25 essential expression sheet by Nancy Palmer

Ran across this, seems pretty useful for getting a character locked down. Created by Nancy Palmer as part of a larger tutorial.

Kong extra cast

Too UGLY gotta figure out a new solution

here's a paint over of the extra characters for the Kong thing. Chorus girls and then cops (the plan being to shoot the chorus girl scenes first then paint off their hair and boots and put them in cop outfits.) The pelvis and hips are plumbers epoxy, then covered in sculpy, limbs are sculpy. Planning on covering the gaps between the limbs with liquid latex (ala Jon), and using paste on mouths. I was almost ready to finish Kong's fingers but having only bought a little bit of latex I thought it might be wise to do all my latexing at once. Not sure if these guys are going to work, they're pretty ugly, but they're background characters and not supposed to be the main point, also they're smaller than kong. Don't even know if these sculpy limbs are going to work. We'll see. I feel like I'm getting close to the animation part (sets are just going to be cardboard so don't think they'll take that long) so I'm excited. But knowing how projects go all of sudden I'm wondering if there's a way I could knock together in a night a character I could get to animating and trying to act on, wonder how hard it is to make a frankenhole style?

Ted Ty Masterclass

  Ted Ty - Genuine acting from iAnimate on Vimeo.

 some notes I jotted down while listening to Ted Ty doing a masterclass

what I felt like I was close to understanding was the difference between a test shot that is solid animation and physics wise, but lacks anything to make it stand out. What I think I got from it is that you have to imbue authentic feeling into your scene, and the way to do that is to catch it in vid ref, and the way to do that is to really try and use your emotional memory to summon it and always run the camera.


volume change signals accent

physically difficult to make a deep vocal sound with head up or high pitch with head down

as if: thought process   walk up show badge,  think, channel specific emotion that you need from specific true moment from your past  when you think of a situation you've been in it adds the drop of reality to change the same ol same ol reference you've been doing before 

your'e trying to make it real enough for yourself as you're acting that you are authentically broadcasting the line so well that you are broadcasting it nonverbally (facially or physically) make it so real that you could drop the audio and still feel it strong enough to see what's happening

it's very fleeting because we're not actors so we can't turn on the juice for real

watch your takes that don't work and figure out why they don't, compared to the takes that do

every shot has some gold in it, closing  a car door can be a great shot if you think about the why of it, like closing it gently so as not to wake up a sleeping passenger

Ken Fountain - Splat Frog

Ken Fountain's got a site where he's offering tutorial vids (which I recommend, I thought they were great). and also some free video podcasts with some tricks

Kong Hands

Finally jumping in to do the latex on the hands, feels like I'm playing in the cat box (ammonia ). This stuff takes longer to dry than I thought, guess it'll be more than 1 night process. Hopefully it turns out all right, but keeping expectations low so as to continue progressing.