Pantomime shot (now fully rendered)

Finally figured out how to properly batch-render that pantomime shot.

Acting/Dialogue - At the diner

2-week assignment with teacher Mark Oftedal.
Choose an audio-track and create characters and background story, including possible subtext to the acting. I won't bother you with the details, rather I'll let the video try to speak for itself...

I decided to challenge myself and came up with a scene that required animating several constraints and some cheeky switching between object-duplicates.
Good scene-planning really helped speed up my process and I largely avoided technical issues this time. Glad I'm getting over my fear of constraints and making the most of them instead.

This is the scene as I presented it for final dailies, only a few minor details left to tweak, which I will do over the winter-break.



And here's the (very helpful) video reference I shot of myself. I found a way to play both roles, thus being able to take as makes times as I needed to get the timing and the beats just the way I wanted them.

Acting Pantomime

Kevin finally got an internship at the big city news-station, but forgets to bring the right notes to his first anchor-job.




I ended up not being able to decide which ending-pose I wanted, so I tried to fit them both in there, and instead it just mushes the action up. Hm. I should learn to kill my darlings by now...

Anyway, this was fun and Michael Berenstein's method was really helpful to me here.

And while I'm no master at rendering, here's a frame showing the Lighting-rig I set up.

Midway Test: Sneak, Notice, Take

Despite some scary skinning-glitch on the jaw, I managed to copy my process so I didn't have to re-do everything up until the moment I discovered the error. That'll teach me to test the rig fully through before blocking anything out.

The story I made up for this test is as follows:  
Character backstory: Charles is a married man in his late twenties. He is very neat and easily agitated and sensitive. He had a strict mother and an emotionally absent father, which has left him a rather quiet fellow. Even though he is shy Charles enjoys the company of others. He prefers to keep his mouth shut, lest he offend someone.  
Story of the shot: Charles has forgotten his coat at his mother-in-law’s apartment. He is a bit afraid of disturbing her and not wanting to be of any trouble he sneaks back in to fetch the coat on a cupboard. He hears the floorboards creak and turns to see his scary mother-in-law in her underwear (because she was about to go to bed).

Trailer Project: Kwaidan

The final look of our half-year long Trailer Project: a re-imagining of a Japanese, expressionist ghost-story anthology from '64, Kwaidan. With a very interesting cast-choice. Really impressed with the CG Artists of our group, they worked very hard on this and I think it really shows!


I animated four of the shots, as you'll see here at the end of my Midway Showreel, showing everything I've been doing since September.


I feel I've almost gotten comfortable with Maya by now...

Parkour escape (2-shot)

First assignment using the Norman rig. He's alright... The assignment required the implementation of a referenced parkour movement, along with some acting constistent with the back-story of the chase-scene...
This young man has been wrongly accused of theft and is now running from the police. The police in his town is notoriously brutal and so he fears for his life...




I'm very happy with how the two shots hook up. Needs few more frames and less exaggeration on the stopping-recoil; it looks a bit silly right now.

Seven faces and a lift

6 faces showing basic emotions, plus an seventh of any choice... Please enjoy my flirty DreamWorks-face...
This was my first test with the Morpheus rig, who, by default, has this Jimmy Neutron hairstyle. This rig can be morphed into pretty much any shape needed, so it's great for many different kinds of characters and body-types...

And here's my desperate attempt at animating constraints... The weight of the box is questionable at best. I regret not using Morpheus for this assignment, since I couldn't switch between IK and FK mid-animation with Hogan here... Poor planning will be punished.

4 more Maya assignments

Here are the next Maya assignments (playblasts):
1. a bow (with a backstory and fitting acting)
The story here being a young man wanting to present a flower to the girl he likes. Unfortunately she's known for having a violent temper and he's caught her at a bad time - so he is cautious, but also hopeful his gesture will appease her, rather than give her a reason to beat him up.
2. a generic walk-cycle
3. a character walk-cycle (here a cartoony sneak)
4. a run-cycle

Trying to emulate weight-physics in 3D is surprisingly fun.

Early rig practise

Continuing where we left off after the Luxo-lamp rig - explorations and assignments featuring more rigs provided by the school: a floursack and a simplified, but well-rigged human character called Hogan. 

• A sack drop
• Sack hop-cycle (which I regret looks like a bunny)
• Hogan; 7 still poses to fit assigned moods
• Hogan weight-shift
• Hogan doing a tennis serve (no wonder these players injure their elbows so often)
• Nico, early facial rig test

That last rig is a freeware download for non-commercial use, called Nico. It's an incredibly well-rigged quadroped model that I've started to play around with for personal practise. As of now, he is still too complicated for me, but it won't be long before I'm doing stuff with this guy. Right now I'm just having fun getting to know the facial-controls.

The Nico rig can be downloaded here for free, for anyone who makes an account (which is also free).

Introduction to Maya assignments

The very basics - we have returned to the infamous bouncing balls.

And some practice with a simple Pixar Luxo Jr. lamp character. I loved acting with this guy. Pole vector was a bit glitchy, but this is only the beginning.

Fair warning, the last part of this clip has balls performing to music. Also, these are just playblasts - we're not in this for the rendering...

I'm really starting to like Maya and it's technical approach and its many different possible ways of doing thing; it IS an acquired taste.
Physics become harder to portray properly and convincingly, but at least the model is consistent by itself now.

These two weeks have been very fun, even if a bit frightening. Maya is not the most intuitive thing - but it IS very powerful and versatile.

Fun with makeovers

Here are some ruff character expressions as part of a re-design of this old character of mine:

My Special Friend

Didn't even realize how much I missed looking at colours; what with all the black-on-white sketch-a-thon I've been doing...

Fun with Acting: nervous/apologetic

3 keys for a little acting practice with a new style I'm exploring - as seen on my new blog-header.
This is fairly close to how I would draw people given absolutely free choice of style...

1st year exam - FINAL -

A week of final exam assignment. We had a three panel storyboard in which the character Danny (oh god, not that spaghetti-cat again!) comes stumbling into the scene to pick up a ringing phone, he gets it takes a breath to speak, but realizes that the caller has hung up. He then has to change his mood to resentfully look at the phone. I did the action pretty straightforward, as the storyboard called for.

Still, ignoring the fact that I'm less than loving the character model, it was still fun.

Flash Introduction (Dialogue)

First animation in Flash... Good for tweening effect and for lazy animation that doesn't involve actual drawing... For classical character animation... it is the most unintuitive tool I've ever come across. It makes me miss TVPaint. However, I had fun with this particular excercise...

We had to make our own character and lipsync to a soundclip. It had to involve some acting of the hands. Basically we we're told to go nuts with the various tweening tools. This was mostly done using Classic Tween, but after dailies I have now thrown in a bit of Motion Tween as well. Also, we didn't learn how to control easing in/out in tweening until afterwards, but I threw it in where I could, without messing up the parented symbol-motions.... :S

Dialogue is from 'Deadwood', I think...

Dialogue Animation

Characters chosen are Gerald McBoingBoing and 'the cat who hated people' (no name given).

I chose this sound clip because it had a lot of energy to work with. This taught me a great deal about how to move a character in a fast way, using smears and rapid settling, over-shoots etc.
Lip-syncing was surprisingly easy; hadn't expected that.

The backstory for this scene is that Gerald has some anger issues - he doesn't take well to being told what he can or can't do... He's a child, so he throws a fit.

I really enjoyed having Mike Polvani as teacher. Swell guy, I'll miss him.

---
Also, here are some sketches of the day...

Non-dialogue Acting

Some secondary-actions focus, a character (Bernard from "Rescuers" here) waiting for a blind date. 125 frames. I chose an anxious/nervous feel.

Also, we did walk-cycles earlier, and I was not happy with the copy-paste outcome of the first one I did (the realistic walk) so I spent some days re-tracing and properly inbetweening the legs and getting a better view of the arcs. (it's a gif file, so if you're using Explorer it runs slow)

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.