"Defective Detective"

Yet another great animated short I stumbled upon:



I thought this film was so good, loved every second of it. I like the really stylized character-designs, the main character has sharp features and a pointy nose and it works well against the small, more round and chunky design of the old lady.
The colour-palette is also very well done, dark and grey in the first half and warm and bright in the second.
Also liked the intro, the camera move over the old newspapers and then moves the camera into the main character reading a paper with his face on it stating: "our hero". Nice little joke straight away which makes you pay attention and want to see more.
The quality of the animation is very good in my opinion, a lot of contrast between fast an slow motions. The main character can be completely still in one moment and in the next he's all over the place. Also like the way they animated the rat in the animation too, very smooth and visually pleasing motion.

The story itself is simple, but it really works. The detective has been trying to catch the "butcher" for a long time (has boxes of newspapers and articles of him + the wall is covered with clippings). So when a red liquid substance hits his desk and he hears screams he instantly believes this must be the butcher on another killing-spree in the apartment straight above him.
His objective is to catch the butcher, but his obstacle is actually getting into the apartment and then overcoming his fear of what awaits him in the kitchen. I like the fact that we get to see what goes on "inside his head" as he hears the screams and stands there with his gun. Those 2D parts are very nicely done and they blend well with the rest of the 3D look.

Overall a very impressive piece of work. This is a student film that apparently has done quite well since it was released. It's made by two(!!!) students, so I must say reading that made me even more impressed. It's really inspiring to see student work as good as this!

The film is made by Avner Geller and Stevie Lewis and you can have a look at their blogs here:

AvnerGeller.blogspot.com

Chocosweete.blogspot.com

There is also some information on the production of the film at:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/brewtv/detective.html

Some more reference and another playblast

So been working hard on the animation lately so again it's been a couple of days without any updates
on the blog. I will try to make up for it now though!
As I said, working on the animation and it's getting close to the end of the piece now. As I posted earlier I like to work in parts (usually about a 100+/- frames at a time). I am now at 584 and think I'll take on the last 170 or so frames as one. It has it's more subtle moments so won't be too many curves too handle at once.

Maya is treating me very good, I must say I'm starting to "fall in love" with her/it more and more for each day. My work-phase has speeded up a bit too, so I guess all I need is time and practice and hopefully soon I'll be working almost as effective as I did in Max.

Since the last post I've done about 250+ frames in linear. I had a bit of a struggle with the transiton from Alfonso being pulled by a rope to the "ta-da" pose and back to the rope again. This part is definitively the biggest struggle in the animation so far. There was again a matter of the orientation on one of the arms, which made even the tiniest adjustment to one of the axis into a living nightmare. When Alfonso moves over to one side and builds energy to do the big "ta-da" pose the arms went straight out to the side, and it felt like I tweaked on the same 3 or 4 frames forever. I actually ended up deleting all the "problem-keys" and went back to stepped and built two completely new breakdowns. Wish I just did that straight away, but I guess I learned my lesson. I won't be wasting that much time when I come upon a similar problem in the future, that for sure. (I say when and not if because I know it will happen again.. Hehe).

I also came upon a problem with a small step Alfonso needed to do. He takes a step back when the director tells him to the box for the third time. And I saw that the breakdown I had doe for the foot was a bit too much. He lifted his leg quite high and this looked wrong, so I decided to do some more reference for the step to see how it should look.
Here's the reference:



The reference showed me that taking a step backwards isn't just a step forward in reverse. (If that made sense.. Hehe)
What I found is that when taking a step backwards the heel "pulls" up, compared to forward steps where the toe pushes the foot up.
So this made the step in the animation look a lot better and more correct than before.

Anyway, enough talk, here's a preview of the piece as it looks at the moment:

Sketches

So I did some sketches while I was at the gym the other day. Some of them look a bit freaked out when they see that I'm staring a lot, I guess that's the normal reaction. Hehe..
But when they see that I'm actually drawing as well as staring some of them even came up asking why I did it.
I got a couple of sketches of motion and a few interesting "attitude-walks" which I really enjoyed drawing, the sketches where way to rough to post as they where in my sketchbook though, but I've done some digital versions:

Long overdue update

It's been a couple of days without any updates on the blog, but been working a lot on the animation after the last feedback. I sent an e-mail to Siobhan and Penny asking for feedback on tuesday night and got an reply from Penny on Wednesday morning. My reason was mainly to get a second opinion since I was pretty much ready to take the next step and move on to linear curves. The fedback I got from Penny was very positive so I was really happy when she told me that the animation was coming along really well and that I could move on to linear.

So far I've done the first 314 frames. I do about a 100 frames at a time so I don't have too many curves to focus on, it just makes everything a bit easier to handle.
Here is a playbast of the first 314 frames with linear keys:



So far I've had some issues with the x-rotation on the upper-arm when he does the rope pull, mainly because the increase in x-value is quite big on very few frames, which then causes the arm to snap. But this isn't unfamiliar territory for me, so I just had to take the time to work it out. Luckily it's just happened once, and that's far less than ever before, so I must be doing better breakdowns this time around - which is good! Learned a lot from my mistakes in the previous module which really helped me work around a lot of potential problems for this animation.

I am actually ahead of the schedule I made for myself, I was supposed to start linear yesterday (24th), but I've already been working linear for three days. The good thing about this is that when I did my schedule I didn't include; "First time animating in Maya" - which apparently adds a couple of days. I work quite a lot slower than usual, but I guess that's normal when you change to a new 3D software. I have gotten used to most of the controls and navigation, but I still work a bit slower than I would have done in Max, so being ahead of schedule is really a good thing for me at this point.
My personal goal is to have the animation done by April 1st, which leaves about three weeks to plan and animate the two person dialogue piece. And hopefully I'll be working a bit faster by then.

Secondary breakdowns take two

So, been working on the feedback I got from Siobhan (as posted earlier) and also some feedback from Scott. Tried to work on making the head-position consistent during the whole piece and also moving faster into the "ta-da"-pose (open arms - waiting for applause) which Scott pointed out. He also mentioned the transition from standing to the rope pull in the beginning was a bit weak so I've tried to make that a bit stronger.

Sent the playblast via e-mail to Siobhan and Penny and posted it in our Mime-group on Facebook so will hopefully get some feedback tomorrow.
Might be moving it to linear sooner than scheduled, it's getting tight between the keys now and it seems to be working okay in linear in the tests I've done so far.

Here is the playblast, this one is still on stepped keys:

Additional reference-footage

Been struggling a bit with the wave, especially where Alfonso stops waving and he lowers his hand. The problem is mainly because of the axis in Maya and the FK on the arm. The X-rotation on the shoulder/upper arm has a big decrease in value from the wave to hanging by his side which causes the hand to quickly rotate and almost snap into place. So I decided to do some more reference footage to see exactly how it looks when I wave intensely and the arm "falls" down to my side. I should be able to solve it, it just needs some tweaking. But I thought some more reference might help me understand how it should look and hopefully I'll be able to make it look right in my animation too.

Here is the reference I did:



The thing I discovered is tat it all happens rather quickly, which might make it easier to fix the issue, since the pop will only happen during a couple of frames. This means that the worst case scenario is to manually force it into the correct position over those frames.
But I'll try to avoid that anyway.

Blogs worth checking out

Mark Kennedy - storyboard artist:


(image taken from his blog)

http://sevencamels.blogspot.co.uk/

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Toby Shelton - Story Artist at Dreamworks Animation:



http://tobyshelton.blogspot.co.uk/

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Rad Sechrist - storyboard artist at Dreamworks Animation:


(image taken from his blog)
http://radfordsechrist.blogspot.co.uk/

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Also found this article from Mark Kennedy's blog really useful:

http://sevencamels.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/true-comedy-comes-from-character.html

The article is about creating comedy in scenes, but using the characters to achieve it, not just funny gags and slapstick.

A memorable quote:

"The biggest laughs always come from watching characters react, think and take action."- Mark Kennedy

I think this post is very useful to us, not only for this project, but for the final project and all upcoming projects that involves comedy in any shaper or form. Both Siobhan and Matthew talked about this in the lectures as well, but again I need to quote Mark from his blog-post:

"The parts that I really laugh at are the moments where the characters are thinking, processing information and formulating ideas".

That's also what I discovered where the issue with my mime, there weren't enough time in the sound-clip to give the character the time needed to process his thoughts and THEN take action. So by editing the sound and adding more time I found that my animation seemed funnier than before. I did not add any action, I just made it possible for the character to think about the action before doing it.

I also need to mention that in this blog-post he actually describes the scene I used for my presentation from Tangled. (He did the storyboards). So fun to see the actual storyboard templates from the scene, and these simple drawings are full of personality and information:



As Mark writes in the blog-post, he really felt he knew Maximus, and he did not see him as a cartoon-character, but as a living, breathing character. This made it possible to create humour in the scene, since he knew Maximus would be too proud and stubborn to shake Flynn's hand in the beginning of the scene. Rapunzel is able to convince him because Maximus probably didn't have too much experience with women or "gentle manipulation".

- This really made me realize how important it is to really know your character before starting to animate. Planning sure is a big part of the final result. I am taking several mental notes, and will do my best to try and make it an even bigger part of my workflow in the future.