Reference shoot, lipsync work and silhouettes

Today's session at university was in the green-screen studio. We got three full hours to do reference for our animations. It was as usual a bit awkward in the beginning, but that passed pretty quickly. I got some more reference for my tasks even though I already have done mine at home. But it's always good to get somebody else to act it out as well, the more reference I got too look at - the better.

When I got home I picked up the lip sync yet again, I sorted out some details on the actual lip sync that Penny mentioned yesterday, so hopefully the B's & M's are easier to read now.

I have also worked on the actual staging. I had this layed out from the beginning, but since this animation has changed quite a bit, I found it useful to re-stage it.
There was also a few questions in the show and tell yesterday about the backstory for the animation - "who he is talking to" , "does he actually see the people following him" etc.
So I staged it as he is standing up against a surface, looking around the corner. This change will hopefully make it easier for the audience to understand what's going on in the shot.
The two boxes you see represent two characters that I will be putting in later on, but these will not be animated, just posed.

(the full story of the shot can be found in the post on December 2nd 2011 in the blog)



Here's how it looks at the moment:



I had to do a lot of changes in the animation to make this work, but even though I gave myself even more to work on in this task I think it's working better than before. I think the acting is a bit more believable this way too.

- Lastly I've been working on a few silhouette-sketches. I used a highlighter too make these, it's a bit challenging to get the pose readable with just colour, but it's really an interesting way to draw poses. And it is good practice for posing in general, too make sure your poses are easy to read just from the silhouette.
To be totally honest not all of them worked out, but here are an assembly of the ones that I think are the easiest to read: