Term 2: Week 3 – Facial Acting Remake

It’s a relatively short week to cover this week. As we were scheduled to continue facial acting, I took it upon myself to have a second go at a Lupin-inspired animation, this time using the character designs of Hayao Miyazaki as a basis for my character art.

Hayao Miyazaki and Yasuo Ōtsuka’s character designs, featuring softer and rounder shapes with little to no shading

Having got feedback from Steve on the last Lupin animation that it came across as a little stiff with how the characters’ limbs would often snap into place, I went into this animation with a looser approach, that really emphasised expressions and body language.

Lupin and Zenigata: Rough

Initial feedback from this rough version was that, in the starting section, Lupin could make it more obvious that he’s reaching for something in his pocket. So to do that, I broke this opening section into 3 parts: walking forward and stopping, reaching his arm out with a grin, and lunging his arm into his jacket. I didn’t get much else in the way of feedback at this point, so I cleaned up and added a museum (aka the V&A which I’d visited previously) as a point of reference.

Pre-composite animation
Final Version

I also took this exercise as an opportunity to try compositing in Premiere Pro (I would use after effects but my laptop isn’t powerful enough to run that software well). The main tools I used were the lighting (as you can see, a spotlight was used), the gaussian blur to separate the foreground and background, and a colour tint to desaturate the background art. All in all, I’m very happy with this second attempt and will be submitting it over the first one from last week.

Abbie’s roughs for her mood walk
Clean-up and inbetweens

As part of Wednesday’s lesson, Christina taught us a little bit about clean-up, and set an exercise to clean up a piece of animation made by someone else. Abbie James kindly gave her mood-change animation to me to clean up, and the result can be seen above. I did my best to stick close to her character design sheet, and made an effort with volume control (with varying degrees of success). It’s nice to clean up someone else’s work, see how they approach drawing characters and timing, and make tweaks if it’s a work-in-progress animation. I imagine I’ll be correcting more work later down the line, just to get a feel for it all.

That wraps up this week, I also got to visit the Wellcome collection not too far away from uni, so I’ll make a post covering what I saw and what I took away from it.