Week 7: Blocking

To show the process I went through i'm going to focus on test and the developmental stages of just one part of the animation.

Shylock: To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else; it will feed my revenge.

Internal Pace and Rhythm:

Shylock has just turned around to face the man who has just spoken. He rises out of a resting position and moves slowly towards the other character, the camera and audience. His movements are slow and purposeful. He has many pauses as he thinks things through. Unlike the rest of the dialogue he doesn't always look at the character. He looks down at the floor as he collects his thoughts at the start of sentences.

Emotional Need:

He's justifying his need for a pound of human flesh and even though his words are dark he is not yet angry. He is filling his emotional need to express his views and shows the audience that his anger come form somewhere deeper. However looking at Al Pacino's interpretation he doesn't appear sad- more deep pondering, a calm before the storm.

Posing:

These are the key poses for this piece of dialogue. Working in some feed back from my formative I have kept his body language opens the character is trying to express himself as a posed to closed body language which is more linked with a shy nature. The red lines show the flow lines of  the body and the yellow show how the lines of the body, particular the arms lead the eye up to the characters face and eyes.

The first stage of the animation is done on stepped animations as this helps establish posing and initial timing. I decided to create my key poses on operative words in the dialogue where the character would place the greatest emphasis. For example the movement of the head upwards was done to emphasis the words 'my revenge'.
Animating to Camera:

I decide the best way to create strong poses was by animating to camera. I set up the camera I was going to render out of at the right aspect ration and placed a render gate so I could see what would appear in shot. Using this two window set up I could navigate in perspective and change my poses in there but be able to see how that looked to the camera. This allows me more flexibility as some poses might cause some pinching but it that didn't appear on camera and created a strong pose then I don't have to worry about it.

Pass 1: Blocking