This week, Nigel introduced us to the term ‘golden thread’ which will help us organize and structure our ideas.
The golden thread in academic writing gives us a clear overview on the contents and ideas we want to communicate throughout our paper. For our thesis we have to make sure that we establish first our research question, then our research objectives and define a suitable methodology in order to start developing our arguments.
This week, I focused on converting my body mechanics animation from blocking into spline. To do so, I focused on cleaning the keys from my graph editor.
In order to start converting my stepped animation into spline, I divided the sequence into manageable parts when the character:
For my next draft, the first thing I need to fix is the timing of my balloon animation.
I also need to improve the arm rotation at the end of my animation and improve the arm overlapping throughout the sequence.
Even though the arm movements look smoother, there are still some rotations I need to improve.
Furthermore, I need to work on tracking the arcs of my waist at the end of my animation, as I have stretched the leg and it affected the position of the waist.
This week, I created my previs animation of my animated artefact and imported my reference videos into my Maya file.
My animation will take place indoors, so before working on my previs animation, I created simple props (bed, table, pictures) to setup the environment.
In order to start planning the timing of the movements, I created a previs animation.
I used some basic volumes to represent both: the character (in red) and the creatures (in green).
Importing the reference videos was a huge challenge as they all started by default in frame 1 even though I moved them in the graph editor.
In order to fix this issue, I had to manually change the expression of each image plane and write on which frame I wanted the sequence to start playing.
After having both my reference videos and previs animation, I combined them into my scene.
However, I needed to retime the reference videos according to the previs animation.
In this sense, my reference videos will guide me on how the character is moving and the previs animation will help me understand the timing of each movement.
Now that I have my previs shots and reference videos, I can start blocking my animation. Furthermore, in the following weeks I will replace the placeholder props with smoother 3D models.
This week, we had one-to-one tutorials and showed Nigel our progress regarding our research topic and bibliography.
Old Question: To what extent do film semiotics play an essential role in world building and characterization within the horror genre?
As regards my research question, even though I have defined that I want to explore Tim Burton’s movies and his use of the horror genre, I felt that the term ‘film semiotics’ was too broad. For this reason, I wanted to narrow down the topic and formulated the following title.
New Question: How does Tim Burton balance horror and empathy in the characters of his movies to create an emotional impact on the audience?
In this sense, I will specifically focus on the characters of his movies, and I will still conduct my study from a semiotic approach as I will analyze the characters as signs that convey meaning.