Week 10 Part 2 – In-betweens, clean up and Lip Synch Start

This week has been quite productive even though it may not be so clear. That is simply because I have spent my time cleaning up the animation to comply with the fundamentals of animation such as ease in and out, arcs and correct body movements.

This has been quite fun and interesting. By doing this, I can start to see my character have full life and emotions through body language. However, it has been simply placing a few in-betweens and thinking it complete. When going from blocking mode to animation mode (stepped to spline in Maya), the entire dynamics change and consequently so to how the body moves. During this transition I have noticed that Molly moves far greater than what I would have liked, almost like she is too frigidity. Upon viewing by myself and Sean, I started to clean up every scene, to eliminate any faults and to create quiet period where Molly isn’t moving. Upon completion I sense the performance is ok. One key aspect of the performance decided during this stage was to learn forward to emphasis certain words. This provides Molly with strength, power and anger towards Bradford.

At the moment, I consider the entire animation for Molly to be good but not great. To make this great, I would consider small tweaks will do the job nicely, such as blinking, modify the eyebrows a tad more, finger movements (if seen in camera) and very slight head/eye movements in still moments. However, the most important aspect to allow Molly to come alive is the lip-syching.

Lip-syching is a task I extremely enjoy, as this completes the journey of making the character come alive. With ‘Suffragette Molly ‘, I decided to start with scene 5 as this was only one line by both characters involve. This way I can see what works and what doesn’t. Upon doing Molly, I saw a few small and minor problems but as always I went back to the reference model to do the necessary changes and as always to see all the mouth positions and how Jess mouth movements work. So far this has been extremely helpful.

Even though most of the week has been busy and trouble free, I still had some trouble with the fingers. Upon finding out I had rigged it incorrectly, and having no time to fix it, I have decided to cheat and I would either hide any of the problems or be very quick with it (in scene 3 when she points her hands move extremely quickly).

Generally, this week has been very pleasing, and seeing Molly coming alive has been exciting and enjoyable. While it may not be perfect once lip-syching and any necessary small changes occur, I believe the animation will be finished and this will give me time for me to do the animation for the other characters which will be a lot simpler task.