11 Second Animation - Live action reference

The time to sort out the acting for my story has come!! I started this with this thumbnails which gave me a sense of the very basic actions of both of my characters. In terms of poses I initially had the following animatic:

This Animatic was useful to make decisions on the poses I wanted to have later on in my live action reference and blocking. Here we can see the Mamuerto putting on its eye and then proceeding to offer the brain to Franketo, the cut reveals Franketo eating a hot dog (human food) and reacting to Mamuerto's proposal of swapping foods. This is the idea I had from the start after feedback from my Animation tutor I changed the food to a cake as he said the second voice sounded quite posh and the hot dog didn't suit it very well, I believe it was a wise decision to change it to a cake as it resulted more interesting in the live action reference.

After I did this Animatic I decided to do a more detailed one in Maya with the grease pencil tool, this was so I could focus even more on the main poses interacting with the environment, the result of this is shown bellow:


This second animatic was crucial for the live action reference I recorded, the poses for Mamuerto are updated acording to feedback, before he would pick up the eye from the table and now the eye is hanging from his eye cavity, he also no longer picks up the brain but slides the plate towards Franketo instead. Franketo's poses are also more clear here and there is a new interaction with a fork. So this is coming together I think, what is the next step? Oh yes... recording a live action of this little story, sounds simpler than it is but after multiple attempts I achieved a decent shoot.

The live action is shown bellow:

Well as you can see I took this exercise quite seriously, this is my first time doing acting for animation and acting in general. My first attempts at this specific story were very bland and lifeless, I believe the reason was because the audio was going very fast for my brain at the beginning. Since I wasn't very happy with the acting I was doing I decided to take a small break where I had a delicious Nutella bagel at 12 am (no regrets). After my little break it was like I had a different mindset and really tried to get into the character's skin. I thought it would be good to have the hanging eye to have a reference for the motion of the eye ball.

I am currently doing the blocking for this animation and I have to say that the live action reference is very useful.

To be contined...  


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