Pantomime Acting for Animation – Toby Winder

In this course, you’ll take the starting steps into acting in animations, via ‘pantomime’ acting. The aim is to build on the knowledge and experience from the Body Mechanics and Shot Building Fundamentals series of courses and start to layer in more complex elements of acting into our shots.

The course will show follow the process from idea generation, through blocking and refining and finally into polish. While working through this process we will discuss the thinking behind each decision, how we would approach them in different studio systems, and, of course, how to approach them when doing personal work.

Toby Winder is a senior animator currently based in Montreal. He has been in the animation and visual effects industry since 2006 and has contributed to many projects such as Batman: The Dark Knight, Dr. Strange, and Alien Covenant. Toby has animation experience in high-end VFX, television, commercials, and games.

What You’ll Learn In Pantomime Acting for Animation

• Class 1: Shot Brief
  To start off the course, we look at how shot briefings happen in a studio environment, what information you might have access to, and how we would apply this to doing personal work. We discuss idea generation through thumbnails and video reference
• Class 2: Rigs & Tools
  A quick look at the rig, tools,and basic Maya setup.
• Class 3: Getting Started with Animation
  Bringing in our video reference and setting up the scene for animation. Importing the set and props and the start of blocking our animation.
• Class 4: Blocking, Second Pass
  We start off with a critique of our first blocking pass and then address feedback on the blocking, pushing the detail level to make a second pass blocking.
• Class 5: Blocking, Continued
  A continuation of blocking, working to flesh out the detail of the shot.
• Class 6: Refining, Part 1
  In this class, we will move into the refine stage of animation. We will put our animation into ‘spline’ mode and spend time really getting the most out of our curves.
• Class 7: Refining, Part 2
  Continuation of the refining process.
• Class 8: Polish, Part 1
  In class 8 we move into the polish stage of the animation, firstly by spending some time pushing some small details and doing a pass on the finger animation and the facial animation.
• Class 9: Polish, Part 2
  In this final class, we finish off our polish pass and take time to discuss where we could have done better and what we could have pushed further on the shot.

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