It's been a pretty good week. I managed to get thru a 2nd pass of refining on the bodymech and a 1st pass on the facial animation on all the shots. The lipsync and the facial is kinda rough at the moment, but I got two weeks left for polishing :)I've mentiond the Glen Keane lectures at YouTube before and now all of them are up, 18 in total. It's a huge inspiration to hear how he approach a shot and how he works thru it. Awesome!Here's my 2nd refiningpass:And here's this weeks facial poses: 
Alright, I'm back on track. I was able to get thru all my shots and get them into a 1st pass of refinement. The worst part is over :) Even tho the 2nd refinement pass, the polishing and the facial stuff probably is more time consuming, it's at least less frustrating. I'm actually beginning to think that I'll be able to finish this piece on time, some way or another. There's no doubt that I've taken on a bit too much on this assignment, but to look at it in a positive way, it will give me an indication about how much I can handle for my short film the next two terms.Great lecture this week about Entertainment, hosted by Pixar-star Doug Sweetland. How to explore different ways of approaching and thinking about a scene/shot to get it unique, sincere and as entertaining as possible.Here's my 1st pass of refining for "It's Over":Here's my facial poses this week:
Oooohh. Bad week! It's been a while, so that's okay :) The pros says that the part after stepped blocking is where everything feels hopeless and the shot is at it's crappiest ever. That's sooo true, but even if it's normal, it still sucks.Anyway, I blocked in a new version of the last shot and converted shot 1, 2 and 3 to splines. Went over all the curves, cleaned them up and started to work on Shot 1. Kept working on shot one....still working on shot 1. Wow, this takes time. We're on a tight schedule so I have to get thru refining all the shots next week, at least a decent first-pass of the overall bodymotion.I came across a great link to a video of a Pixar tour. Check it out. There's also interviews with John Lassetter and Dan Scanlon. Really nice stuff.Here's my semi-refining pass:And here's the facial poses this week:
Time for breakdowns this week. Lots of lots of work, but defining arcs and getting in the overall motion is maybe the most fun part. I have a lot of keys on this one. I guess we should decide if we put our keys on the bodymechanics or on the acting, but I kinda did both, because it's a lot of physical stuff going on at the same time as there's acting, and it looked weird if I skipped either. The result was a lot of keys and therefore a lot of breakdowns :) I threw in one breakdown between each key and then an anticipation inbetween and an overshoot/settle/easing inbetween and ended up mostly on 3s and 4s. Even 2s some places. Sean wanted me to come up with a new gesture for the guy in the last shot, so I left that untouched this week, but I was able to go thru the first 5 shots and break them down as much as I felt was needed before going to splines.Most of you are probably aware of this already, but if not, check out Keith Lango's blog. His series of posts about manufactured images in CG productions, is awesome (the link is to the first post, there's a lot more on this topic at Keith's site). Not only does he point out what might be wrong, but there's also a lot of gold in there to learn from.Here's my 2nd pass of blocking on "It's Over":And the facial poses of the week:
