Acting for Animation

Since the last post there has been a lot going on, it was Animex-week! Won't go more in detail about it than telling you that it was fantastic, as usual. I attended almost all the talks and I got to speak to some really interesting people both in the lounge and after the talks. I also attended The "Acting for animators Master-class" with Mr. Ed Hooks, it was such a great experience and I learned a lot from it! (Also showed him my presenter-animation for feedback like last year, always helps to get his point of view on it).

So, back to the important part of this post: The new module!
It's called; "acting for animation"
and there are three tasks in this module, these are:

Mime Audition - ( Group task where we in teams of three shall produce a short film consisting of three individual animation pieces featuring three mime characters. The pieces will be assembled to make the final short. I have teamed up with Em and Scott.)

Two character dialogue - (11 Second club) This will be a challenge, I haven't animated two characters in the same shot since last years creative animation module and that was just simple characters without any particular acting and no lip sync what so ever.

Presentation - We will do another presentation; This time it's on the acting-principles. We all picked subjects from a hat (literally) and I got "Achieving empathy not sympathy".
I think my notes from Ed Hooks workshop will be useful here.

The "scariest" part of this module is that I am going to use Maya for the first time. I have been using 3DsMax for nearly 4 years now and I'm very comfortable with it and I feel I know my way around the software. The reason for the change is that I want to become a better character animator and I need to add more personality to my characters, but 3dsMax only have two functional free rigs it just gets tiresome to look at the same rig all the time - they are also less appealing to look at than other rigs.
Maya is also a bit more angled towards film-animation than Max, so that's also a reason to try and change.

The group for the mime is set-up so that we have one Maya-animator (Scott) who can help me and Em to learn the software faster. It will also make it easier to assemble the individual animations in the end if everything is done in the same software, because at the moment we are using three different software's.

- I have been playing around in Maya for the last couple of days in addition to looking through some tutorials. So with a lot of work and even more help I'll hopefully be able to figure out the basics and most important parts over the next couple of weeks.
(Also; Em and I have already decided to work together on the MA-project so we want to use Maya for this as well).