wouldn't be natural and then how something natural wouldn't be cliche. I was probably hoping that posing Bishop out would give me enough visual cue to generate some clarity. Even though I realized early on after a couple poses that it wasn't going to get me anywhere, I couldn't figure out what to focus on and just kept trying to tweak the same horrible sequence rather than starting over. The night before the assignment was due, I finally gave up and posted what I had to the forums for peer crits. And thank goodness the first person who responded not only cut straight to the point of telling me it didn't work, but also gave me some great suggestions to think off of ~ thanks Anthea!! And thanks to everyone else who posted with more observations after that, especially with what worked and didn't. I don't if any of you even read this, but you guys rock! Gosh, I should've posted earlier....
So Sunday morning, I woke up, saw those crits, watched my blocking again, and finally decided to start over with thumbnail explorations. My first blocking had an awkward staging setup and didn't really hit the right notes in the dialogue. Even though I still wasn't clear on what to focus on in acting with dialogue, everyone had given great pointers on what worked and didn't work in my shot and the planning flowed a lot smoother that time. Then I figured since there was no way in heck I could pose Bishop out in an hour, it was high time to try out the GP script that so many people swore by. For those Maya users out there who by a freak chance might be reading this and by an even freakier chance have not heard about the GP,
Jason's Grease Pencil script is an awesome tool for thumbnailing in Maya. Check it out. I think the only reason I hadn't used it before was because I'd been comfortable with my working methods...and uhh, yea, comfort.... So anyways, in ten minutes, I had my poses of choice drawn in and by the end of the hour, I'd explored the timing between frames, eliminated and added poses as necessary, and was TONS happier than I'd been an hour before. So here it is.
It's ugly, but it gets the idea across and thumbnails don't need to be pretty. I tacked the original 3D blocking onto the end so you can see how terrible the staging and acting is. I included it in my assignment submission as well that day though since I figured I'd been too close to the whole thing for too long to make any objective judgements at the time and it'd be a good idea to include all my work, especially since the 3D had some facial blocking. In retrospect, that was probably a bad idea as Pete didn't even look at the 2D version, but critiqued the 3D one instead and suggested things I'd already considered in the 2D...too bad he doesn't seem to check email...I should've included a note on the assignment submission. Sorry that was rather long-winded and probably rather boring, especially for most of the people who read this, but for all the aspiring animators, PLAN!!!
Oh and it looks I forgot to post this last time...here's my Week 1 assignment. I guess I'll stick it here for the sake of completion.
We were to choose three dialogue pieces for consideration. You know which one won out. Hmmm, though I think I might try the first one for out next dialogue piece. Hmmm again, I can't remember anything specific about Week 2's lecture except that it was led by Randy Haycock and it was short and sweet. I need to go watch that again now that the haziness has cleared up a bit.
