Developing ideas

Scott and I went to a café after the gym this morning and sat down to try and develop the idea for the mime further. We both like the concept of "mimeland", but we had some concerns about the audition part of the idea. So we sat down and started to throw out suggestions and after a few silly ideas and some laughs there was a moment where it felt like it all came together. The idea is to make it into an audition for a film, and the off-screen voice is a overambitious and slightly ridiculous director that yells out scenarios that the mime's has to act out. And as the mime finishes his act, the next one gets an even worse scenario to act out. Not sure if it should end with a mime break out of character and show his frustration or if he is going to impress the director so much that he gets the part.
Anyway, this is still work in progress and it might not be the idea we go for, it's just the idea we worked on today.

Em could unfortunately not make it in to town today, but we have kept her up to speed on what we did and we are all meeting at Uni tomorrow and will continue developing the ideas. I guess the goal for tomorrow should be to decide on a final concept so that we can get the story down on paper and start working on the storyboard and plan it further.

Otherwise I have also animated a bit today, or to be honest animating is stretching it a bit. I have just done really basic stuff like bouncing balls and some posing. But it's all been done in Maya and it's slowly starting to make a bit more sense.. I've also borrowed the "How to cheat in Maya 2010" from Scott so been reading up on some stuff in that too. Hopefully I'll be able to learn enough so that I won't struggle too much when we start animating the tasks.

The mime - Early concepts

Here are some rough scene concepts for the mime-animation I have made:

A park:



Kid's birthday party:


Half-time entertainment during basket-match:



A dark basement in a club:



"Crossing a bridge" - (Fairytale):



These are all rough ideas, but the problem I have is including the audition-part of it. It could be auditioning to get the job as a entertainer in most of the cases, but in the fairytale the troll is an obstacle and the audition would have to be changed to an attempt to get across the bridge. (these are issues we need to discuss in the group and talk to Siobhan about).

I showed these to Scott today and we both like the fairytale/mimeland idea best.

But when I got home today I laid down on the bed and tried to think of other ideas, so after an hour or so I came up with some new concepts to pitch to the group.
Here are some sketches of the parts/jobs/roles that the mimes can be auditioning for:






-That's it for tonight.

Acting for Animation

Since the last post there has been a lot going on, it was Animex-week! Won't go more in detail about it than telling you that it was fantastic, as usual. I attended almost all the talks and I got to speak to some really interesting people both in the lounge and after the talks. I also attended The "Acting for animators Master-class" with Mr. Ed Hooks, it was such a great experience and I learned a lot from it! (Also showed him my presenter-animation for feedback like last year, always helps to get his point of view on it).

So, back to the important part of this post: The new module!
It's called; "acting for animation"
and there are three tasks in this module, these are:

Mime Audition - ( Group task where we in teams of three shall produce a short film consisting of three individual animation pieces featuring three mime characters. The pieces will be assembled to make the final short. I have teamed up with Em and Scott.)

Two character dialogue - (11 Second club) This will be a challenge, I haven't animated two characters in the same shot since last years creative animation module and that was just simple characters without any particular acting and no lip sync what so ever.

Presentation - We will do another presentation; This time it's on the acting-principles. We all picked subjects from a hat (literally) and I got "Achieving empathy not sympathy".
I think my notes from Ed Hooks workshop will be useful here.

The "scariest" part of this module is that I am going to use Maya for the first time. I have been using 3DsMax for nearly 4 years now and I'm very comfortable with it and I feel I know my way around the software. The reason for the change is that I want to become a better character animator and I need to add more personality to my characters, but 3dsMax only have two functional free rigs it just gets tiresome to look at the same rig all the time - they are also less appealing to look at than other rigs.
Maya is also a bit more angled towards film-animation than Max, so that's also a reason to try and change.

The group for the mime is set-up so that we have one Maya-animator (Scott) who can help me and Em to learn the software faster. It will also make it easier to assemble the individual animations in the end if everything is done in the same software, because at the moment we are using three different software's.

- I have been playing around in Maya for the last couple of days in addition to looking through some tutorials. So with a lot of work and even more help I'll hopefully be able to figure out the basics and most important parts over the next couple of weeks.
(Also; Em and I have already decided to work together on the MA-project so we want to use Maya for this as well).

All the clips are found in the AP 2 page at the top

Final thoghts

So, Animation Practice 2 is done and I figured I'd write down some thoughts on how it's been.

Honestly I have enjoyed it a lot, these have been really fun tasks to work on and that has been important since we spend so much time working on it.

I won't dig too deep into details, but I just want to say that these tasks seem to be making us all into better animators. I mentioned it before, but I have learned so much over the past weeks working on these. Especially the song and dance. And that made it even easier to avoid problems in the presenter.
I have also learned that my characters don't need to move ALL the time, so hopefully a lot of the "drift/floatiness" has disappeared from my animations as well. I actually see a difference myself.

I also used this knowledge to revisit the lip sync and went over the curves again and personally I think it looks a bit better in the version I handed in than it did in the last show & tell I brought it to.

The song and dance where supposed to have a cam-cut to emphasise the characters wink to the audience, but I tried it out today and the cut where just to rough and made the whole piece seem a bit distracting. So I left it out.

Lastly I want to add some sketches I did while rendering the tasks;








All the tasks are found in the AP2 page at the top, (remember to watch it in HD)

-And enjoy!

(Btw: The time/date on the blog is as mentioned earlier completely wrong, so just in case; it's Friday and it's 11:45 PM)

Thursday/Friday

Today has been a VERY productive day. The linear-version of the animation I posted here yesterday I also posted in the MA-group on facebook for some last minute feedback. I basically just got the okay to carry on with it, so since there weren't any suggestions to changes I then moved into spline this morning. I have polished the entire animation + animated details, such as fingers, facial expressions and polished/tweaked the lip sync, so I must admit I'm quite happy that I managed to do all that in one day.
(To be honest it's about 2AM so I guess I went a bit over.. Hehe)
I would of course have liked to go over it again just to polish a bit more, but I found out I at least needed to complete a hand-in ready version before I dig too deep in the details and end up with something that's only halfway there.

I do have until midnight to hand in so I might do some more polsihing tomorrow.
I have made a "schedule" for what's needed before hand in;



There is a lot of post-it's lying around when it's close to deadline!

So, tomorrow's plan is to assemble the two other tasks, set up lights + textures and render the presenter (and maybe dig into the details if I have time)

Calling it a night now, my eyes have been staring at this screen for 14 hours straight today.
- But it feels good to have got so much done!

Wednesday already?

So yes, it's getting close to hand-in and I'm in crunch-mode (Working non-stop) on the presenter.
I won't use too much time to explain where I am at, so here is a preview of the piece as it looks at the moment:



This is in linear-mode.
I'm trying to push the piece to make the comedy show even better, so there is a lot of fast moves and exaggeration like drag on head/neck and chest. It's fun to try something new, even though it's difficult to get the timing right, but hopefully I'll get a decent result when I'm done.

I'm working on the lipsync now, just so that I know it works and then I need to start figuring out blinks and fingers. I think I'll add some details in linear and then move into spline and do the rest there.
It's a new way to go about the animation-process for me, but after going through the Keith Lango tutorials I see the point of working like this. (Not sure if I'm doing it exactly the same as he suggests, but at least to some degree, especially when it comes to post-ponding details).


By the way, I found this great site that shows the animation principles:

http://art-eater.com/2010/07/test-1-darkstalkers/

The principles are found all over the web and in the books we use, but the nice thing with this site is that they use animated gif's from a video-game to show the principles "in action". Old subject, but with a new twist, at least I found it quite handy.