The second performance animation we had to make had to be with two characters in which at least one had to speak. So the first task was to search for an audio clip and have it approved by luke, then look for rigs from the asset library, record reference footage twice and start working.
The first 3 audio clips I chose were from Final Space (netflix series), The hustle (movie) and from Peaky blinders. The first one couldn’t be as it is from an animation, the second was not very good (I admit) so it was the peaky blinders clip. It is a dialogue where Polly was speaking to Grace in the moment she founds out the betrayed Tommy. It is a slow dialogue but I believe it will be a good practice to know how to make characters move without any major movements. I do have some trouble with timings and this seemed like a good exercise for that. Although I went looking for more audio as I regreted choosing this one, but I ended up keeping it.
The characters I chose were Janine and Lou
janine lou
I had Janine as Polly and Lou as Grace and began recording the footage. The first one was too bad so, I re-recorded it and the result was much better.
I chose the environment “Victorian Interior”, found a table, glasses and a fancy botle on turbosquid and built up the scene. I began by animating phonemes from each character and then animate the body according to my reference footage, Polly was first then Grace.
These two characters have to pick up and change hands when grabbing objects and that, I believe, was where I lost and keep losing time with as I was using the animSnap tool to have the objects constrain to the hands but they would go crazy and the objects just appeared on the other side of the scene. My solution for this was to block everything like they had the objects on their hands and in the end I would deal with it. I ended up only parenting one cup to grace’s hand, as she wouldn’t have to pick up anything else with that hand. This is a problem I will have to learn how to fix and really understand constraints and all that comes with it.
This is the final playlast of the blocking:
I still have to figure out how to light this scene properly, this environment came with a ton of lights but I would like to improve on it and be the one to light my work as it is such an important concept of emotion and reality.
After the blocking I tried to make a shot sequence with the camera sequencer and this was the result: