Saturday, August 8, 2009

11 Second Club August Competition!

After not being able to find a good, creative and funny concept for the 11 Second Club June's competition, I decided this month is a go! I've been blocking my scene last week in stepped-mode, and today I moved to linear.

To be honest, I must be doing something wrong, because I find passing from stepped to linear way too complicated. I'm feeling I have a better understanding of timing if go directly to linear and avoid going through stepped. As I said, it must be me, because everywhere I read it says the same thing: workflow is stepped-linear-spline.

The first time I entered the 11SC I worked on linear from the beginning, but I make the mistake of trying to emulate the stepped mode through linear tangents. What I mean is that every pose was duplicated, marking the starting and ending pose. As you can imagine, it didn't turned out well. Now I've realized that when blocking in linear, you still have to keep in mind that the spline tangents are coming next, and linear and stepped are two different things (Duh!).

Anyway, next month I'll do the whole first passes in linear (taking into consideration my latest discovery) and see what I get. For now, you can find my postings on this month's competition in the Youtube link below.

Actually, here is my first blocking pass:



As you can see, I've done a bad staging. When you see the video, your eyes go back and forth between both characters, when they should stay focused on one of them (the one to the right in your screen is the main character, the other one is Charlie).

I recognized two mistakes here: The secondary character has poses as strong as the main one, if not stronger. Second, both characters share the same amount of space in the screen, making it difficult to recognize which one is the one to see.

I fixed this (I guess) by:
- Adjusting the camera, putting in the center of your screen the main character, and Charlie more to the left.
- And changing the poses on the secondary character
- I'll still try to play with the lighting and the colors of their clothes to increase the attention on the main character.

In the next playblast, you'll see that when the main character is talking, Charlie is doing nothing. And when the main character is not talking, Charlie is doing his "thing". Let's see how it goes. I still have to do the playblast on the second pass, but I'm still adjusting my now-linear curves.

Stay tuned!

Kron.

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