Workflow

Jon's Workflow
*I took these notes during class, so it's kind of a mess!

Visualization. When getting a dialogue shot, put it on repeat and listen to it over and over again for about an hour or so. Try to find different shot ideas in your head. If you come across something you like, take a pause and draw thumbnails. Keep them fast and efficient, get the essence of the pose and idea. You want to keep momentum going, so keep it brief. These thumbnails will allow you to pitch the idea to somebody. Now clear that all out of your brain and start again. Do this at least three times with completely different ideas, don't keep them too similar. Don't get married to an idea. Sometimes people could have feedback that could add to the idea. If you're too closed off on one of your ideas, you could be limited in how accepting you are to ideas. Believe in yourself through ideas, don't feel like you're doing what somebody else wants to please them or because you're not confident in your own idea. Only add them if you want to, you're the one doing the shot.

Reference. Using two cameras can be useful. Recording a few takes from multiple angles gives you a lot of variety to sift through. Don't skip on this phase, it's very important. Hit ideas and poses, but continue other variations. Try not to redo the same thing every take, try more. Get out of your comfort zone. If your reference looks robot-y, your animation will too. Get loose, study acting, and practice! You'll get better over time.

Blocking. Use stepped if you can, get the key ideas in. Now you can play around with how you move through poses. Showing really rough things is okay at certain studios. It works best to get core ideas into stepped. Don't over-breakdown the shot in stepped, it's easier to get the finished result in spline where everything is smooth. Instead of taking a lot of time figuring out in reference, put rough poses in the blocking to pitch with. You can easily see what's going on in the viewport than what you're doing in person. If you overcomplicate, though, it could lead to deleting frames in the future, which results in a waste of time when you added those frames. Keep it simple.

Spline. Ignore the arms. Focus on the hips/root in relation to the footfalls. Look at the pacing on ones. Think about repetition in shots, break up evenness, and involve variation. Watch root from start to finish, if it's 90% right, the rest of the animation will be easier. Now look into offsetting keys, overlapping actions, and follow-through.

Polish. Make sure the root works and look into all of the details. Arc track your points. Brows and eyes are done before the rest of the face because it's much easier to handle. Work through the facial animation in spline, stepped will look bad and will be harder overall to figure it all out.