Waiting for the Bus - Acting and Blocking

I started work on a new shot a couple of days ago. I wanted to animate a simple shot that reveals the emotion of a character.

In London whilst waiting for a train I started looking at how other people on the platform were standing. It was clear what emotion a person was in by the way they stood, or how they shifted weight from one foot to another or how they checked their phones. It was cool because these simple actions revealed so much about the person.

I thought this would be fun to try in a shot so I picked a relatively bold emotion for the scene. An impatient businessman is annoyed because the bus/train is late. By giving the character a tiny story like this it informs me as to how he would act when waiting for the train.

I shot some video reference bearing in mind the back story to my character. Whenever I felt like what I was doing was unnatural I refreshed my memory as to what the story behind the character was which really helped. After a few minutes in front of the camera I felt like I had some of the key acting poses down.

I set up my scene in maya and imported the video reference. I keyed every frame and then played with the timing of the reference until it was something I liked (kind of animating the video reference). From here I blocked out the key poses in one pass and the extremes in another. The third pass was to neaten up the poses a little bit and make sure the movement made sense in a playblast.

First blocking:


Waiting for the Bus - Blocking from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Next stage: critiques, re-blocking and then spline!!