First off, to catch everyone up, I've now moved from Florida to San Jose, California for a job working with Apple - finally a job within the industry even if it's only slightly related to what I want to do. But the point is, no more working in household moving or in the deli. The double shifts, and multiple jobs were really stretching me thin and making it hard for me to produce quality animation. But now that I've got the immediate job situation taken care of, I don't need to worry about other things and can really focus on my art. I also took a good long break after making the jump out here to recover from the burnout I was feeling and now after a little warm-up I feel ready to jump back into the fire.
So for this particular assignment, the first of my facial animations in Workshop 4, I chose dialogue from Breaking Bad, one of my favorite shows on television, and selected a particularly cold and tense piece when Walt threatens Hank. "If you don't know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly." The biggest thing I was focusing on here was telling a story with a little time as I could.
My instructor Bill Tessier, was quite helpful in getting me to develop a visual story surrounding the character. While I did go a little cliche with the gangster bit, I tried to elaborate in the background further who he was. The problem here was that, we don't know who he was, and given that we don't know the before or after, I had to try to hint at who he was so that as an audience we would care. I accomplished this through proper staging.
I used three primary props to help the audience know who this character was: the personal picture, the art by David, and the newspaper article. All three work together to tell the story. We are introduced to the character Vinny with him holding and longingly looking at a picture. The picture is of a mother and child hugging each other, and here we can assume that they are his family. The painting by David displays and woman with young children at her feet standing between two warriors, stopping them from fighting. Hanging over the head of Vinny (both metaphorically and literally) is the newspaper clipping which has the the headline "Mother and Child Slain in Suspected Mob Murders". With all these pieces, we can assume that Vinny is in someway associated with the Mob, and that the picture he holds is of his slain family. The painting also shows that the woman and child were the only things preventing an outright war between two enemies. This all helps build tension and give reason to Vinny's dialogue.
The animation itself was not too particularly difficult for the most part. I had not yet as of this time figured out how to efficiently constrain an object and did struggle some on the release (though thanks to Nick Arbeiter have now solved my issues there). I did have significant problems with the elbows and spent a long time trying to get them to feel natural and as though they were supporting weight.
The hands felt quite basic to me as well while working, I intend to do a hand study soon to better understand the subtleties involved. My facial animation was also quite basic in my opinion and could stand to use a little more natural eye-movements.
All in all, I'm reasonably happy with this piece, but I do think I could have performed better had I not been so busy.
