Bugsy Pantomime

In Computer Animation 2 we had two projects over the course of the month, as well as various activities that focused on certain skills we needed for those projects. The first project was a pantomime featuring none other than Bugsy. We also learned a lot about pre-pro this month and the importance of developing a strong sense of who your character is. Without knowing who they are yourself, there is no way you can convey those ideas to others. So before even animating I developed my character through various traits like power center (which body part leads the motion), energy level, and use of space. I thought of my character as a spoiled rich boy who always got what they wanted and threw a fit if they didn't. Since my scene involved the character's phone breaking I thought this personality could perfectly compliment the scenario. Even throughout my pre-pro drawings I was considering things like the power center because having the visual reference definitely makes it easier when setting up the key poses.

Here is an excerpt from my characterization sheet that focuses on the back story of the character:

He is a spoiled brat who has had everything handed to him throughout his life so far. He is the type of kid that gets a new iPhone every year even though he doesn’t need it. This is because his parents are rich and have been out of touch with real society for a long time. Because money was never an issue he has time to focus on more petty endeavors like the quest for popularity. He has never been faced with a major tragedy or loss so this makes him oblivious to much of the world around him.

In addition to the written pre-pro there was also the drawn pre-pro, this consisted of staging and key poses, storyboards, and action breakdowns.

             

 

I had a lot to pull from once my pre-pro was done, by the end I ended up having to even cut some due to time constraints. But now I was able to jump into Maya and start setting up my block out.

At this point my main focus is getting the proper staging and putting in the contacts as well as some other key poses. A requirement for this project was to have three steps so I wanted to make sure they were all visible and still left room for the rest of my objects. The steps were also my focus for the second pass , this time adding the passing, up, and down poses, but I also brought in the cell phone so I could get a sense of how that would look in the scene.

From the second to the third pass a big part I was trying to develop was the moving hold. This was also the point I switched over from stepped to auto tangent so it aided the process a bit. I personally prefer auto when working on moving holds just because I think seeing them in real time makes a big difference because one frame can be the difference between too fast or too slow. I'll usually put the poses in on stepped but the reworking of them will be in auto. That's just me though, I say this a lot but there are a ton of ways to do do the same thing in this industry. Another thing I added in this pass was the motion of the phone hitting the ground. This was pretty necessary at this point because there was quite a lot going on around Bugsy's feet so I needed to make sure they had room to move and that it all looked good from the camera view.

In the fourth pass I started to think a bit more about what Bugsy was thinking, all throughout this process I'm getting critiques from the instructors and one thing that was mentioned was that the character needs to react to hitting the wall, which was something I was missing up until this point, it was also nice because I could turn this into a moving hold, this would help break up the action of my scene a bit more, between the walk and the freakout, having too much action in a scene without a break can be pretty overwhelming, like a paragraph with no periods.

In this fifth pass I added a lot of the minor enhancements that start to bring the character to life like the mouth movements and antenna bobs. I have kind of a bad habit of saving these for the end which I'm told adds a bit more work to the process, so I'm trying to be more diligent about adding this stuff earlier in the process. From a critique I also learned about the mechanics of my freakout motion and that it's actually very similar to the walk in that there are up and down poses in addition to the two I created. Adding these gave a bit more sway to the character and made him feel a bit more real in the motion.

Throughout these videos you've probably seen many iterations of the final ending pose. This was something I experimented with a lot because I was looking for a good silhouette that still had a readable emotion, was 3/4 view with the camera, and was not blocked off by or clipping through the glass wall. I was surprised by how little room I actually gave myself to work. In my final critique, the instructor just told me to ditch the ending pose and finish on the freakout, this way the audience ends on some action. I was a bit surprised because I was kind of fond of the fifth pass's ending pose, but ultimately keeping the audiences attention is most important.

In my final tweaks before turn in, I added some secondary motion in the tail which is kind of similar to the antennae as well as break the symmetry in some poses to get better silhouettes, and get rid of that ending pose. This is what my final looked like.

Had I had more time, I would have made a bigger push to get that ending pose working and maybe even bring some of my other pre-pro ideas into to animation. I original idea had a bit more humor in it and I really liked how it played out in my head. But that's not to say I didn't enjoy what I did create. The lessons and techniques I learned here will be very helpful in the future. Let me know any feedback you might have.