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