Today has been a rather hectic day, a lot of things have been done, but the first half of the day was unrelated to the animation-work. We are throwing a New years eve party tomorrow so there was a lot of shopping and preparation needed.
A bit stressed out at the moment, I feel like I should be working more since we have a lot of work to do in this module..
I managed to edit together the reference-video for the "sing & dance"-task today though..
That calmed me down a bit!

I had close to half an hour of reference shots to go through, but 10 of those had an unfortunate camrea-angle.. Or to be honest, I did not remember to stand at the same place while I shot it, so I had to do an additional shoot from another angle to get enough reference material to chose from. But now I know that I should mark a "acting-spot" for where I should stand, and hopefully I'll remember that for the next shoot! Hehe..

I edited together pieces from 4 different shots for this reference-video and I also kept the original 30mins in case I need to look at some more when I start animating. I usually en up doing my reference this way because I find small interesting details in different shots that are more appealing than I find in the shots where the whole thing is being acted out.

The way I do this is by looking through the original clip over and over and take notes where I find things I like. It tends to be quite a lot of sequences the first time around, so I need to watch it again to eliminate some of them.
Here's an image showing the process:



After the third "round" I had my favourite sequences and I took the footage into Premiere and edited tem together, added sound and frame count.

Here is my reference for the "sing & dance"-task:



I've also done some sketching over the last couple of days and here is an assembly of the ones I liked best:



These are inspired from some of the things I've seen on TV and so on lately.

I also saw a short film today called "The Gruffalo's child", based on a children's book by Julia Donaldson:



(Piture taken from; http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/dec/14/the-gruffalos-child)

It's a 3D animated short that aired on BBC1 on Christmas Day. A lovely little film that I just adored! Fantastic character-designs and beautiful environment and mood in the film.

The animation style was nice, it was subtle and realistic.
-no big cartoon-like motions.
Even though I usually prefer the "cartoony" animation style, this style was more suiting to the film.

It's presented almost like a fairytale and everything the narrator says rhymes. A really nice way to tell the story.

There was also a lot of emotional scenes, and especially a good sense of fear through good acting. They really made it clear that the main character, the Gruffalo's child was a indeed a child. She was curious and brave, but also scared of the things surrounding her in the forest.
I enjoyed it a lot - very inspirational!

Another interesting thing was that I saw Sabrina Schmid (my "Creative Animation"-tutor from last year) credited as the Production Manager for this project, and that was really fun too see!

Well, tomorrow is New years eve so I won't be blogging as I am hosting a party.
- Happy New Year everybody!

A bit of planning

I have put the lipsync task on hold for a little while, so that I can continue working on it with a fresh pair of eyes later on.

So, after a constant loop of the songs for the song and dance task I have decided to go for the "feeling good" clip. It's the one that seems most interesting to me, I also really enjoy both the song and the performance and that helps when you know your going to be listening to it A LOT. Hehe.
I wanted to do one of the Queen songs as well, but they all sort of built up to where it gets good, but then the clip ended.. And in "feeling good" I get what I'm looking for.

- There is a build up in the song, and then a "pay off".
It's that moment when he stops singing and the orchestra start playing in the background that really made me want to animate that song.
(Hope that made sense.. Hehe..)

I watched a few performances on youtube as well, I want to try and do an emotional performance, make it look like the character feels strongly about what he is singing.
So I watched different types of performances to get ideas, but so far my opinion is that it's a single performer with a microphone-stand - alone, emotional, closed eyes, etc..

Here are some examples of performances I watched to get inspiration:







Only one of these are really relevant to this clip, and that's Michael Buble's version of "Feeling Good", but it's nothing better than keeping an open mind. I might steal a bit from Elvis and Tom just to make it more interesting. I'll definitively keep watching performances in case i see something I want to try and incorporate in the animation.

Here are some of my planning. This is just sketches and the lyrics, nothing is decided yet.
- It's mainly to show what I have in mind and what I have acted out so far.

Yet again I'm behind on posts on the blog. Sorry about that.. But since it's Christmas I guess it makes sense. Just came back from a christmas-fiest/family-mash up! There is more toddlers for each year, the elderly are a bit older and my younger cousins keeps growing taller and taller. A lot of fun to see everyone though!

Yesterday was a win-win situation for me, because I got to spend time with my family and introduce them to some good animated films. We sat down in the livingroom with coffee, cakes and chocolate and rented Cars2 + when we finished it, The Incredibles was on TV so we watched that one as well!

- Happy days!

I also used the opportunity to "steal" some poses when people weren't looking.. Hehe.
Here's a few pose sketches and a scribble of a dog posing as a cat (that last one was not intentional, but it's hard to get the anatomy right when your drawing from your imagination.. Hehe.)











Enjoy your holidays!

Been a while since my last post. I haven't done much animation work during the weekend due to the fact that I'm back with my family and friends. So been a bit more social than usual, that's for sure. But I have managed to get some work done on the lip sync in the past two days. I actually ended up with deleting the keys on the entire right arm yesterday (the one holding the walkie talkie).
I felt I had lost control of the keys, and it seemed easier to start over than to try and fix it. It's still a lot of work needed, but I think it might end up better afterwards. I've also tried to make the body-movements less "drifty". I will continue working on it tonight, I feel I need to get it on the "right track" before I start thinking about the other tasks. I also need to enjoy the holidays a bit! Hehe.

On my trip over here I travelled with both plane and train, which means I spent a lot of time waiting..
But there is a positive outcome of this; It's the perfect opportunity to observe people.
- Airports are fantastic!
People from all over the world gathered in one area - waiting.
There's different walks, postures, attitudes, personalities and poses everywhere you look. I did not sketch as much as I would like too, but I got some pages of rough scribbles and here are some of the more detailed ones I did;



(Had the time to put in more details on some of the sketches while I was on the plane, but a bit too much turbulence made the lines a bit rougher than I would have wanted them to be.. Hehe.)

Character poses

It's been a day of Christmas-gift shopping, packing and so on but I managed to get some work done as well.
I've done some tests on the animation to prevent it from drifting, seems like I'm on to something. I've mostly gone through the curves on the body and straightened out the ones that we're causing the character to drift back and forth, but I think I still need to put it back to linear and really separate some poses, because it's all floating a bit from A to B at the moment. Might try and work in some sort of contrast, but we'll see when I start working on it again.
All I'm thinking about now is if I've forgotten something or if my bag is too heavy.. Hehe.

I've also done some more character-poses today, or it's more characters in situations I came up with. Might be a bit unusual to draw poses this way, but I prefer to draw characters from my imagination and this is sort of a personal twist on the "regular" pose drawings to make it all a bit more fun. Have a look:







I'm leaving tomorrow morning at 7, so it's time for bed. Next post will be from Norway! Ah, I can't wait to get home to my family, friends and also the snow!

Last show and tell of 2011 & some sketches

Today was the last show and tell before Christmas. We weren't a lot of students at this one, quite a lot has already gone home so.. I think we were three people showing work in progress and people seem to be improving fast. And that's great!

I got feedback on my animation, nothing to say on the lip sync apparently so I take that as it is working. At least for now. My main focus is on the body now, since I was told it was a bit to "drifty", meaning I need to work more on those holds, and also the way the character goes from one pose to the next. I've changed it a lot, so I might benefit from going back to linear-mode and try and fix it there.

After the wip was shown we saw some animation-shorts and just enjoyed ourselves. And around 11:30 we went down to the floor below to sit down in the seating-area and had both pies and home-made biscuits that the tutors and students had brought. Good way to kick off the holidays!

Went shopping for Christmas-presents afterwards, need to bring some of the UK back with me.

And when I got home I sat down to do some work, but it's a lot to arrange before the trip home so I tried to multi task a bit. Packing, cleaning and so on. After that I didn't feel like animating so I put on a episode of "True Blood" and drew some sketches instead. I really like to draw while I watch series, I mainly do it because there are a lot of good acting poses to steal from tv-shows. You need to be fairly quick to read the pose, but it's good training for when your sketching people in real life as well. (You could pause it and draw the pose of course, but that's cheating! Hehe..)

Here's the poses I drew down today:

Presentation and more work on the lip sync

Today we had our presentations for the class. I think it went okay, I was a bit nervous in the beginning, the classic dry mouth.. But that went away pretty quick. Was a lot of interesting presentations shown today, and almost everybody had different subjects. I learned a lot!

Went for coffee at Starbucks with the class afterwards. Was good to sit down and just talk.

When I came home I sat down and continued to work on the lip sync animation. Solved some issues with the hands and eyes and polished some more on the actual lip sync. Will hopefully get some additional feedback tomorrow so I know what I need to focus on during the holidays. I will be doing some work while I'm back home since I'm leaving on Friday and are staying until the 8th of January.

Here is the wip-clip I will be showing in tomorrow's show & tell:



Also, I still recommend joining Twitter if your not already on it. One of the animators at Dreamworks that I'm following shared this video on Twitter earlier today, it's goes through a lot of interesting topics and it's some really great stuff in there either your a newbie or a professional:



Will share this in the MA Facebook-group as well, I think there are more than me that find this useful and interesting.

The day before

So, tomorrow is presentation day. I am actually not as stressed out/nervous as I usually am before a presentation. Guess it helps that we have gotten to know each other better during the last months. I'm actually kind of looking forward to presenting.. Guess that is a good thing!

Today I've used most of the day on preparations. I had most of the presentation already, but there where a lack of continuity, basically a bunch of slides in no particular order. So I dedicated the day to arranging everything and running through it a couple of times while timing myself. I'm landing on around 5-7 minutes on the presentation so that should be fine. (ICA says 5-10min)

I still managed to sneak in a few hours on the lip sync animation, I just can't leave it alone.. Hehe. It's changed quite a bit after the feedback I got this weekend, but I like it better as it looks now so I hope I'm not wrong about changing it.

I won't upload a preview now since I need to bring one along to the show and tell on Wednesday and will be uploading that one here as well.. So you'll just have to wait.

In the meantime you can have a look at a clip from one of my favourite animated features. This one is packed with childhood memories since I grew up listening to Phil Collins and watching Disney films. And getting both at the same time is just fantastic! Enjoy.



(This song gives me goosebumps every time.)

Saturday

Been working on and off today, felt the need to take a couple of hours off to just watch a bad comedy and eat some even worse food.
I have done some changes to the animation, because I felt the character still was moving a bit too much. Or, more like he was moving for no purpose at all. So I toned that down a bit. Also tried to work in some facial features like a slight rise of the upper lip in "followed". I feel it adds some personality to him and also brings a little contrast into the otherwise pretty symmetrical facial-animation. I'm still not happy with the eyes. Can't seem to get them to communicate his feelings.
But I'll keep at it!

I also got some feedback from my friend, Wei.
He gave me some pointers on the body, that the hips did not seem to do much. And also that the last head-turn seemed a bit unmotivated. The lip sync seemed to work but I could push it a bit on "followed".
Got a lot of tips from him so I'll do my best to try and include/change some of these in the piece.


Here's the animation as it looks at the moment:

Feedback, more lip sync work and animation-gold outside my window.

Continued to work on the lip sync animation this morning and think I have sorted out most of the things that where mentioned in the previous feedback. I then went out for a walk with my friend Jolien and her puppy to get some air and a break from work. Helped a lot! When I came back I asked my room-mate Ricky for some more feedback and he pointed out something that improved the piece a lot. The mouth was way too open on "followed" and after tweaking it a bit it looked a lot better. It's often small details that makes a huge difference.

I have also started to add some small details in the way he speaks, small things like a small raise of one side on the upper-lip, to break the symmetry in the face. I feel it adds some personality to it and this is a lot of fun to experiment with.

So over to explain the title of this post;

As usual there was some "sketchy guys" out and about on a Friday night and one of them had apparently had a bit too much to drink. He was yelling at another guy who was just waiting outside for someone to open the front-door. And as he stood there, the drunk one started a very loud argument with him. The thing is that the poor fellow never said anything, because the drunk guy spoke (or yelled) for the both of them. And he went back and forth through all the emotions you could think about, but stuck mostly to the aggressive ones.
Anyway, as sorry as I felt for the poor guy who had to listen to him, I just had to see what would happen. At one point I thought I might have to go out and help him out, but the drunk guy seemed to be all words so I just kept an eye on them.
After the police came and took "drunkie" with them I ran up to my room and started to sketch, because this was pure gold as poses and ideas for later.

Here is the situation laid out as I remembered it:



You just can't make this stuff up.

Animation, some research and some sketches

Today most of the time has been used working further on the lip sync animation. I've been struggling a lot with eyes and the feedback I got today also confirmed this. As I understood the feedback the actual movement and lip sync seemed to be working, but there was an issue with the eyes. So I tried to find some more information on it.

This site was really useful to me today:

http://www.animationtipsandtricks.com/2009/08/animating-eyes-and-eyebrows.html

Great article on the subject!

I also checked out the video at:

http://www.animationscout.tv/#1996248/Eye-Movements

But since I had already read the article on "animationtipsandtricks.com" I saw that a lot of the
the video content was the same as the written words in the article. But repetition can only make you remember better I guess.

I also changed the animation on the hands slightly in the animation, since I got comments in the feedback saying that the walkie-talkie blocked the lips a few times when the character was speaking, so since the focus is on lip syncing I realized this was something I needed to sort out.

I moved on to spline-mode just before I finished up for the night and it looks like it's working okay. I will be tweaking and polishing curves next + try to tighten and try to make the lip sync as good as possible.

Here is the result after today's animating:




I must admit that after several hours of almost only eye-animation I got a bit "sick" of the piece.. Hehe. So I found out I needed to end the night with something different, so I sat down and sketched some characters in different situations. Pretty poor line-work on this, but it was mostly to "get rid of" some leftover creativity.. Hehe.

Here you go:



Gooood night!

Another lecture, some research and more animation.

Today we had another lecture, a bit unusual week but we are having presentations on Tuesday and show and tell on Wednesday in the following one so the schedule was changed to make sure we got all the lectures.

Today's lecture was about the emotional and thinking side of a character. A lot on facial-expressions and how and when to use them.
We learned that there are seven basic emotions according to Paul Ekman, and these are:

- Happy
- Sad (pain)
- Surprise
- Fear
- Anger
- Disgust
- Contempt

But after some more research I found some additional ones:

"in the 1990s Ekman expanded his list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions not all of which are encoded in facial muscles. The newly included emotions are:
Amusement
Contempt
Contentment
Embarrassment
Excitement
Guilt
Pride in achievement
Relief
Satisfaction
Sensory pleasure
Shame".


I know one shouldn't trust wikipedia too much, but interesting non the less.


Here is a very useful video I found on the subject:



We also talked a bit about micro-expressions. And these are expressions that we show for instance when we are lying.
Say for instance a person is angry about something. This person could put on a fake smile and pretend to be happy, but without knowing it his/her face will for a brief moment show a micro-expression that shows how they actually feel.
I have seen a tv-series that is based on this called "Lie to me", and it's really useful as a reference source.

Here's a promo for it:




So, back to my animation. I've tried t work in some more facial-expressions in the piece and also worked more on the timing on the actual lip sync. But the biggest change is in the body. I found that the body was both floaty and moving about to much, so I've worked in holds and got rid of one of the turns to calm it down. I'm trying to get the sense of him being both worried and thoughtful and therefore thought that more subtle body-movement was the better choice for this piece.
I also tried to work on the eyes, so I read up on eye-darts (which we learned about in yesterday's lecture) and tried to implement this in the animation. Also in the reference (for the lipsync - posted earlier) you can see my eyes moving slightly, but fast from left to right - almost "scanning the situation" he is in. I have been struggling a lot with the eyes on this so I needed to do some additional reference on that as well. Here is a short clip that I recorded of my eyes moving to help me along:




And here is the animation as it looks at the moment:



Posted this preview in MA-character group on Facebook as well, so hoping for some feedback on it.

But now; Time for bed!

Lecture and work on the lip sync animation

Today we had a lecture on facial animation and a bit on emotion. Had been through some of it last year, but it was very useful non the less. I'm trying and include some of the things we learned about emotion in the piece now, because the task isn't just matching the lips to the soundtrack, it needs to be a believable performance as well.

I also learned a useful lesson today and that was to include facial expressions in the blocking. This is not only useful for me, it helps the audience to better understand what's going on in the shot as well.
As you can see in the last video I posted on the blog (Friday December 2nd), I had only blocked the body-movement. But since I've already moved on from the blocking stage it's a bit late to do that now, but I'll definitively remember to do that in the block in the next task.

Otherwise I've Been working more on the lip sync animation today. Been mostly focusing on the actual lip sync itself today, so there is a bit of crazy eye-movements going on. But since we got some pointers on that in today's lecture I'll hopefully manage to sort that out.

Here is a preview:



Got some feedback on the piece today as well, so I know I need to work a bit on the body since it's a bit too floaty. It needs some holds, because it's moving to much at the moment.
Also got some tips on the actual lip sync, it was only some minor changes so it might seem like I'm actually on the right track.. I'll keep working on it tomorrow, gone a bit blind on it now.

Working on the presentation, a bit of lipsync and new sketches.

Today I've done a bit of everything really. Started the work-day with the lipsync task and got most of the body animation figured out. I want to have a solid "foundation" before I start to work on the lipsync. I know that when I start animating the face it will take a lot of the attention away from the rest of the body, but I still want the body to move with purpose and not just because it has too.

After that I continued to work on the presentation. Penny sent us an e-mail today telling us that we will do the presentation next Tuesday so we have quite a bit of time to work on that. I have a lot of material to sort out though, because when you start to analyse a 20 second clip you discover how much that is actually going on. I'll have to figure out what's most important since we have 5-10 minutes to present.

Last, but not least I've been doing some more sketching, and here is some of them:

Lipsync on paper, key poses and blocking

I've been working mostly on the lipsync task today. Continued work on planning the animation. I have finished the character profile, the key-poses and the lipsync-poses (on paper).

The animation is going to be pretty subtle so I tried to keep the key poses to a minimal this time, to focus on the lipsync since this is the main objective in his task.
Here is the key-poses on paper:



The character-profile:



And the pose-sheet for the lipsync:



(I guess it isn't necessary to do it this way and I'm not sure if I'm going to use it that much, but I like to plan out most of the animation on paper before I start to do any work in 3dsMax.)

I then started blocking the body-movement for the animation. Still trying to keep it pretty subtle and without any major gestures:




Will keep working on this tonight, but I might jump a bit back and forth between the two tasks since I need to get a lot done by tomorrow. I've planned to take most of the day off tomorrow because I'm having the class + some other friends over tomorrow night to celebrate my birthday, so I won't get much else done then.

Preparations for presentation and the lipsync animation

It' been a while since I posted anything on the blog, but I'll try and sum up what I've been up to since Monday.
Since we just finished the first module we where told by Penny to take a day off - which I did. Tuesday was a day to relax and just enjoy animation from "the other side", meaning I put on a animation film that I've wanted to watch for a while; Cars 2. I enjoyed it quite a lot, it surprised me since I usually don't like sequels. On Wednesday I went to the lab and met up with Jørgen, Rachel R and Em from class and we took advantage of the projector there to watch a film. I had not seen "Princess and the frog" yet, so I finally got to see that one as well. I must say it was a delight to watch a Disney Classic again - Enjoyed that a lot!
Afterwards I went home and started to work on the presentation. I had a film in mind, but I was not sure if we had to have a feature film or if I could use a short for my presentation, but after a quick e-mail to Penny that was sorted out. So I am going to use Blue Sky Studios latest short; Scrat's Continental Crack up (Part Two).

- I've mentioned this one on the blog before, but since we are going to show examples of use of animation principles etc. I feel the animation in this film is very relevant.

I have also chosen the sound clip I will be using for the lipsync-task.
I chose to use the "alarm"-clip;

- "I don't mean to alarm anybody, but I think... We're being followed."

In my head I pictured a guy catching up with a group, out of breath trying to warn the rest that they are being followed. But after a lot of reference-shots on that I found that the acting and tone of voice in the clip did not match. The voice is to controlled and the breathing is heavy not rapid and "gasping for air" as it would have been if he had been running. So I threw away the first reference shots and started over.
I knew he needed to warn someone about being followed, but instead of exhaustion the heavy breathing in the clip might represent fear. So I came up with the idea that the character is talking to a group through a walkie-talkie. I could then act it out as a character who's all alone, scared, breaths heavy and almost whispers the words:




I picked out the three shots I was most satisfied with and I guess I will be using bits from each shot to find my key poses for the animation.
(I might play around with the camera angle when I start staging the scene, but I kept it pretty close to make sure I got a good look at the face and especially the lips. We have to keep the camera at shoulder-height in the animation as well.)

Animation Practice 2

The end of Animation Practice 1

So, it's 8:25 PM and I am officially done with Animation Practice 1.
I just uploaded my latest task to Blackboard and everything seems to be working. Was a bit worried since it took quite a while to upload the file, even though it's only 22mb.. Luckily I wasn't trying to submit at 23:55.. Hehe.

This last component has been a tough one.. As I mentioned in the last post, the main reason for this was the rig. But I worked until bout 1 AM last night and managed to render out a version of the animation just to be on the safe side. When I got up this morning I realized that I had forgotten all about including blinks on the character, but fortunately I always render in images so I only had to re-render 300 frames. But it was not all bad since I knew I had a backup version of the piece, so I actually got time to add blinks and polish a bit more before I had to send it to render.

The blog has been a helpful tool to document my progress, I really like the fact that I can sit down and write about problems or observations etc. at the end of a work-day.

- But this also means that a lot of my posts doesn't include material directly related to the assessments, so I'll mention it again; to easily find the actual animations you could just press the "Finished work" button on the header and you will find all my animations there.

All my planning for the ICA's are posted on the main blog (You just have to go back a bit..)

Now it's time to do something completely different.. Or, sort of. I'm going sit back and watch and study the pro's work in:



(image taken from: www.coversdaddy.com)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- Oh, and I will post my last task (component 2) in the "finished work"-page as well.

linear to spline and rig-trouble.

As the title says I moved over to spline curves today. I did the fingers and hold pose in linear before so that it would be about right when I started polishing.
I always work on about 50 frames at the time on my animations, it's easier to see and control what each curve does to the animation that way.
But today that wasn't a smart choice. Apparently the dee-rig is having a bad day, it's been a lot of bugs on it. The mesh has popped away from the rig controllers, heads has "magically" disappeared and the rig has been a absolute nightmare to work on - And I have no idea why.
Because of this I was set back at least 5 hours work.. I sat polishing on the first 150 frames for hours and when I made a preview of the piece as a whole, the remaining 350 frames was a rig that where doing whatever it pleased.. And it just kept happening in older files, but at different points in the animation.

Here's an example of what I have dealt with today:



I then realized the best thing to do would be to go back to the linear-version, put it in spline again and start over. (Fortunately you work a bit quicker the second time around..)

I have worked on most of the animation, but I would like to continue with "fresh eyes" tomorrow. But, I will render one version during the night so that I have a version to hand in tomorrow if it rig keeps acting this way when I continue polishing.

Productive saturday!

Got quite a lot of work done today.
I've been working on tweaking curves today, mostly all the ease in and outs and trying to prevent "floaty-animation". I'm still working with linear curves, so it's still looks a bit choppy.
Last thing I did tonight was to start working on his fingers. I also need to work on the ending, since I haven't done any work on Chris hands in the part where he holds Joy, and I know there is a bit of correction needed there to prevent mesh-collision between the two characters.

I have made an observation through this walk-cycle as well. If you move the character too low so there is a lot of bend in the knees and you then add a lot of movement from side to side on the upper-body you get a "drunk walk"! I have really been working a lot to try and prevent that look on my walk. I want it to be a walk that you can see in kids that have been playing around for a long time. They tend to move about a lot, but they are obviously tired at the same time.. (hope that made sense..)
So I guess my conclusion is that when your animating a bipedal character with no facial or visual clues to show their age or mood, the difference between tired/exhausted and drunk is hard to figure out. Hehe..

Got feedback from both my room-mate and Daniel today so that helped me a lot.

Here's a preview of my animation as it looks at the moment:




As you can see in the clip I have changed the story a bit from the original idea. Joy's jump in the first block sent the wrong message.. Seemed like she was attacking Chris rather than playing around.

I need to sort out the fingers and the holding pose tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be able to move over to polishing the piece sometime during the afternoon. I was hoping to get two days to polish it, but I'll have too see about that..
It's 1:05 AM now so it's time to call it.

work, work, break, work.

Here's an update to keep you posted on my progress. I have been working on the animation non-stop today.. I have had some problems with the arm- and body-movement on the animation, so after a couple of hours tweaking I decided to get rid of a lot of it and repose it. Don't know if it was the best solution, but at least it sorted out some of the worst problems I was having.

Took a break from the animation after dinner and brought some of my precious Norwegian chocolate over to Albin & Joliens house for a long over due visit. Was a good way to get my mind of work for a while. Tim was there as well since he's back for the graduation (he's currently working at a 3D company in Amsterdam). Lot's of fun! The amounts of laughter and sugar provided me with new energy so I could continue working when I got back.

It's 1:00 AM and I'm getting tired so I think I'll call it a night. It's been a productive day. Will hopefully be able to spot the flaws Iv'e missed today after a good nights sleep.

Animation moved to linear.

So I moved over to linear keys today. It looked okay so I decided to continue working on it in linear since I feel the deadline closing in on me. I know how much work and time I spend in linear mode so I felt that I couldn't wait any longer.

As usual there are some gimbals on the knees, but this is common so I was not surprised.
I have worked mostly on the first walk and I am struggling a bit with getting the movement right.. But it's 10:30 and I've been working on it all day so I think my eyes need a rest. Hopefully it will be easier to handle the issues with fresh eyes tomorrow morning.

Show and tell & work in progress.

So today was the last show and tell in this module. I showed all my pieces today, since I had done changes since last time. I got some suggestions for changes I could do if I got time, but I'll have to see if I can get around to actually changing anything on the animations since I'm already pretty occupied with the last task.
The feedback I got on the last animation was pretty much to just keep going. And the puppy's attitude and personality had improved since yesterday, so I'm happy with that.

I'm a bit worried that I might not finish in time, but then again, I always am.. Hehe.

I "moved" Joy (The ball w/tail) over to linear keys today. Mostly because I want to use as much time as possible on Chris, since it's a lot more work needed on a full bipedal rig. So I decided I'd try to get most of the rough animation done on Joy so I could make a layer in 3dsMax and hide "her" while I continue working on the secondary breakdowns on Chris. So far it seems wise, since 3dsMax is running a lot smoother now.

I have uploaded another wip_preview, and I apologize in advance if it's a bit troublesome to watch. There is a distinct difference between the two now that Joy is linear and Chris is still on stepped, but hopefully you will be able to see how I'm progressing anyway.



- I will continue working on the secondary breakdowns on Chris tomorrow, but now; Bedtime!

Practical, feedback and breakdowns.

Today's lecture became a practical, so I got do work more on the piece while Penny was available for us to ask for feedback and so on. I showed her my wip and got some useful pointers on what I needed to work on. There was lack of character to the puppy, so I have been working on the attitude of the ball w/tail and also continued to work on the breakdowns. I am currently working on the "secondary breakdowns", which basically means the poses between the breakdowns and key poses.
These are really vital to get the walk correct.
In a walk you have the contact pose - passing pose - contact pose, in this case the passing is the breakdown. But you also need to add down and up position to get the weight in there so these become your secondary breakdowns. You also need to add breakdowns and secondary breakdowns between the other poses so that the transition between them is clear when you move on to linear keys. So that's what I have been working on today.

- I'm still working with step-keys, and here is a preview of my current wip:




I got a lot of useful feedback from my friend Daniel (previous Ma student) via skype this afternoon as well. And as I understood it the story was pretty clear so I'm quite happy with that.

Block, timing and a bit of feedback.

I've finished blocking out the storytelling poses for the animation and timed it out. I was aiming for a shorter animation this time, but as usual I had not planned out enough thinking-time for the characters.

(This seems to be a reoccurring problem, so note to self; I need to keep that in mind next time I do my planning..)

- Not that it's a big problem to solve, since I do all my blocking with stepped keys and have all the rig-controls keyed on each pose.
(By working this way I can easily move the keys around without messing up any of the poses.)

I also showed the block to my room-mate, just to see if he could read the story from the poses and timing and according to him it was quite clear what was going on in the scene. Will be posting it in the MA-group on Facebook as well

So since I used more time on the walk than we have to finish up this task I think I'll have to start on the breakdowns now.
I'm still keying everything in each breakdown-pose so if I get some feedback after tomorrows lecture and I get any suggestions and/or if I need to do any major changes, I will still be able to solve this quite efficiently.

Here's my block timed out:

Quick update

After a good night sleep I found out how to scale the rigs to fit together. Embarrassingly enough I found it in the modify panel (where I had looked at least 8 times yesterday). Guess I just needed the sleep.. Hehe.

I have started to block the animation, and so far the scene is working pretty good with both rigs in it at the same time. (Was a bit worried that this would be a lot to manage for the computer, but it's running quite smoothly so far).

Otherwise I have found a new source of entertainment while I work. I am sort of addicted to podcasts and I found this great page for those of you who love to hear people talk while you work.

The page is:

http://altanimation.podomatic.com/

It's a animation-podcast featuring interviews with animators and people with relation to the animation-business. It's only 11 podcasts, but the ones I've heard so far has been about 1 hour and 30 minutes so that should keep you entertained for a while. I especially recommend the Ed Hooks interview, he talks a lot about his path from acting to acting for animation.
Would also like to mention the interview with Jamil Lahham, he gives us a insight on how it was to work on "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs" and how it was to animate in that particular style.

Great stuff!

Storyboard

I've finished the storyboard for "Chris & Joy" (bringing it all together task).

Also started to test the rigs together in the scene. So far it seems a bit difficult because I can't scale the rigs without messing them up. But I'll hopefully find a solution to this tomorrow.

I started out with drawing down some key-poses on paper, and then photographed it and used it as reference. Then I did the rest of the storyboard in Photoshop.
I like to do the ground-work by hand, but I usually make the complete storyboard digitally just because it's easier to correct it if I make a mistake.

Here is the key-pose sketches:



And here is the finished storyboard pages;








Oh, and if you haven't seen it yet, check out the latest Scrat-short from Blue Sky Studios:



I just love the animation-style they use on Scrat. There is a lot of contrast, from super-fast to slow body movements and the way they use his eyes to show his reactions and emotions.
You can see a good example of the contrast in the beginning of the short;
When he drags himself slowly through the sand and grabs on to the palm tree. His feet starts moving really rapidly until they get a grip and he slows down again, out of breath. And then he slowly turns his head, sees the skeleton and after a seconds pause he realize what he sees and he freaks out and the moves are fast again. Lovely!

Finishing up component 1 and shooting reference for the 2nd

As the previous post mentioned I have now uploaded the new versions of the tasks in component 1.
(I mentioned most of the changes in a post added November 14th)
But I did a quite a bit more on the ball-animation and I think it looks better now. It's weird how you suddenly find several problems with a piece just by not looking at the animation for a couple of weeks.
I chose to use the days before the reference-shoot to plan what I wanted to shoot, but since I want as much time as possible for this last component I also worked hard to manage to finish up all the tasks in component 1. I had all of the feedback written down so I managed to do most of the changes that were suggested.
On the walk I changed the camera so that it's more of a 3/4 perspective view, this was suggested to me so that the audience got to see more of the animation. I also got rid of a lot of keys and re-timed it so that he's reaction became quicker. Also worked a lot on the overall hand and head movements.

(And as mentioned earlier; all the tasks can be found on the "Finished work" page.)

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So, reference shoot..
As always it was a couple of hours of pure fun. I'm really starting to enjoy these sessions!
It's social, interesting and sometimes completely bonkers. (I mean that in a good way.. Hehe.)
It can be a bit tense in the beginning, but that usually goes away after the first two takes. ALl in good fun!
I got some really nice reference-shots for my animation, and I have chosen to go with an edited version which is put together by three separate shots to match my original idea.
The reason for doing this is that the shot where we acted it out according to my idea on paper, the walk and overall acting was too slow and stiff.
The last two shots we did where much better, seemed more real and playful than the first ones. -
- But the positioning and acting where a bit off according to my plan, so I edited in those from the first takes and blended them all together.

(I have to versions of the reference-video, and I think I will be using both of them.)

So, here is my main source of reference:





And here is the other version:



(As you can see, the action happens behind the box, and I want the dog to sneak up on the character, but there is still a lot of things to implement in my animation from this one as well..)

And last, but not least a video just to show how much fun we have shooting these videos;



Good times!

The finished work.

Check out the new page called: "Finished work" to see the final versions of my animation tasks from component 1.
(It's found underneath the blog title, next to the "blog and wip"-page).

A brief update to keep you posted

I've been working on the walk all day and I think I have to wrap it up now. I have come to the conclusion that I will need all the time I can get for the last task, especially since it's 30% of the marks. So I will probably render the walk tomorrow before I head to the gym. We also have the reference-shot tomorrow, so it's a good day to let the computer work on it's own.

Show and tell, feedback and a guest speaker.

Today we had show and tell. It's changed a bit now that people are working on different tasks. I just showed my walk-animation today (the one I posted yesterday). I got good feedback on the animation-part, but the jump does not quite fit the character and story. So I've been working on the hands to make him "pull himself together" quicker, this meant getting rid of the big follow-through movements and also deleted about 40 frames to get the timing to fit better. He now moves quicker from the landing to the "macho"-pose. Personally I think it looks better this way as well.

Also, today there was a a guest speaker at the University. The speaker was Frazer MacClean and he did a talk on "the art of animation layout". It was really interesting and he has worked on some really big films, such as "Who framed Roger Rabbit" and Disney's "Tarzan".
I won't go in detail on his talk, but he did leave us with three wise words that I want to mention and those where;

-"Do your homework"

What he meant by this was mainly that if you are so lucky to get an interview with a company, you should use a couple of days to read up on the company's history and what they have done.

Lecture, character profiles and walk animation.

Today was lecture day and the topic was blocking. I had parts of this lecture last year, but it was good to get a "re'cap" on the topic anyway. Especially the part on power-centres, because I had almost forgotten all about it.
In short it is the characters personality/attitude/mood reflected from the inside and is one of the main causes to why a character behaves as he does. Very useful to find your characters power centre because it will help you in posing and to show the personality to the audience.
A high power centre shows a positive attitude, and the higher the more positive. The opposite is a low power centre and this is used for a negative attitude.

So I have made my character profiles for the Bringing it all together task:



I have also worked on the walk animation. After some feedback from Penny I was made aware that the jump was too slow so I have redone it and also tried to clean up some snappy knees, fingers and body movements. I also worked on getting more drag on the hands when Angus lands.
So this is how the animation as it looks at the moment:

A day revisiting the previous tasks & some research and planning.

Today I have mainly done work on the previous tasks. I had all the feedback I've gotten so far written down so I just read up on that and have hopefully improved the tasks.

The things that I have done are:

Bouncing Ball:
- Worked on the arcs on the basketball, so it does not speed up on it's last bounce.
- Added a bounce and more roll/movement on the tennis-ball at the end.

Pendulum:
- Added more movement to the tail on the way up.

Poses:
- Moved the character further down on the first pose, so it's closer to the drawn version.

Ball w/tail:
- Added movement to the tail when it has landed on the nut.

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While I rendered the new versions of these I put on a episode of a action TV-show, and instead of watching it I started to study the acting. Especially the heads and facial expressions in the scenes where the characters where angry or displeased. So this inspired me to draw some examples of what I saw:



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"Bringing it all together"

I did some more sketches on the latest task, just to show the relationship between the character and the dog and some attitude poses:




And here is my main source of inspiration for the task:



I want to try and recreate the relationship between a owner and his pet in this task, so I thought I'd use my own dog as a reference for this one.
(I've always had dogs myself so it was easy to find reference photos for this one..)

Weekend update

Been working on both planning the new task and the jump in the animation this weekend. Finally I see some progress in the jump, it's been constant tweak-work on about 40-50 frames so it got a bit tiresome at the end.. So I'm glad I was able to put it away and work on the planning instead when I became too fed up with it.. Hehe.

I have had problems choosing between two ideas for the "bringing it all together"-task.
in short the ideas where:

1. Character and ball w/tail playing hide and seek around a big box.


2. Character teasing a dog (ball w/tail) pretending to throw a ball. Eventually the dog get tired of the teasing, jumps on the character and they roll over.


But at one point I thought; "Why not combine the two if I can't choose".

So I ended up with this;



I have based the idea on my own dog. (They say you should choose ideas that you have knowledge about, so I thought this might work out.)
I always play hide and seek with my dog and I just love the way she behaves when she can't find me, gets a bit worried and when she finds me she almost attacks me full of joy and excitement.


And last, but not least here is a preview of Angus' jump that I have been working on:

A jump, some planning & a tweet.

Been working on the new jump in the animation today, struggling with getting the arms right. I have also made it him jump higher, since I got feedback from Penny who pointed out that it seemed a bit slow. It's seems to be working better now that I sorted that out.



But I have also started to play around with ideas for the next task. I'm still at the stage where I just draw down my ideas in small thumbnails and put them together as a "mini-storyboard", as mentioned earlier I find it easier to express myself through drawing than writing. I usually wait to write the story until I have a more clear vision of what I want to do.



(Image shows some of the ideas I did earlier today)

I'll probably go back to the animation again tomorrow, I want to get it as polished as possible before the next show and tell, because a lot of next week will be used on planning the next task since we have a video reference-shoot on Friday.

I'll hopefully sort out the issues I have with the arms tomorrow.

Oh, and if your not on twitter yet you should really consider joining it. I follow a lot of animators there. Just the other day a animator at Dreamworks tweeted that he was struggling with the movement of an arm and had ended up animating it frame by frame. I tweeted him that I just did the same with the knees on a character and he left me these wise words;

" @Kristian_Egge Anyone who says this stuff is easy isn't doing it right. :)"

- Goood night!

Working on the feedback.

This is just a short post to show the work in progress after yesterdays feedback. It was suggested to make the difference between the two walks more distinct and exaggerated, so I've tried to push it to the limit with this one. So here is wip on Angus' girly jump:



Otherwise I have sorted out the issues I had with the snapping knees, and made the walk a bit more tough so he walks with closed fists and less delay on the secondary motion and follow through.

Will probably work on polishing this part the rest of the night, but if I "go blind" on the animation I'll just move on to planning the next task - That's the great thing with have more than one thing to work on!

Walk animation

Been tweaking and polishing curves all day. I wanted to do as much as possible before the show and tell tomorrow so I haven't rendered the animation yet, I decided to rather use the time it would have taken to render and composite to work on the actual piece itself. So I made a preview of the piece that I will bring to show the class, hopefully they won't be too disappointed by the lack of lighting and fancy effects in the piece. Hehe.


So, here's the preview I will be showing tomorrow:




Now; time for bed! It's been a long day with a lot of work, but it's worth it when you see how the animation evolves.

Linear mode

So I moved over from stepped to linear keys this morning and have been working all day on adding in-betweens and additional breakdowns. It's changed a bit due to the time limit and also because I realized I might have "bit over a bit more than I could chew". I guess I could have made it work with the extreme pose where he leans over, but it would have needed more time to make it look right. So I went back to try and keep it simpler and also to give some more time to the transition from the skip-like walk where he crosses the road and back to the tough guy-act.

- At least to me it looks better the way it is now.

The last thing I worked now was the fingers. They are a bit tricky since it's my first time working on actual movement with this rig (only done poses with it before), but I think I will figure it out.

It's getting pretty late and my eyes are "blind" on the animation now so I think I'll call it a night. I feel I've gotten a lot done today and hopefully I will be able to move on to spline and start polishing the curves tomorrow.

Got some feedback from my room-mate so I have a few things I might try and work into the piece, such as subtle hand-movements, but that's tomorrow.

So, Here's a preview of how the animation looks at the moment:

Blocking Angus walk

I have been blocking this weekend.
Finished the key poses yesterday and timed it out so I have started to work on the breakdowns now. I still work with stepped keys because I want to get as much information as possible in there before I have to move on to linear keys.
I am struggling a bit with the transition from calm and back to "tough guy", but hopefully it will be more clear now that I am working on pushing the poses a bit more. I want to exaggerate it so it's easier to understand, but I don't want to overdo it either.. Tricky stuff.

The hardest part is definitively the walk. I hope the attitude shows, because that is the only way to show Angus personality in this task. Could of course make a really tough facial expression but in the end, if the walk doesn't show him as tough it won't be believable.

I figured out the tempo yesterday on my way over to the lab. I watched people in front of me and counted the beats in my head, and almost everyone walked in so called march-time. When I walked behind them I counted about half a second for each step.
I acted it out as well, but it varied from 1 second to 1,6 so I decided to go with the tempo that looked best when I looked at my animation, so Angus is now walking on 12's. (normal walk)

Anyway, here are some wip videos:

Key-Poses:



Added breakdowns:



I had to get rid of a lot of poses yesterday. Angus was originally stretching and looking around more when he waited to cross the road. But I found that I needed a lot more time to work with to make this look good. Don't want the animation to suffer because it needs to rush from pose to pose, so I got rid of it and tried to work on a more subtle way to show him waiting. The important thing is that he loses his attitude and becomes calm and thoughtful.

The planning I have done so far

Been planning the walk-animation all day and have finished the following:

- Character profile (with back story)
- Storyboard
- A drawn example of a "walk with attitude"
- A drawn example of contrast in the silhouette when the attitude of the character changes.

The last two are mainly to help me figure out how the characters attitude should be at the different stages of the animation.

I Used more time than I usually do on a storyboard on this one, mainly because I wanted it to include as much information as possible. There is a a rough outline of the walk cycle along with the usual explanations of what is happening in the shot.
But I thought it would be worth spending a little more time on it since I can use it as reference for the key poses for the block as well.

I put the character profile and storyboard together in one image for you to view:



PS: It is quite big so it might be hard to read the text, but if you right-click the storyboard image and click "open image" you will be able to view the image in full size, and also zoom in).


And here are the two drawn examples of the characters attitude that I hope to achieve:

Show and tell, some more reference footage and planning

Today was the show and tell for the poses. According to the feedback I got my poses seemed to tell the story. I might push the first pose on "waiting to start" a bit further down, so that he nearly touches the dumbbells, but he's scared at the same time. (I need to do some changes to the staging to make this work tough..)
Was a lot of good and fun poses so there where a lot of laughs in the classroom so it was a fun session. And as usual Penny brought sweets and that always makes us happy!

After class I went into town to get a new sim-card, because my new shiny Iphone 4s arrived yesterday! Afterwards I went over to Phoenix to meet up with Jørgen to help him shoot his reference, so now I also know the phone works excellent for that. I also did some new reference shots for my own shot, just to be safe. (Did this because I was a bit unsure about the reference shots I got from the Green screen-shoot.)

Here are the reference videos I will be using for the walk animation:





(I have edited bits and pieces from several shots to make these, I'm sure I won't need them all but since I found interesting parts in a lot of them I chose to keep it).




As the image shows I am currently at the drawing & writing stage of the planning.
So far I have worked out the character-profile and the story and also done some sketches on attitude-walk poses:



I need to refine the style of the walk and do some more polished poses before I start working on the storyboard, so I can get a better idea of how the animation will look.
I am also reading the chapter on walks in "The Animator's Survival Kit".
(Richard Williams, 2001)
And there I found a sentence that I will keep in mind while I work on the attitude of the walk, since it fits to my character (description posted on the 26th of October in the blog);

"Women often take short steps in a straight line - legs close together = little up and down to the body, as opposed to mister macho".

The finished 3D poses

Here are the renders of the finished 3D poses I will be showing at tomorrows and and tell.







(I polished and edited them a bit in Photoshop so they would look a bit better since I never get satisfied with my lighting..)

Lecture and feedback

Today we had a lecture on "Body mechanics". It was some parts in there that some of us had been through before (the ones that did Penny's character animation module last year), but I have to say it was really helpful to get a repetition on the subject because this is a big one..
There are so many parts of it that relates to physics so it includes a lot of difficult phrases and terms. But when these get linked up to the animation-principles it really does make sense, and it also makes it easier to understand.
The most important things I learned today was on
Internal and External energy/force.

In short;
Internal energy comes from "inside" the character, it is acted out and mind-driven movement.

External energy/forces influence the character/object from the "outside"
(the nr.1 external force is gravity.)

We also learned about "inertia" and "momentum" which are a way to describe that objects want to stay still until it is for instance; pushed (inertia). It then wants to keep moving until it is forced to stop (momentum).

The most important thing to remember is that; Movement has meaning!

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Now, over to the poses and the feedback I got.

As I understood it five out of six poses are working pretty good, the thing I needed to change was the first pose in "What's inside". I quite like the staging in that pose, but I agree with the feedback which was that it leaves a gap between Jack in the fridge and the next pose where Jack is sitting on the floor.
So instead I sketched out a pose where he is sitting on the floor with the jar next to him,
and took a reference photo:



On the "Waiting to start"-sequence I need to stage it a bit different so that the dumbbells does not cover up so much of the poses, because at the moment you can't see the character in full. And since the dumbbells aren't going to be used in the scene for anything else than helping me tell the story, this is just poor camera-staging from my part.

- Also need to stick to one camera for each sequence.
(to keep some consistency to the sequences)


I have finished the drawn version of the new pose "What's inside"-pose and now I'm going to work on the 3D version.

And here is the new pose-sheet with a updated story to match the new pose:

It's Halloween everybody!

Been working on the poses this weekend, and here is the result:



I hope to get some feedback on them so that I can improve them before the show and tell on Wednesday.
Now I'm off to dress up and enjoy the what's left of Halloween!

Feedback and a new pose-sheet.

Sent an e-mail to Penny earlier today to get some feedback on the poses. The "What's inside" got the "green light" so that's great. The "Waiting to start" was a bit to ambiguous, so I took Penny's advice and worked a bit more on the story. After the story was rewritten to fit better to the phrase, I started working on a new pose. In my opinion the last two still worked with he story so I decided to just redraw the first one.

Here is the sketch and the reference:




I took the new sketch and implemented some bits and pieces from the reference pictures I took and here is the final pose-sheet with the rewritten story and the new pose:



Hopefully the new pose and the edited story works better now.

I have also started modelling some of the props, only the important ones yet since I don't want to use to much time on that part. I found out that I at least need the fridge for the "What's inside?" and the chair and dumbbells for the other so that I can work out the staging and camera set-up for my poses.

The poses

This post will be mainly to show you how I have gone about to create my drawn poses. I haven't done any work in 3D yet, this is just to show my planning and the finished drawn poses.

I started with the six phrases we got to chose from:

1. Waiting to start
2. Late for...
3. What's inside?
4. Troubled
5. Er.. Excuse me
6. Overjoyed

I then tried to find creative and fun ways to communicate them.
I ended up choosing "waiting to start" and "what's inside?". An example of a early idea for the first one is shown here:



I usually think out the story while I draw, it's just how I prefer to work. It's a way of working out the characters personality through their attitude, shown in the poses. So I scribble down a few important bullet points under the drawings so I will remember what each one were when I go back through my ideas at the end of the day.

I came up with two stories for the phrases and started sketching the poses I thought could help me to tell the story to an audience. When I had the poses sketched down on paper I took pictures of them and redrew them in Photoshop.
(I also took some reference pictures where I acted out the poses, even though their not exactly the same as the drawn poses, they are really helpful and makes the poses look more realistic. It's especially hard to figure out the anatomy of the cartoon-like character that I use for my poses, but also to figure out what pose is actually "humanly possible" to do and not.)

Here are the sketches and the reference pictures:







I also tried to include the staging in the reference pictures, this was especially helpful on the first "What's inside?" pose, since I want to have a camera inside a fridge. And this turned out to be quite tricky to draw. So the sketch shows the side, but the reference pictures include the shot framed in front just like I want the first pose to be staged in the scene.

I then put together the finished poses with their stories and made two pose-sheets that I will use when I start working in 3D. The sheets include a brief character-description and a set-up for the scene.

This is what I hope my finished poses will look like: