Ed’s Feedback #01

Posted by Avner Engel in Animation

This morning I received Ed’s feedback about the blocking we did last week.

Overall Ed was content with what we turned in. He said the opening is nice. He gets that the guy is enjoying his sandwich. It looks like it tastes good (Hell yeah, I made myself the meanest Tuna sandwich when I took the reference footage – It was YUM)!

The second shot wasn’t clear to him. He said at first it looked like the character heard something, then the facial expressions confused him. It seemed like the expression was one of annoyance. Since the facial expressions weren’t clear enough it was hard to understand why the door knob would be hot. But then he got it, the man is eating a sandwich, when he smells smoke. That odd facial expression he was looking at was the guy sniffing the air, then he goes to open the door, and the fire has already over-heated the door knob.

His first suggestion was to add smoke in the background, at least a little bit coming from under the door. at the moment the character looks more curious than worried, it doesn’t feel like he is alarmed.

Also, he thinks the character should open the door and not simply get his hand burned on the doorknob. Having the guy burns his hand doesn’t make much sense in the order of actions we normally in a case of emergency. The acting lesson here is priorities of actions and objectives. Smoke is a bad thing, something that needs attention right away. It isn’t something you deal with after you go put your hand under cold water. First tend to the smoke. THEN tend to your burned hand. Baring all his great comments in mind, I started refining the blocking pass. It’s still work in progress and far from being finished. There are few more poses that need to be pushed as well as the timing towards the end.

I haven’t really had a chance to add the fire extinguisher at the end of the piece so it will be added with in the next couple of days.

In this Quicktime version I put two versions of the blocking. The first has two camera angles and the second three. I would love to hear which one works better.

Anyway, if you are still reading I want to thank you and apologize I rambled a lot.