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.