I’ve been working on two long animated series over the past few years. Recently, I started creating some behind-the-scenes videos — but instead of speaking directly about my films, I present them in an animated style through a fictional character.
I thought this might be an interesting way to approach it. Let me know what you think.
It’s much shorter than the first one, which is why I chose it for showcasing.
I’d really appreciate any feedback — especially regarding the facial animations. In my first video, I used the Face Puppet tool, while in this one I tried AccuFace for the first time. (In both cases, I adjusted and smoothed the animations afterward as best I could.)
I still feel there’s some noticeable jankiness, and the tempo seems a bit off — even with AccuFace, which I expected to produce more natural results (maybe it’s just my acting skills haha).
Anyway, let me know what you think. Thank you for watching.
Hi
The render quality is very good.
I found the facial animation not bad but typical Iclone level
output.
My two biggest criticism are,
1) When she lowers the lights to present her video there should be some rim lighting from the big TV being cast onto her right side.
2) Once she begins speaking her body completely freezes in that sitting pose with no so much as a slight hand gesture during her entire “presentation”.
This is in stark contrast with her head rolling around while speaking makes her look like an animatronic robot.
The first 40 seconds are cool. After that it’s very static. Remember that you have an infinite number of cameras, dolly, jigs, etc… at your disposal. The girl’s expression is too severe for me. Finally, the slide show on the TV is too static, it lacks animation.
But that’s just my personal opinion.
I always have in mind this saying “every frame is a painting”
You’re right, I will keep this in mind in the future. I got used to minimizing body movement since I do it with only keyframes now. I had this problem with using the motion puppet tool on top of the facial expression animation because every time I used it, it moved away the pivot and the character itself. But this was really in a previous version of iClone, it might work well now, I have to check.
I would be really happy if it would work because with the motion puppet tool I could do more natural and continuous movements for the character’s body and I would only have to adjust it afterwards with keyframing. But only using keyframing is really hard to not make it look robotic, so I usually only do the body movements when the character does a “goal-oriented movement”.
It’s a great saying and an important thing to keep in mind!
What do you mean by the slideshow lacking animation? Do you mean it lacks actual videos of animation or the transition effects on the images are too monotonous, it would work better with something more vibrant and interesting? (For example in my previous video I had a more dynamic transition between the images.)
Also, what do you mean by her expression being too severe? Like exeggerated or too serious?
Great point about being too static, probably a big part of it is the lack of body movements like AutoDidact pointed out. You also mentioned all the types of and number of cameras I could utilize. Do you think for this kind of presentation video it would work better if the very least I would have two camera angles switching every now and then?
