Escape Studios: 11 Second Club, October 2017

Planning:

The process began by brainstorming numerous ideas on paper. I was determined to not open Maya until I was absolutely set on a concept, so as to not waste time with wasted assets and resources.

I found it quite difficult to settle on an idea for this month's 11 Second Club audio, as I wanted to find a decent explanation for each sound. Monday to Thursday was spent circling around ideas, by playing around with quick sketches as I tried to think of a concept by the end of the week.

Below are some examples of the primitive sketching I would do to try out a concept. Not exactly Michelangelo quality, but it made sense to me and proved helpful.

 

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BONUS: Ideas experimented with:

- Detective duo investigates gruesome crime inside a garage
- Girl carrying fragile antique in old elevator, which halts abruptly
- Rebellious student tries to sneak out of school, only for the Teacher to slam the door in time and send her to detention
- Spy crawling through a vent, which then collapses
- Explorers travel across bridge, which then collapses
- Guy raids fridge at night, girlfriend catches him
- Stressed out Animator angrily struggles to come up with idea for 11 Second Club (seriously)
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I was unsure whether I should be realistic with explaining the sounds, or use them to exaggerate an event that wouldn't normally use such sounds.

Nevertheless, after a thorough brainstorm on Friday's train ride, I settled on the idea of a prisoner being sent to her cell by her guard.


Storyboards/Animatic:

I decided to try a new approach to storyboarding. Instead of doing it on paper, I tried drawing directly in Maya with Grease Pencil. This was as I wanted to ensure no time was wasted readjusting 2D storyboards in the 3D environment if the dimensions didn't match well.
It turned out to be very comfortable and efficient for me. I gathered assets to make a basic Prison set, and was able to make a rough animatic.

Below is a playblast of the animatic in Maya. The idea was that two guards escort a prisoner to her cell and throw her in.

Thumbnails/Blocking

As I was trying to refine the idea, and how to pose the character and frame each shot, the deadline came closer very quickly. And as I had struggled so long to actually pick an idea, I didn't want to waste any further time and simplified the shot.

I chose to use just one flat camera angle to avoid my indecisiveness, and to shrink the set so that I could focus the scene in just one contained space.

At this point I had already imported the character rig and began to roughly block it to the beats of the animatic.

The original idea was that the guard pushes the prisoner inside the cell onto the floor. I wanted to find some decent reference of someone falling in a similar way so I could observe the physics, not just pantomime, and found this crazy video of a monkey jump-kicking a man from behind!

Below is the stage of the shot at this point, and the cool monkey jump-kick reference. The timing was still in the works, the main focus was just getting key poses in there.

   

However after changing the camera angle, I wanted to change the animation as all the action was happen in one small part of the screen. Thus I changed the concept of her being pushed down to her walking across the room to her bed.
This was also motivated by the fact that I finally discovered a way to explain the last set of sounds in the audio (some rummaging noise, then some sort of lid closing?). I had a standard toilet on the opposite side of the prison set, so I thought maybe it would be funny if a rat just popped up from it. and she react by shutting the lid on it.

To help plan her movements and mood I did some crude thumbnails, seen below:

I also filmed several references as I tried to figure out the basic motion.

Below is a snippet of some last minute shoots I would do as I changed the concept.

Block to Spline

Now that the basic motion was planned, I had new block to work with, as seen below.

From then on I began the splining process in sections. I got some great feedback from peers and tutors throughout the process as I ran into obstacles. Below are some of the comments that really helped me out.

- Don't be afraid to exaggerate
          -Easier to exaggerate to the extreme, then dial it back
- Always keep in mind where the weight is
- Face is one cohesive unit
- Don't have too much motion from more than one character at a time
- K.I.S.S

Below is the 1st Pass of the Spline:

After submitting the 1st Pass for review, I got some tips on having the clip not end so abruptly. It was advised to have the prisoner react in a more intense, disgusted way and to have the rat scurry or leave in some way.
Did some quick experimenting with what I could as the deadline loomed in on the same day, seen below.

Final Submission





BONUS:

Here's a weird addition I made to the shot at one point!