2012-09-06

Stewie Tennis Camp, finaled


Here's the final version of my Stewie Tennis Camp shot, which I completed in AM Class 6.
I made a frames-to-seconds chart and used Audacity to line up the sound effects after the timing was locked down. Incidentally, I later applied a 2 frame delay to get the audio to sound right. It is always best to animate to audio without a time offset, but when everything's done and over with, putting in that slight 1-2 frame delay does sometimes sound better, especially when it's a given that the camera is a bit of a distance from the subjects. Sound travels 340.29 meters per second, or just over 14 meters per frame / about 42 feet per frame. A tennis court is 39 feet from net to rear, 78 feet in total length - the assumed distance-to-camera in this shot. So, strange as it may seem, a 2 frame sound delay for this particular scene is pretty much spot-on.
Introducing audio also led to introducing a third unseen character: Pro's opponent. in keeping with Pro's girl-power, it only seemed logical that she would be besting a man, to boot. (Who knows where Kid's balls are coming from! Whoever or whatever, the source remains silent and unnoticed.)
Frames 100 - 200 were scrapped and re-done three times over before I finally got that part right. Ironic that the very segment where "nothing in particular" was happening posed a particular challenge. But then again, thinking in such a manner was perhaps the fundamental problem with that segment to begin with. Generally speaking, no moment should be dramatically vacant. "Something in particular" does now happen there, a series of subtle but clear emotional beats. 
Getting the hand-held camera to feel right took a few passes. It was initially over-active and jittery. While this may have been truer to life, it was distracting; hand-held action is best kept low-key.
Pro's hair was fun to animate. It is simply composed of AM's Tailor rig constrained to her head, a hair solution I've seen other AMmers use before. I resolved it intuitively (via "mental simulation," I like to say) by overdrawing existing playblast frames (via Digicel Flipbook), then exported and rotoscoped directly in-camera within Maya. (I used a duplicate non-animated "steadycam", because the rendercam was handheld-animated by then.) When rotoscoping like this, it helps to move the rotoscope's plane close to the camera and make it semi-transparent. Posing to the drawover is then relatively straightforward. I find it interesting that the observing mind does not appear to be very particular about the details of motion with things it does not intuitively understand, so long as the general sense of it seems to hold true. Any sort of complex dynamics (fabric, water, hair) would fall into this category, as does complex physics such as the pendulum dynamics of two or more bones in a chain. What this amounts to is a great opportunity for artistic or creative treatment in these contexts. For example, the sinuous motion of this hair in the air is not physically accurate, but it looks great this way. No physics simulation is going to obtain these kinds of results. Nor will it "know" where motion needs to be subdued and where it needs to be more active. All of which supports the point that dynamic non-living objects are also best given the art-of-animation treatment whenever possible.

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