Secondary breakdowns & some observations

I've been working on adding secondary breakdowns to he mime-animation this weekend. So far it's been a bit hard to make it look right, but animation isn't exactly easy so no surprises there. Luckily I've learned from the previous tasks so I've used the computer to help me build the breakdowns by jumping between linear and stepped to see how it moves between the keys. It's made it possible to avoid a lot of joint pops, snaps and rotation mistakes between the key-poses. Some hiccups here and there is hard to avoid with my current skills of course, but a lot less than in te previous tasks.
I've posted it in the group on Facebook and sent it to both Siobhan and Penny and will hopefully get some feedback on it pretty soon.

Here is the latest playblast (Stepped keys):



I also did an interesting osbservation today when I was watching an episode of a tv-show. So far my animation and short film work haven't been very clever about camera use. But inspired by the tv-show I made two rough drawings illustrating how the cameras focus is very effective in scenes with a certain mood. In these two examples the mood is quite tense and dramatic.

In this first example the two characters A & B are discussing character C (the one closest to the camera). By moving the focus to the two characters A & B (making C out of focus) it actually clearly reads aa they are talking about C without him being aware of it:



In this example character A (closest) is standing in front and B is almost out of focus, but this only makes the mood more intense. We are really close to character A and can spot every emotion in his face. Half of the face is hidden by a shadow, but all of our attention is lead to his face. This kind of camera use is really effective for intense scenes where one of the characters are dominant to the other. (In this case A dominates B):