Mirror Mirror On the Wall

So at the beginning of the year on my first day of school they handed us a VFS backpack with some free stuff, including pencils, erasers, a sharpener, etc.  One of the items they gave us was a smallish personal mirror. At first I thought maybe it was to do some perspective drawings or something.  I then also noticed that they had full length mirrors in every classroom that spanned from the floor to the ceiling.  I thought they were just there as part of the design of the room, but they serve a very specific purpose (as does the mirrors we were given).

The mirrors are there for animation purposes.  As I have stated a number of times, the best thing to do in anything you do in 3D (whether it be animation, modeling, or VFX) is to have reference.  These mirrors are basically there for you to act out your scene in front of your mirror so that you can see the action as it is, instead of imagining what it might be.  You can also have someone else act it out for you, that way you can strictly observe and not be focusing on the acting.  It is also a good idea to tape yourself (or others) doing the actions.

I realized that this was the purpose of these mirrors when early in my first term I noticed one of the guys in the class ahead of me acting out his scene in front of the mirror.  In this term when I got to animating a person (before we were animating inanimate objects) it became really useful. I have acted out in front of that mirror a couple times and it does help. I've also asked others to do the action so that I can see. You get to pick up a lot of what you miss by just trying to imagine it and you pick up the subtle details the body does during these motions. 

The smaller mirror is for facial animation. I haven't done any facial animation yet. That will be covered in Term 3.  I wanted to post up a clip from Making Nemo (I believe that's the correct title) to prove my point about mirrors (and recording oneself) and its importance to animation.  We'll in this documentary on the making of Finding Nemo (which I think is on the DVD special features), it shows an interview with the animator who worked on Dori and how he prepared for Dori's facial animation by acting it out in a mirror. It's an amazing documentary and I highly recommend it.

This entry seems like its getting a bit on the long side now. Was going to post some of my animations but I will leave it for my next post or else this one will be super long.  Until next time.