Note: This timespan includes roughly 7-12 days of light work spaced out over the holiday period, rather than a continuous week of heavy work.
Over the holidays, I let myself breathe a little bit, seeing my project less as a 9-5 job and more of a fun way to channel my energy when I had nothing else to do. I was excited to start blocking, and got the first three seconds done in one sitting.
I began noticing as I worked that the arm motion looked a little bit janky. The left arm seems to jolt quickly and unnaturally on its way down.
As I continued on I kept running into this problem, where the hands and arms seem to be moving faster than would be natural, distracting the viewer from the emotion in her gestures and the inflection of her speech. This technically is something that can be addressed in the splining stage, but I felt that issues like this are such a big deal that I don’t want to go on animating without first understanding what the problem is and how to address it.
I tried deleting unnecessary keyframes- by unnecessary I mean frames that don’t need to be keyed; the arm would be in that spot without the key- but that didn’t do the trick. So, with trepidation, I decided to try completely deleting gestures that were less important, ones that didn’t contribute to the key pose and were causing it to look unnatural, even though I did do them in real life for my reference. I found that, though I considered this method controversial (amongst myself), the effect was much better. Below you can see the difference caused by deleting a pose in which she outstretches her arms in front of her on the way down. When I allow the arms to come down naturally instead of making that gesture, it gives the second key pose (hands to the side of her head, fingers splayed facing out) and third key pose (fists clenched by herwaist) more time and meaning. Although I sacrificed a gesture, these first three seconds of work are some of my strongest in the scene.
I continued on in this way, completing about 3 seconds per day, and deleting gestures that I found to look unnatural.
At the end of each 3 second day, I added facial expressions. I found that part to be quite easy and enjoyable, and realized that only one expression change per 2-3 seconds should be the maximum. Even though my character is meant to appear hysterical, this really is enough to do the trick without being over the top.
When I finished blocking, I threw Janine into the scene I had constructed last week.
I kept in the area lights that I’d used before introducing her to the scene, and found that they provided a nice spotlight in a dark, eerie space. The interior of the mansion was originally quite bright and yellow, and, being an artist, I spend some time fiddling with the composition and adding shadow mattes to bright areas to create a nice dramatic color and light balance. My goal was to provide an ominous aura without teetering on scary, whilst simultaneously isolating Janine’s movement as the focus of attention in a relatively busy background.
I like that the stairs are framed and reflected, as it gives Janine a nice spotlight while drawing attention to the blood, amplified by her red shirt and lips. Again, not sure if that’s too grotesque for some viewers, but I personally like it.
Here’s the block. Feeling positive about it overall, but I can see already a couple fixes that need to be made. I can spot a foot phasing through the floor, and she still feels a little jolty. The work I did in removing distracting gestures was not an overall joltiness fix, just an effort to take care of the basics. I have high hopes for this.
My next step, before splining, is to add in what I call “extras”. These are the characters that will shush Janine. I plan to have the camera whip around to them right after the close-up, giving some exposition and drawing curiosity back into the narrative as well as putting some essential lightheartedness back into the atmosphere with nonthreatening, colorful characters and more party debris.
Well, turns out I was wrong to think of these characters as extras, because as I dressed them up for the occasion, so to speak, I actually found myself instilling personality into them and imagining their place in the story. As I posed them I liked them even more, and now they’re as near and dear to my heart as Janine. I’m very excited to animate them first thing tomorrow.