This week I continued working on my dialogue shot and spent a lot of time trying to address Ting’s feedback about making the facial expressions snappier. One problem I was struggling with was how to adjust the spacing and timing without destroying the key poses I was already happy with. Rather than simply telling me what to do, Ting very kindly recorded a short demonstration specifically for me. Watching her workflow was probably one of the most valuable things I have seen this term. She showed how she uses the graph editor and adds intermediate keys to adjust spacing while preserving the important poses. I honestly think that demonstration may have changed my workflow permanently, because it showed me that polishing is not about remaking the animation but about controlling the spacing between poses.
The second major task this week was creature locomotion. I decided to animate a horse because I wanted to challenge myself with a quadruped that has a clear and rhythmic gait. For the first blocking pass, I approached it almost like a walk cycle with extra steps. My brain tends to understand animation best when I can break it down into systematic patterns, so I focused first on establishing the order of the footfalls before worrying too much about overlap or secondary motion. It was interesting to compare quadruped locomotion to human walk cycles, as the same principles apply but the coordination becomes much more complex. Although the first pass was quite rough, I felt it was a good foundation to build on.
Reflecting on the week, I realised that I am becoming much more interested in workflow rather than simply final results. Watching Ting’s graph editor demo and experimenting with horse locomotion both reinforced the idea that complicated problems become manageable when broken down into smaller pieces. In the past, I often felt overwhelmed when looking at an entire shot, but I am slowly learning to trust the process and tackle things one layer at a time. Even though both the dialogue shot and the horse animation are still far from finished, I feel much more in control of my work than I did earlier in the year.