Project "Uglerede" - The Danish Film School collaboration

(The project name is the Danish word for "owl's nest")

We had director-students from The Danish Film School in Copenhagen come over and direct us to animate chosen segments of their own storyboards.
The idea was to practice communication and teamwork between director and animators and also between animators. We had several scenes between us that were immediately adjacent, so keeping awareness of the other guys' first and last keys were vital for continuity hook-ups... Good practice. :)

"Uglerede" was the story that my group was given.
The director also provided a loose model-sheet for the character that we had to make more 'animate-able'. We pretty much used the first day in pre-production, deciding on a mutual style and coming up with compromises so that we all reached a look that we could draw consistently and that the director wanted...
My second draft-sheet ended up as half of the influence. I had got the graphic style closer to what the director wanted, and the other animator who influenced the look had got the proportions right...

Here's the part of the ref-material that I provided:

With my great love for drawing birds and especially owls, this project was almost as if made for me ;D
That's why I chose the close-ups, particularly a scene with a difficult angle and motion. It's the project that made the most people go "how do I make an owl cry?" simultaneously... I've never had this much fun on a depressing scene.

For clarification; the storyboard is about an owl woman who is heartbroken after losing her boyfriend and is moving into her apartment, which is really lousy, she realizes how alone she is, starts crying, but ultimately decides that she wishes to forget her boyfriend and recover from her heartbreak...

I picked these scenes:
Sc_12 - mid-shot - she takes off her soggy, wet hat.
Sc_30 - face close-up - straining (to turn a radiator-knob)
Sc_32 - mid-shot - she gives up, throws her head back and cries, is about to fall to her knees

Thumbnails for these scenes:

Here's the fully inbetweened, tied-down ruffs. For copyright purposes, the full animatic is not included.

 
The bag-strap is missing in some of them, but those are ol line-tests. It is drawn on the final scans we will provide for the director...

At least now I can draw an owl crying desperately... But with that beak I'm glad our project involved no lip-sync.

Conductor - Ruff Animation

Rock on, Ludwig!



Seriously, I love Beethoven. So when that turned out to be one of three orchestral sound-options I just HAD to pick this one...

Our second assignment in acting; a conductor showing clear key-poses. It was also our first attempt at sync'ing to audio.
Model is Danny the cat from "Cats Don't Dance".

This is probably the most cartoony style I've tried so far. I'm very happy with the accents, but the first couple of arcs after the initial beat are a little rugged. They were almost fully inbetweened, but I had to take them out again because of bad spacing, which killed the animation.
This has gone through big changes - mostly because I made some very chaotic and unreadable 1st pass keys; however, after cutting about half of the unneccessary gestures I had large enough gaps between them to work on the subtle physics... (recoils, cushioning and staggering)

Also,
smeared frames = wacky animation = fun

Acting/Interaction assignment 1

First assignment from teacher Fabian Erlinghauser (whose work I know from Secret of Kells, just off the top of my head. he animated the scene we had to inbetween earlier, btw).

We had to animate two characters hugging (story is that they haven't seen each other in a long time). It was very important that there was a size difference and that both characters' faces could be seen, so we had to take that into account with our staging. Time frame was rather loose, anything from 75 to 125 frames...
The characters were Hogarth from the Iron Giant and either the Sultan (a taller version because we had to upgrade him to Santa-size, haha) from Aladdin or Kala from Tarzan. I chose Kala because her model was more challenging and I'd been walking the easy street with the last character assignment.

First some thumbnails...

 At least I can draw gorillas now...

The 3 story-telling keys were the most important (as they always are, really) and needed the most on-model focus; all the other keys were just meant to be rough, loose sketches.

Some of my early action looked like this:

But here's what I finally came up with and settled for:

The release and last looking at each other frame was added at the very last minute of the process. I felt that the scene didn't breathe at the end without it.

Kid and Cookiejar (comparison)

Here's the final inbetweened version of myself as a kid plus a cookiejar.

Here's a comparison between my first 2nd pass keys and the final keys,inbetweens and timing tweaks for this week. Pardon the amateurish Picture-in-Picture effect, but I'm teaching myself Adobe After Effects these days...

I'm very happy I changed the 2nd pass keys, they were not very well thought out.

hands practice + lecture thumbnails

As I mentioned in an earlier post I'm working on a 5 sec scene with myself as a kid. I've had a lot of trouble with a balancing part, which was due to some bad and unnatural key-poses. Today during lecture I finally got my act together and re-did the middle part of the scene here. So these are alternative keys that I traced onto separate frames and linetested into the scene - and eurika, now the scene is much more fluid! I've realized that I like this thumbnailing aspect of the trade. Frames 4-5 definately need a breakdown.

Got inspired by a blog-post by Toby Shelton. I love hands, they're a great secondary acting device... So I tried out some angles.

Thumbnails from Disney's "The Rescuers". We're currently very focused on how Milt Kahl animates. This sort of doing croquis from frame-surfing is very fun and personally I get a great overview of how the keys play out. I'm definately going to make a habit of this whenever I get in-over-my-head or confused with a scene just like in the 'kid-scene' mentioned above.

Oh, and here's my "unrelated sketch of the day"...

-emotions-

Teacher decided we should have a little sketching fun drawing the basic 4 psycholigical states on a simple character. The 4th word is supposed to be scared, not surprised; I just copied down the wrong note...

Then we were told to do the same states, using roughly the same poses, but to push it further, taking into consideration aspects such as readability, shapes and silhouettes. Upper sheet is 1st attempt, lower is 2nd attempt.

My personal favourites are the second attempts of angry (lower left) and the scared/surprised ones. They have a nice flow.

Inbetweening assignment - Aisling

We were asked to inbetween a keyed-out 1-character scene from "The Secret of Kells". I already knew this movie and loved its visual style. However, trying to uphold this style in inbetweening made it a much more difficult task than let's say something softer or squishy.

The teacher made some small changes in the time-charts to ease our burden. The end is mostly keys on 'ones', so most of our workload lay in the beginning, where the movement is much more subtle. It was tricky, trying to determine a third of a milimeter, but I loved the practice in interpreting time-charts. I feel that even though this is technically considered low-brainwave work I feel like I've gotten more comfortable with the workings of time-charts. Seriously, those scared me...

(Her mouth had overlapping with the main keys and is supposed to be on a separate layer, so we could just disregard that part)