Where my keys at?

Today I finished blocking the animation for the movements of my model. At least I think I did. I broke down the lyrics into various section, animating section by section by moving on when I thought the section looked alright. Every time when I added a new section I would playblast a simple "splined" animation of the blocking to check if the timing in spline was also alright.

Then I went back to previous sections to tweak a bit to continue on the next section.

I animated after my storyboard and newly filmed reference footage I filmed a few weeks back in my dorm. Comparing the reference with the storyboard and working from that was quite a good way to keep all the movements clear. While acting some movements out, I figured they wouldn't work quite as well in animation for the movements would be too minimalistic. So while animating I tried to alternate exaggerating movements with minimalistic ones to keep a bit of a balance. I also found out some movements I had in mind while animating were a bit too fast when I splined them, so I had to find a way to tone those down a bit to make it look a bit more calm. (still working on that).

This is the first time for me to try and animate something scripted in Maya and so far, it isn't too bad. And so far the rig has't acted up yet anymore, so that is nice! (still a bit anxious for the lipsync part though. I will first practice the lipsync while using the audio fragment from 11secondclub and I will cry when it looks terrible, but I don't really have a choice afterwards so I better make it work then. But we'll see soon enough.)

(I just found out this one has no audio. my bad. And also that the ending looks horrible. but I'm going to work on that tomorrow.)

My plan of work from now on is alternate the workload of Character and Narrative and Responsive, but concerning this module: I'm going to spline and tweak the hell out of it to finish up the animation to make it ready for lipsyncing and I'm going to break down the lipsync using the simplified dope sheet we were provided earlier. When that's finished I can just pop 'em into Maya (I hope). I also have to add some lights to the scene to make it a bit more exciting.