Class 4 is over. I learned a ton in this class. Lots of credit owed to fellow students and of course my mentor Brett Coderre. On the second assignment I think I was definitely playing catch up most of the time. I started off early with over exaggerated body poses. In the Body Mechanic classes you have Stewie who has very simple eyes and no face. In order to get your acting across you are forced to animate through poses that more often than not exaggerated. Our new assignment introduced us to Bishop who has a face. It is a two part assignment. The first part of the assignment was to do just body and eyes. During this first part the facial features were locked other than the eyes. So I was compensating by using the body to convey all the acting. So I exaggerated the poses. The second part of the assignment will be adding in the facial expressions. My problem was that I was not thinking about the facial expressions when I started. I was told to do a second pass where all the motions were much more subtle. Brett warned me how the extreme gestures would be overkill once the facial expressions were added. That it would come across as over acting. I had to keep in mind that the face is going to really sell the performance once in place. So I went back and re did the shot with the poses way more subdued. Another important lesson is keeping the head from moving around to allow the viewer to read the facial expressions. I still have a few rough patches I have to work on but all in all it is neat seeing this character come to life.
I am working on getting the latest progress real up. Now that we have audio I am having some syncing issues. Once I get that resolved I will post it.