Today, I took a Life-Drawing Class. After the class, I showed my work to Vanessa in order to ask for some advice. Happily, she said my work got a great progress.
Then I asked her some question about perspective because I always find it difficult in perspective. She showed me a lot of examples and drew some examples for me. In the end, she said there will be a course about perspective next Monday.
In Monday, Vanessa taught us a lot about perspective. There was five principles of perspective and I drew and found some examples by my own.
Today, I took the course of storytelling and it was such a nice experience for me because I always got problems in storytelling. I really enjoyed this class because Professor Robert made every single point easy to understand and he was really humorous.
I learned two structures of story:
Structure1. First with happy story, but then so much troubles come out and has a great ending in the end.
I found one example fitting this structure: Short film <BAO>
The Baozi, a kind of Chinese food mother make, become a baby Baozi with life and baby Baozi go through a great lifetime with Mother.
Baozi starts to do what he likes, but mother thinks those activities dangerous and forbid Baozi to take part in. So Baozi is not happy as before and begin to bicker with mother.
Baozi gets a girlfriend and wants to live with the girlfriend. Mother is not willing to let Baozi go and she eat it.
Everything is a dream and Baozi actually is mother’s son and now he comes back and says sorry to mother with a happy ending.
Structure2. First with difficulties, then the characters solve all of the problems and has a bad or great ending in the end.
I found one example fitting this structure: Short film<Piper>
Piper’s mom wants piper to find food by itself rather than waiting to be fed. So small piper needs to find piper and come across lots of troubles.
No “Bean” Structure, No stress line to underline the important part, no volume line, kind of flat.
From 21st October 2021 3 min
With some “bean” structure inside. But the line is still flat without important point. Kind of hard to control my line, which cause the body was kind of fat and disproportion.
From 28th October 2021 3 min
Know how to stress the important part with thick line. But the line overall was a little disconnected and not smooth.
From 11th November 2021 2 min
A bit better though, still difficult to control the line. Good to see there were some volume line, but they were kind of stiff.
From 18th November 2 min
Worse, but the line was much more relaxed. Some old error appeared again: no stress line, no volume line.
From 25th November 1 min
Line became more confident, which was happy to see. Could add more stress line and volume line.
From 8th December 2021 2min
Some volume line in the thigh, could also add them to more places. Kind of not continuous around the pelvis.
From 13th January 2022 1min
Great progress, every line is relaxed and some natural volume line with some thick line to stress the important part.
I firstly have look at lots of fantastic movie to choose one for my lip synch. Then I choose one footage from The Truman Show.
It is one of my favorite movies, I then research his expression and mouth shape carefully and do my work.
This is the first version, when I show it to professor, I get a couple of valuable feedback including the movement of the body is too strange and the last motion of head is not suitable. Plus, the eyeball of this character drift to nowhere, it should always locked on the audience. So I modify it and accomplish my next version.
From this work, I now understand some extra unnecessary movement of body will actually distract my audience and confuse them. So Now I know I should focus on the major movement and reduce some extra movement to improve my work. Also, It is very important to design the eyesight of your character, it is the key to convey the mood. So carefully design the movement of eyeball. Do not let it drift always, and make it focus on the audience most of the time.
Lip Synch Given
It was kind of hard for me to do the lip synch first, so I recorded a video of myself to say this word and then follow this clip as the reference to do the lip animation.
Then the do the animation became quite easy though, I haven’t noticed the problem that my performance was a little exaggerate.
Then I show this to teacher and get some feedback. The unnecessary movement was too much and some gestures were quite weird. Ok, then I knew my feeling to the performance got something wrong. So I performed again and found the better feeling.
From this assignment, I found how to perform actually was pretty critique to animator, with better performance, animator would have better work in the end.
