After finishing school I went to The Drawing Academy to gain knowledge of/and skills in classical drawing techniques. I then applied for the The Animation Workshop for the second time and struck gold! This blog sums up what I've done and is doing now, both in school and for personal fun...
A compilation of what I've done and learned during my first semester here at The Animation Workshop, starting from the famous and basic 'bouncing ball' assignments to the official mid-term test.
Background Music used: "Turtle Woods/The Pits/Night Fight" (Crash Bandicoot 2 Game Soundtrack) by Mutato Muzika.
The final assignment for our second Design class... My teacher had to help me with some more dramatic lighting, but otherwise this gives me a great sense of accomplishment... I learned a lot about rendering at least.
Of course I chose an owl-bear-creature. It couldn't be helped...
Learning about values has helped me understand how to indicate facial features faster... I like this sign of progress. I'm almost comfortable with doing these now.
Oh well, here's two page of it made with a 2B pencil.(pardon the class-notes)
(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.
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)
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.
Not sure if I like the rougher, sketchy look of the first one better - but here's some added work on the arms and smoothing of the face...
