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:

Show and tell and video refrence for the walk animation.

Today was the second show and tell. Yet again there was a lot of fun animations on display, really enjoy these sessions. They are both entertaining and helpful at once.

The feedback I got was to add a little more tail movement when the squirrel lands on the nut to make it act more like the behaviour seen in the rest of the animation. Sounded like the rest of it was working pretty good, so I'm quite pleased with that.

After that one of the students asked Penny if it was possible to use book the green screen-studio to shoot our walk-references. She got right on it and we actually got to use the studio from 2-5 today. Almost the entire class showed up so we all got 3-4 versions of our shots with different actors to get more variety in the shots. I am not completely sure if I am happy about my reference yet, I'll have to have another look at them when they get uploaded to the server. (The reason for this being that I had not thought about the walk yet, still working on the poses. I had a brief idea of what I wanted, but it might be a bit too much of a cliché..)

The idea is based on what I saw on my way into town the other day;

A huge "macho-guy" was walking towards me. He had his arms way out to the sides, chest held high. There was a zebra-crossing between us, and as we approached it the guy still looked kind of threatening, until he pressed the button and had to wait to cross the road. My initial thought was; "He's not stopping for anything" - But he did stop, and he suddenly "fell into" a much more relaxed and non-threatening pose, almost as he's inner self came through the "tough shell" for a brief moment. When the lights went green he suddenly went back to his macho pose and started walking all macho towards me again.

The references I got today might have been a bit too exaggerated, but I'll just have to wait and see. There is still time to redo the reference if I need to.


Otherwise I am working on my poses, still drawing and trying to come up with new stories for the characters and settings to put him/her in. I think I will be working on this for a while, the better the drawings are the easier it will be to pose the rig when I eventually open 3dsMAX. Good planning is just as valid for this task as any other even though there is no actual motion, so I think it will be useful for me to do it in that order.

Lecture day and preparaion for show and tell.

Today's lecture was on walks since that is the next task after the poses. We saw a few video examples of walks, my personal favourites where to videos by Richard Williams (author of the "Animator's Survival kit" and animation director on "Who framed Roger Rabbit") which showed a lot of walks, but also how fun and interesting it can be to study people for improving your animations.

What I remember best from the lecture is that you can have an exaggerated walk in your animation, it's both more appealing and entertaining, but if you don't have a realistic walk to sculpt the exaggerated walk from, it with all end up looking unrealistic and unappealing.

We also went out of the classroom for half an hour to study people and how they walk.
We could chose ourselves how we wanted to take our notes, so I did some really rough sketches and added additional notes to them to help me remember later on.
Here is an example of a few of the walk-poses I managed to sketch down:



(It's probably hard to read anything out of these sketches without the additional text that belongs to them, but it's mainly posted here to illustrate how I go about when I do my observations.)


I also brought my "ball with tail"-animation with me to the lecture today and got some more feedback on it. A few minor changes was suggested. So when I got back from the university I got rid of the squirrels reaction when it lands on the box and instead of it stretching and the tail goes stiff it now moves/slides over to the edge, wiggles the tip of his tail and jumps down on the nut. I think it worked out better this way as well so the feedback was very useful. It also shows that the squirrel is aware of the nut falling down and is determined to catch it instead of being surprised by it.

I have rendered the version I will be bringing along to tomorrows show and tell and you can view it here:



Now I am going to leave the laptop alone for a while and start planning the next task at hand; the poses.

Alternative endings to the animation.

Got a reply from Penny, and I found out that I did indeed not for-fill all the criteria in the brief the way the animation was in the last preview. She gave me a useful tip on how to solve this, so I sat down and came up with alternative endings. As Penny said I could have the squirrel jump off a box in the beginning and then I could keep my old ending.
But I also had a fun little idea I came up with while I was at the gym this morning and I had written it down on my phone just in case.

I ended up going for the idea I had written down, since it seemed like a fun challenge.

I also got some feedback from the MA-group on Facebook, so I have worked on the speed of the slide to make it look more believable.

So this is how the piece looks at the moment:

A few poses

Took a break from animating and drew some poses. Except for the boy "eating candy while walking" and the guy "checking the time while walking" which I saw on my way to the store today, the poses are polished versions of sketches I have done during the weekend.