Learning to talk... Dialogue Animation!

These past two weeks we made our first foray into dialogue animation with Christian Kuntz teaching us.

Working with dialogue and lip sync is pretty challenging but I enjoyed it a lot. I got a lot of positive feedback on my final result and even though it was a struggle half the time I learned a lot. I think this kind of subtle acting, be it with or without dialogue, is more natural to me than action shots. (No need to slack off on the action, of course!) Another challenge was animating Sawyer, which I've been wanting to do ever since watching her in "Cats don't dance". Her construction is really tricky! Again, I learned a lot.

I hope to get back to this scene eventually and inbetween/clean it, but I have some personal projects on my list first.

Some gestures & croquis

The midyear review went okay. As expected, pretty much all teachers agree that my work process is too messy and that my drawing fundamentals kind of suck. On the other hand they like my ideas, storytelling and Mike liked my dance animation in particular. ("Excellent" - yay!") So I'll try to get back into the croquis habit as well to strengthen my draftsmanship because that's been frustrating me for quite a while now.

Colour class with Lawrence was both frustating, fun and very enlightening. I see a long line of still-lives coming up, I'd really like to keep working on that. Once I fix my final assignment I might post that too, it's nothing extraordinary but Lawrence said he liked it and the lighting was good, only that my painting technique itself is really awful, haha.

I'm slowly getting better at gesture drawing... Doing it regularly is starting to pay off already. Here are results from recent sessions, plus two from croquis.