Character Performance

Narrative

The scenario is a well-known interview from the Suits TV show. Choosing the audio clip was simple for me because it satisfies every need, including scene start, scene middle, and scene finish. The scene is about the interview in which the interviewee is confident about his achievements. However, he does not have a law degree. 

The dialogue is as follows

Interviewer: “Unfortunately we only hire from Harvard. And you not only did not go to Harvard Law School, Have’nt been to any law school.”

Interviewee: “What if I told you I consume knowledge like no one you ever met and I have actually passed the Bar!”

Interviewer: “I would say you are full of crap.”

Reference

I tried to simplify the reference by breaking dialogues into three sections. Because of this It was convenient for me to act accordingly. It was the first time I was going to act in order to animate the clip as a reference. 

First of all, creating our own scene was a little bit difficult for me. There were many ideas for actions that crept in my mind. So I started by making a list of thoughts. 

In between, there was an in-person session based on acting for reference held by Alex Clark. It helped me to figure out the ways and simplify the method to act according to reference. For instance, I learned that it is going to take a lot of takes. Secondly, 

I learn to divide the scenario into 5 concepts to make it easier for us to act

1 To whom a person is speaking

2 Activity

3 Environment or world

4 Event 

5 Intention

After all, I started to act by myself. It took me a lot of retakes to finalize my acting reference. I ended up creating a big reference video where I used my top picks all synced to the sound file, annotating the best parts and adding some research for different poses – this would allow me to have everything I needed in one place.

I received feedback from Professor Richard, who suggested that I talk dialogues on my own rather than synchronizing lips. From this, I learned that the actions in my reference may be more precise. Moreover, for the interviewee, I had decided to go with the confused or nervous action but I received feedback that I should go with the confident gesture as the voice is very confident. Just like he knows what he is saying and a Nervous gesture will not look appealing,

After that, I started performing again from scratch, and after a few retakes, I created the final animation reference.

Moreover, I created a mindmap to simplify the whole project.

Setting up the Scene

To start with I created a project in Maya and imported both the original and acting image sequences into the scene.

Moreover I referenced both the rigs and the environment which conveys the interview scene. Both the rigs are different in their own ways. In case of Malcom, there are lot of different character versions which we can customize accordingly, however, there are lot of extra controllers in places like shoulders and arms,also, there is no blenshapes for mouth. On the other hand, Andre rig is less dense and flexible to animate with lot of blend shapes around face controls.

Blocking main poses

I started blocking out the main poses of the reference including hand and finger and initiated the animation with pose to pose. As in the animation, both the characters were sitting on the chair, and there was the less but crucial movement of the legs.

 

I looked up a picture of a monk seated on a chair and noticed a few variations in their positions. In several places, I also made use of the original reference. For example, the eye and eyebrow moments in the original ones were more visually appealing and understandable. 

I made the initial decision to focus more on hand movements than fingers when I was speaking. I reasoned that working with fingers is more difficult and should be handled later. I animated my head, chest, legs, and hands first during the fundamental blocking stage.

Adding In-betweens

After getting done with pose to pose, I added keys in between as and when required. I added ease in and ease out in hand gestures to make it look more appealing. Furthermore, In the section where the character put his hands on the table, It was quite challenging for me to decide how to switch from FK to IK in the rig. There were a lot of attempts in which the hand was getting misplaced in between. Eventually, I came up with a time range where the moment was seamlessly animated, and with the help of Euler in Animbot, the misalignment of the hand was minimized easily.

Just like in the walk cycle animation, I came up with the sequence to work on specific controllers one at a time for my convenience.

Whole body( Hands, arms, legs, core, back)

Head moment

Eyes, Eyelids( blink), eyebrows

Hair moment of needed

Mouth moment( Jaw, end tips, Tongue)

After done with the blocking, I came across the video from Sir Wade in which with the help of animation layers he added a layer that specifically focuses on breathing animation. So that even if the character is idle, it looks alive and appealing as there are slight moments on chest and shoulders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P05qRtTwpM8&t=1s

One of my friend Kunal gave me feedback that moving holds should be incorporated into the animation., For example, while a character is speaking, their head movement doesn't happen continuously; instead, it pauses, adopts a new attitude, and repeats the process. So while animating the sequence after each pose I was making sure there were holds along with a line of action.

After getting done with the basic pose and in-betweens, I made it habitual to hit play after editing any controller from which I came to know if the action is still looking robotic.

It was still looking robotic as the fingers were not animated and there was still a little room for improvement on the spline. 

Malcom's left hand was animated to move a little or to insert into his knees as it did in FK. In order to have smooth movement, I decided to remove the entire key range and convert it in IK.

Dialogues Animation(Lip sync)

At first, I was confused and not able to understand how to initiate animating. So for animating mouth and facial controls, I refer to the external tutorial by Sir Wade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fySj1JDAFZQ&t=56s

In this tutorial, he explains the whole workflow of animating dialogues, in a systematic manner and it helped me to understand the importance of basic shapes and how we I can manipulate the side controllers in order to get specific pronunciation.

The tongue is essential for creating smooth, natural-looking mouth movements, so I began animating it after that. He also said in the video that the tongue travels continually at a speed twice as fast as the lips do when speaking.

Self Creatique

While working on this project I felt like I should have managed my time more prominently as I failed to take any additional feedback from professors. I did tried my best to add an eye for detail in the animation but I think there is still some space for improvement.

Working on legs was a little bit difficult for me as I had no idea how the legs would move slightly if the person was confident and typing on the laptop. I reckon without leg movement the action was not quite appealing.

I think I should practice more with Animbot as it is a fun and interesting way to approach animation.

I feel this module took me through a very big leap in knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of the basics of animation.