January 23, 2012

This week I had my first round of meetings with my graduate committee to go over my current progress on my project and my paper. As it stands here is the current idea that I am working on.

  • It will be a two to three minute animation that is focused on the character performance and non-vocal communication. My research finds firm grounding in the animation principles created by masters of traditional hand drawn animation and brings in some current ideas that have expanded on these original principles. Lessons learned from the study of theatre and film acting are additional areas that will inform my character’s animations. 
  • The story is centered on the idea from Greek mythology that every life is connected to a life thread, and these threads are all controlled by the three fates. The delivery will be from two points of view: the three fates, and the hero who is attempting to change the fate of his child. The fates spend their time watching the terrible results of their interference in people’s lives. They have begun to damage the life thread of the hero’s child, and the story will follow the hero as he finds the fate’s lair and attempts to steal his daughter’s life thread in order to save her life. 

There was a lot of brainstorming that happened in my committee meetings.  There were two ideas that I really liked that I'm going to use in the developing story. One is that the hero is a worker in the sisters residence. That will be how he has the knowledge of where to go to find his child's life thread. Also, it provides a greater change in the role of the main character. He goes from a somewhat compliant helper to a rebel who is trying to change things. The second idea deals with how the fates are interacting with the life threads. My initial idea really only allows the fates two types of influences: torturing and killing. This is good for a few clips, but the new idea is that the fates will use the life threads to embroider an image that will affect the life of that person. This new technique will give the fates a much greater range of torments.

Outside of my thesis, work marches on with the short animation and below is the progress I have made on the characters in scene. I'm liking the weight on the Flamingo's, but I had a bit of a setback during the initial stages that is still somewhat noticeable now. I was using the play feature on the timeline to check how the movement was playing out, but in fact it wasn't until I used the playblast feature that I was able to see how the animation truly looked. The playblast was a lot faster than the animation looked when played on the timeline, and as a result the animation was frantic. I have tried to slow it down, but I still feel like the Flamingo on the left is too aggressive when it contacts the other Flamingo.  I'm going to keep working on this so keep your fingers crossed because we submit the animation for judgment next week.





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