Video Report Initial Notes on How it can Help me

After giving it some thought I have decided to do my video report on a scene from Wall-E in which Eva shutdown to protect a discovered plant and Wall-E sets about trying to protect her and ends up crushing on her. I feel the film itself has a lot of strengths with character animation as the characters rarely say much at all so there feelings and thoughts must be told through body language. Throughout my chosen scene Wall-E shows a wide array of different expressions through subtle tilts of his eyes to the way he positions his body. I believe I have a lot to work with so I will now write up some notes of what the most prominent talking points will be.

New way of working

To try and challenge myself this semester I will be cutting together the audio for the project before I do any animation so I will begin blocking out the animation in 3D using the audio track as the basis for what happens on screen. This is similar to the 11 Second club animation challenge where an animation must be created from a short piece of audio. I found it to be an interesting challenge in the tutorial so want to use that as the basis for my project. I have struggled with the audio in my animation in the past so this will be a challenging way of working but I hope it gives me a good final piece.

Set for animation so far

I've now finished modeling a simple set to use with my animation. I need to look into a way to animate a stage curtain as I feel that will be quite a challenge although it is necessary for the story.

Expression References

As I'm doing this with a rig I didn't personally make I felt making some photo references would be the best way to get the best expressions.

Character Sheets First Draft

In order to have an interesting interaction with my characters I had to ensure they had very different personality's One a complete slob without anything to lose and another a tightly wound aging performer with more self importance than is good for him.

First Story Boards for 3D Animation

My Initial Idea is to have a performer gets extremely upset by a terrible turn out for his show and to then run off stage in embarrassment. Using two characters, Harold the viewer and Simon the performer, I can explore facial expressions and emotion with the seated Harold and a much more exaggerated expressions of Simon s full body, he is a performer after all. This will let me put a wide range of animation techniques to use and provide a nice piece of folio work.

First Attempts at 3D animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfWjOBKLFIc

I feel the biggest areas of improvement here are to work on a more convincing walk cycle and trying to have more character displayed by the character.