'Munkei' Shot Progression

'Munkei'

After working on a handful of acting shots back to back, I wanted to do something more body mechanics based. I spent quite a while looking through reference of people swinging various types of weapons around, before I landed on a great video from Motion Actors Inc. that became the foundation of this assignment. It became a back and fourth battle of trying to track arcs while keeping appealing poses intact, but I believe it turned out quite nicely.

Shot Progression

A lot of the work through blocking on this shot ended up just being pushing poses gradually through each pass, until it was time to dial them back slightly for the final iteration. Once I was at the end of the blocking stage I honestly considered filling everything in on 2s and keeping the stepped feel, but I figured it would be more beneficial to have experience polishing a more complex action.

I also got to experiment with drawing some trails with Maya's blue pencil, to give it a smeary feel.

Layout

After seeing the blocking and polish, it becomes a little more evident where poses were pushed, and where the characters balance had to be tweaked to accommodate their movement across the stage. The layout stage is missing some of the camera work, just because I hadn't quite landed on a camera setup that would allow for the punch-out that happens in the final version. Eventually it did make it in as is evident in the polished version, and I think that camera move gives it a bit of a 'highlight intro' type of feel, which is very cool.

Cheating

Since this shot was also very animated to the camera, there's a lot of cheating happening behind the scenes. I ended up relying on some sneaky broken arm movements behind the back of the character as they spin around to readjust their hands, but I tried to prevent it from being too broken.

There's also a lot of bending and stretching happening to get that nice perspective on the strikes. Certainly not a flattering side profile.

This shot ended up being a great opportunity to experiment with some perspective camera work, and try out Maya's blue pencil for animation purposes. It was a huge undertaking compared to some of my previous projects, but it was a ton of fun, and extremely satisfying to see all of the arcs coming together at the end.