Reference Videos

Throughout this module I've been taking a lot of reference videos of myself as this is something that really helps me block out my poses. It helps me see the movement and how it travels across the body. As I've mentioned before I struggle with trying to put everything into my animations, so by breaking it down into a video I can see the different parts of the body in motion and I can translate this in my animation. With reference videos I know I need to put in more exaggeration and need to think like an actor and not be afraid of letting go. I never enjoyed drama when I was at school and have only recently got in to doing reference videos. A lot of the time it's for me to understand the mechanics of the body, but now I'm moving on to more performance as well. Something to take into consideration, is to possibly bring in an actor next year to really push the performance (more than I would be able to anyway) and see the different results I'm able to achieve.

I've heard a lot of the times that once you're blocking is complete, you should really move away from your reference videos, as this is the time where you can push the poses further and they are just really for the blocking stages. From here it's up to the animators to take it further and put their own spin on things. This reference video, is one that I tried to push a bit further than I normally have in the past. From this I got some good blocking which you can see below. The cameras probably need some adjusting, but animation wise I'm quite happy with it. As it's still in blocking, I haven't gone in and added all the overlap and secondary animation yet, but the end pose - the scream, I used my reference video as a basis and tried to push it that little bit further, especially in the facial expression.