As mentioned last week, I felt overwhelmed and a bit lost with the heavy object project, especially because I wasn’t sure how to approach it. On Friday morning, I had a one-to-one tutorial with Ting, where we opened my file and went straight into the scene. The first thing we did was go through the rig and identify which controllers I actually needed to move, because I had keys everywhere, which was a big part of why the scene felt so chaotic. Seeing everything broken down like that immediately made the project feel much more manageable.
We worked on the first 30 frames together, using both blocking and blocking-plus simultaneously. That was really useful because I could start to understand how the animation should be organised, rather than trying to guess my way through every control. Ting also gave me pointers on Maya itself, explaining what her plugins did and how I could achieve the same result without them, since I don’t use those tools. That was especially helpful because it showed me not just what to do, but how to think through the setup more independently.
From my notes, I also realised that I need to be more selective with what I animate. We talked about keeping the keys under control, using the right body parts for the action, and avoiding unnecessary complexity in the rig. Ting’s guidance helped me understand that the problem was not only the performance itself, but also the way I had structured the scene technically. By the end of the tutorial, I felt much clearer about the workflow and more confident about continuing the blocking process from a stronger starting point.
At the same time, I still feel a little terrified because the project is quite big, and I’ll have to figure out how to approach it on my own. That was another thing we discussed: I tend to overcomplicate things, so the challenge now is to keep the idea clear and manageable rather than adding too many layers too early.
This is what we achieved after the tutorial:
On the other hand, my facial expressions were strong, but the issue was timing rather than the poses themselves. Next term, when we return to dialogue work, I want to focus more on timing and give it the attention it needs, because I know that will matter a lot once we start working with spoken performance.