What connects ZZTop, Jesus and Me? Read on to find out!

Here we are again, another week, and another blogg. Right, where to begin? The lip sync project is as good a place to start as any because it is more or less finished, I have even remembered to bring a copy of it home so that I have posted for you but the sounf dosn't sem to want to work, apologies. For the mean time I can sound pretentious and talk about acting theory! Ed Hooks’ book Acting for Animators talks bout a lot of different acting methods but two that stuck in my mind were, one: feel the emotions of the character and two: what was the character doing before the scene started (or something like that). At first I found it quite hard to do any of this but after a day a very frustrating animation tests where nothing seemed to be working I was feeling pretty miserable and I think that this helped when I came back to animating the next day.

From a more technical perspective it was quite hard to do more subtle animation and as a result I don’t think that I did enough animation in the tests and it all looked a bit lifeless and mechanical. Eventually I started to use a bit of exaggeration and this looked a lot better. I would like to think that I have got the balance between exaggeration and subtlety about right, there are a few bits that could be tweaked; the blinks are a bit fast and I think the pull at the end could do with some more tweaning. There is also a rather annoying band of light across the puppets face so if I have time over the next week I will try to re-shoot it.

My attention this week has also been focused on getting on with the storyboards, which are now all roughed out and just need tarting up. The song I have chosen to interpret is ZZTop’s Jesus Just Left Chicago, a proper blues song, not the crappy pop stuff that they did in the 80’s. Anyway, I have turned this into a charming story bout a drugged-up, womanizing rock star, a sort of Jesus of the present day, if he where famous, definitely not for anyone who is religious though. Here I have for you some character sketches of Mr. Jesus, this is pretty much how he appears on the story boards, I am still not too sure on a finished style, I quite like this biro look but I have also done a test with watercolors, that’s on A3 so if I remember to scan it in the studio you can see it.

Until then I shall bid you farewell.

Ye Olde Lipee Sync

Greetings and salutations! And once again may I welcome you to ye olde blogge! This week I have been focusing mainly on the lip-sync project as I’m struggling to come up with ideas for the storyboarding thing and my way of dealing with that is to ignore it and hope a good(ish) solution presents itself.

So, lip-sync, well it has bean chuntering along quite smoothly; its all now drawn up. Initially I had put quite a lot of tweaning in as it all looked a bit jumpy with just the keys but I did a bit too much, making it look like the mouth was jittering about. So I have subsequently taken a lot of it out again, hopefully striking the right balance. My next job is tart up those drawings and mount them on card so that they can be fixed to the stopmo puppet.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do for the rest of the animation but I’m toying with the idea of playing on the fact that the mouth is stuck on. Although it is possible to use the eyes on the puppet I think I might draw those too just because I think drawn ones would look better with the mouth.

Before I go I will give the storyboarding project a brief mention, I did have a song that I picked but I fell out with it and as of yet have not found a replacement. However, whatever song I pick I think I am going to have to use fairly simple character designs as many of the more complex characters I have tried to use look different every time I draw them but If I can find a song where that sort of style would work then I’d be set.

Hurrah!

So here we are; my first blog of 2009, what a momentous occasion, hurrah! First things first, a leap back to yesteryear and the Exeter ident and apologies for the lack of the videos that I promised, they do exist, I promise but unfortunately blogger does not seem to want to let me post them, so if anyone out there is really desperate to see some candelabra things and the spinny floor let me know and I can show them to you. As for the run-through on the lighting, which I promised I would post (I lied), I can copy it from my production report.

Now back to the present and the brand spanking new project, which I must say is making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside as it will be a chance to do some stop-mo by myself and really get some character into the performance. In the finest uber geek traditions I have dome some background reading for this project; Ed Hooks’ Acting for Animators (with multimedia CD-ROM included!) and Acting in Animation, which have both been very useful if not slightly confusing at times. So hopefully reading them will pay off. I am still trying to come up with ideas for a scenario for this project but ideas have not been particularly forthcoming; the best I have so far is a guy in a Pot Noodle factory but that idea would have probably changed completely by next week. As for tackling the lip sync I was thinking of “borrowing” an idea from Tandem Films Flatworld (1997), which uses 2D characters animated traditionally but put into a 3D environment and filmed as if it were stop-motion. My plan is to use traditional techniques to animate the face and then just blue tack each drawing to the armature, I will need to do a couple of animation tests to get it right no doubt but hopefully it will work , fingers crossed.