Production on The Life of a Student Animator has now officially begun! I'm a bit behind, but animation started yesterday. It took me some time to push myself to begin (starting is always the hardest part), but once I got into it I really enjoyed it. I blocked out three shots yesterday:
(She is laughing because she is playing with a character rig, deforming it.)
Of course, with a new stage of the project came a new organisational list to keep me on track! I took my old shotlist and added columns that would allow me to check off each stage of animation for each shot (since each shot goes through several passes of work before it is finished). The aim is to turn all those pale blue boxes red. Once that happens, I'm into post-production! (The grey boxes are gaps - because I want my shot numbers to stay the same - or stages that don't apply to some shots.)
(Click image to enlarge. You can see the actual spreadsheet here, which I will be updating continually as I animate.)
What I have realised, looking at this handy table, is that I have a lot of boxes to check and not much time to do so! But with the shots varying so greatly in length and complexity I will simply have to wait and see how I get on before I can further evaluate my workload and schedule. At least for now, step-blocking (putting in the main keyframes and setting the tangents in the graph editor to 'stepped') does not take very long, so I should be able to block out the majority of the film quite quickly.
Since starting animation I have learned what an interesting piece this is to work on, as it is a continuous process; as I consolidate my ideas, I begin animating them, and as I animate them I pay attention to myself as I do so and then put what I notice back into the animation. Even as I was animating my character, Phoebe, laughing at the deforming rig on her screen, I was doing exactly the same thing to her!
(Tee hee…)
So I'm going to continue to stay aware of the way I work so that my animation can be as believable as possible.
Caitlin :)
