Song and Dance

Began work on the final task of this module on Thursday which is the song and dance performance piece. My plan originally had been to do the song 'Shout' after first listening to the audio tracks recommended by Penny but after Tuesday's lecture (which I'll talk more about later) I decided to go through them all again just to make sure before I started, as there were a few which had been added since I last looked.

So I played them all again...and then things changed. Upon listening to 'Singing in the Rain' I had a bolt of inspiration and an idea for a character and the performance came instantly to mind, so I decided a change of plan was probably the best course of action, even though I do still prefer the 'Shout' song. 

I made a few sketches of some ideas I had for the character/posing for my piece, which you can see below:

(drawings to follow)

Following this, after spending some time repeatedly listening to the track I filmed some (rather embarrassing) reference footage on Thursday and then went through it all and put together the best bits which I wanted use for my animation ready to begin the blocking. 

I also made a chart based on the BPM of the audio file and the corresponding frames the beats fall on to help with the timing of actions, so they fall on the correct frames. Last weeks lecture was on 'Animating to Music' and we watched a tutorial by Keith Lango, which was really interesting and also very helpful for this task.

I finished my my first pass of blocking yesterday before I went to work and I think it's off to a promising start! I think I've captured what I wanted, I just hope some bits aren't a bit ambitious for me.(there's a few jumps, skips and spins which aren't apparent yet. Gonna give it a shot anyway!

Here's the base block with audio: 

I'm going to develop the block a bit further now, add a few break down poses so some areas make more sense and then block the lip sync. I may also need to make a few adjustments to the timing of the actions towards the end. Will check it again after I've added a few other poses in...in case the skips make a difference.