Animation Process

As mentioned before, as there were some issues with my rig, I had to keep this in mind when it came to animating and know what my limits were. In some places I wouldn't be able to push the emotion as far as I would have liked, but I still needed to get the right feeling and emotion across to the audience. My animation workflow for this project has been the same as before, blocking out the main poses before adding in the breakdowns then taking these into spline. When using spline tangents, I normally go for auto-tangent as this ensures that the curves do not overshoot and that you are able to hold certain positions. This has worked fine for me in the past, however sometimes I have noticed the movements can be quite snappy and not flow as well as I would have liked. Last week I did some other work for another project and this was using the actual spline tangents. I found that the flow of movements appeared more natural and allowed me to achieve a smooth transition between motions. I would love to have tried this on my dragon animation, however I didn't have the time and by the time I worked on this other project, the majority of the animation was already complete. I didn't want to try it out and then for the animation to look inconsistent with the rest.

Ideally I would have loved to have more time before I got to the animation stage of my project in order to properly plan out all of my acting choices for my dragon. I feel that I missed out on this due to my tight schedule. In order to have everything completed on time and to start rendering, I needed to be animating 150 frames per day, every day. I have tried my best to get across the emotion that my dragon is feeling but in places, it's not as exaggerated as I had originally anticipated. I think after this project, I might go back and spend more time working on his performance and getting a better animation out of him. Even though I'm not completely happy with what I have been able to achieve, I am glad that I have managed to get it all done on time as rendering is taking a lot longer than I originally thought. I also wanted to get the animation completed so that it could be passed along to Josh Broughton, the composer who is doing my music, as he too had a deadline to meet.

Geri's Game

Geri's Game is a short animation created by Pixar which revolves around a game of chess. What's clever about this animation is that there is only one character, yet as it progresses you believe that there are two men playing the game. To distinguish from each other, they have different personalities even though deriving from the same character. Their personalities determine their expressions which create a really entertaining performance. This is something I want to try and achieve in my own animation, actions speak louder than words, so I want to create a performance with engaging gestures that represent my character's personality.

This animation has been shot in a way that only one character is ever seen, giving the illusion that there are two. It cleverly cuts in between actions, which also adds to the illusion, as if they were interacting with one another. If an action was carried out fully before cutting to the next shot it may not have worked as well as it does. Shot composition and camera layout is really important so I will need to spend some time working out each of my shots. I don't want everything to be shot on one camera or along the same plane, close ups of expressions and objects will highlight certain things more, such as emotions and the importance of an object. Once I've designed my environment I think it will be easier to visualise what camera will go where as I find working in a 3D space is more beneficial to myself.

Short Films

My animation contains only one character whereas many other short films will tend to have a couple of character in which interaction can take place. Instead my character interacts with its environment. I've been researching into other short films that contain one character and have come across the ones below. Even though they only contain one character, none of them are lacking in terms of interaction with another character, in fact, you become absorbed into the story and focus a lot on the character. An animation can be great but if there is no story that engages an audience then it's almost wasted.

Good idea + Bad animation = Good film

Bad idea + Good animation = Bad film

Bad idea + Bad animation = Stinker

Good idea + Good animation = Write your acceptance speech 

(Animation: The Mechanics of Motion Volume 1, pg110)

All of these films have the story and the animation. Whether it is funny or heartwarming, you are still engaged from the start, right to the very end. With Origins and Sapling, it shows the emotional journey of the characters and how by interacting with objects in their environment, the story unfolds.

Having one character keeps it more simple, if I were to include another character I would need longer or another person working with me on this project. It gives me a good opportunity to work on the story and the development of my character throughout the animation. It's going to be about his reaction to certain events and how he may overcome obstacles in his way. Snow Day has a similar concept to my own story, the want and need to achieve something yet it's a struggle to do it. It's entertaining to watch the ways in which the dinosaur tries to put a sock on. Because of his short arms, it's not possible, but this does not deter him. Nothing is easily achieved in life and from this people could relate to the dinosaur's struggle and end up routing for his to achieve his goal. Even through a comedic story, the audience should still be able to connect with a character and be able to empathise with them. 

Origins

Sapling

Saturday the 14th

Snow Day

Dragon Candies

Whilst researching into dragons and other animations, I came across this advert that revolves around a young dragon and his want for a ripe strawberry. As mentioned in my previous post, a young animal can be shown through proportions and this advert is no different. The head and eyes are much larger than the rest of the body, the wings are fairly small and look like they haven't fully grown yet which suggests a younger dragon. I really enjoy this animation as it contains subtle use of squash and stretch to emphasise and exaggerate certain gestures. The performance really puts across the dragon's personality and desire for this strawberry, and that's something I need to make sure I get across in my own animation. As there is no dialogue, performance is key, there is no tone of voice to suggest certain emotions. Whilst sound effects can be used on top the aid the animation, the performance needs to be believable in the first place or else the audience may not be able to connect with that character.

Watching through this animation, your eye will instinctively be drawn to the face, so this is where most of the emotion is shown, especially with the eyes. There are many subtle eye darts throughout to ensure that the character appears alive, but it also aids the performance and you get a sense that the dragon is very curious, yet slightly confused to begin with why this strawberry isn't fully ripe. This soon turns into anger/annoyance combined with a great amount of concentration. This dragon has a similar demeanour to mine so observing these subtleties will be of great help. I also have to bear in mind that there will need to be secondary action with the wings of my dragon, similar to this one. The wings are connected to the body so it will react to any movement coming from the spine. In this advert, the wings not only have secondary action, but they aid with emotion. If the dragon reacts happy or shocked, its wings perk up. This is an idea to consider and possibly work with in my own animation.

 
Dragon Candies: Strawberry from Tolm on Vimeo.

Joy Competition Animation

Only just got around to posting this now, but back in November, I entered the Joy competition held by Spline Bomb, in the end I didn't place, but it was a good exercise working without any sound. It was harder than I had anticipated as sound can really carry an animation and help it along. Voice or sound will have beats and you can normally animate to those, but without this there needs to be some sort of rhythm to the piece.

With the bear rig that I created, it worked okay, however there were issues with how much I could animate it without it being deformed. This comes down to the weight painting and if I had more time to spend on the rig, I would have liked to have made sure that it was capable of all the animation I needed. There are parts of the animation I'm happy with, but it needs some work. I think I would have found it easier if I could have constrained the hands to the bear, however I couldn't figure out how to do this without the arms deforming a considerable amount. I used FK on the arms instead, to ensure and constant contact on the bear, yet when it came to switching between FK and IK, I think this is where a few issues arose. I need to explore more into the switching and how to do it successfully and seamlessly, as right now in a couple of places the arm jumps quite sharply. I might try and revisit this at a later stage, and hopefully by that point I will have improved so I can go about fixing the errors.


Joy Competition from Siobhan Parkhouse on Vimeo.

Final mocap with keyframe

Below is my final motion capture with the keyframe aspects added in. In a previous post I had managed to get the motion capture to a workable stage with the cleanup of the data. I found that in some areas the performance wasn't as strong as I was hoping it to be, this may have been because of the data not being very accurate when recording. To get around this, I emphasised certain actions whilst trying to keep the main performance at the core. I found it hard to distinguish between what makes it motion capture and what makes it keyframe. Surely by animating over the top of the data turns it more into keyframe, so what is the point of motion capture? It's trying to find that fine line between the two, keeping the integrity of the actor's performance whilst ensuring the animation has weight and believability to the movements.

I chose to use iPiSoft as it was a more accessible piece of technology that is becoming more commonly used. I wanted to see how well markerless technology could capture a performance. It had its issues with the accuracy of the data, however when it did capture something, the movement came across as realistic and had subtle motions within it, something that may not have been able to be achieved with keyframe. Through doing this project I can see the benefits to using motion capture, it's a quick way to get a base performance down or to work out the layout of a scene in 3D space. If you do add keyframe into motion capture you have to make sure that there is stylistic consistency between the two, and for this reason it is why games companies may choose to use motion capture without the use of keyframe. It ensures that throughout the game the animation is of the same style, something that could be hard to achieve with keyframe if the animators have not had much experience with that. Both motion capture and keyframe can have their strengths and weaknesses, however it should be about the performance and the believability of a character. If an audience can connect and empathise with a character because of the believability and performance, then that should be all that matters.

Companies and Studios

Being a final year student I need to be prepared for once I finish uni, where do I want to work and in what area? My main goal is to be an animator but to get to that, there are a few different routes I could end up taking. Depending on the area of work whether it's games, animation or vfx can change the entry roles. Ideally a junior animator position would be a good starting point, however it seems to be more common within the vfx industry to get started as a runner. It's a good way to get your foot in the door and you can also get a wider knowledge of the industry and see how the studio works. Over the past couple of years I have been building a database of different studios in the UK and abroad of where I would possibly like to work. One site that has proved really useful is CGStepInside, it shows a vast number of animation, visual effects and cg studios around the world and is always expanding. What's interesting to see is the widespread of these companies around the world, and many in places I would have not even thought about.

The CG industry is huge, and I've already found out that for what I want to do specifically, that is character animation, my opportunities may be better outside of the UK. I know that for the next few years I plan to establish myself and get experience within the industry here, but long term I would like to move abroad and try and get a job in Canada or America. With those countries though, there is a lot of competition for jobs so only when I feel ready would I go for it (also have to consider money and visas and possible sponsorships, it's no easy feat!)

Even though I'm wanting to work more within animation or vfx, there is a site for the gaming side of things, similar to CGStepInside, GameDevMap. This too shows many games companies around the world and splits them into different categories, developer, publisher, mobile/handheld, online developer etc. 

Clumsy Ninja

I recently downloaded a game for iOS called Clumsy Ninja, I was initially intrigued about the style and how the animations would look. After playing it for a little bit I was really impressed with the overall aesthetic style and the animations, I decided to look into how the animation was created and found out that it is actually AI based. 

"Normally, game designers have to create painstaking animations that model every possible kind of behavior. They predefine what a game character will do based on certain inputs. But with Clumsy Ninja, NaturalMotion’s designers don’t do that. Rather, they create the character from the bones up. They do that just once. They imbue the body with physics, based on the Euphoria engine. So the arms will move like arms and limbs will behave in a realistic fashion. They marry that to artificial intelligence, which tells the character what to do in a given situation. Then they essentially let the character loose in a game world and see what happens. 

With canned animations, all you can do is play back an animation in response to something the gamer does. Clumsy Ninja can generate procedural, or on-the-fly, animations, based on actions taken by the A.I."

The standard of the animation is something you could see within short animations or even feature length films. There are some places where you can tell that it's based on physics simulation, however the majority of it I was very impressed by. It's interesting to see that this high standard can be achieved with AI and physics and that each animation is calculated in realtime. Seeing how far this can go in the near future will be great to see and what it can be expanded to from just a mobile game. As great as it is to see this technology, the animator inside of me is a bit sad that this wasn't keyframed. With the type of interaction that it entails, I can understand why it made sense to go for more physics an AI, but it would have been great to see even small sections or movements that were keyframed.

 

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

I went and saw Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 the other week after much anticipation. After seeing the first one when it first came out I was blown away with the animation and I love the aesthetic style of the characters. 4 years later the sequel came out and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was able to watch it with a greater knowledge of animation and notice things that I wouldn't have known about when watching the first film back all those years ago.

Cloudy is one of those films that is extremely cartoony, the animation is over the top and in many scenes the characters aren't restricted by human constraints e.g. stretchy limbs and breaking of the joints to create a more fluid motion in the arms or legs is a common feature that arises in both films. In animation you can break the joints, but it should be done in a subtle way that can enhance the pose, however because this film is so stylised it can get away with it as it fits in with the overall feel and aesthetic of the animated feature.

I've always been a fan of this style of animation and it seems to be an occurrence with Sony Pictures Animation as they used this style in Hotel Transylvannia. It's taking the poses and really pushing them to get an appealing performance. As an audience, you know that movements like this wouldn't really be possible as a human yet it is so enjoyable to watch. I think depending on the context of a scene would determine whether this type of animation would be suitable. As you can see with Cloudy it's not used throughout the film, just in certain places to convey emotions such as, panic, excitement, fast past action etc. Having a whole film in this extreme cartoon style would be overkill and it would lose its appeal.

I would really love to try out this style at some point as it's something I've held back on so far. It would be interesting to see how I would take to it and what I could achieve. What I might do for a test and to get to grips with this, is take an over the top movement from Cloudy and try and replicate it myself, then from this I could hopefully go on and create my own shot/scene.

 

Animation Competition - Joy

Seeing as I have been entering a few 11 Second Club competitions, I wanted to try and find another type of animation competition. I came across this one that is run by Splinebomb.com. I thought it would be quite a good one to enter as you are given a emotion to portray, in this case it's 'Joy' and there are more stricter rules to follow which gives me good practice to working to a specific brief. I'm only allowed to use one character, the shot should be no longer than 6 seconds and no music should be added. Without the use of music you are just purely concentrating on the performance and animation.

I've come up with an idea for the shot that I want to produce, a girl playing with her teddy bear and hugging it tight and smiling. For this I knew I would need to model my own teddy bear and probably rig it in some way in order to get movement out of the legs. Even though it is an inanimate object, something like a teddy bear will still have movement when picked up, held etc.

Below are some screenshots of my finished teddy bear and its rig. I was planning on using the HumanIK system to generate the skeleton for me, but I had issues with mirroring the joints. I found it a lot easier to place the joints in by hand and constrain everything like I've done before. Because of the bear's simple shape it wasn't too much of a hard task to get this all done.

I've started setting up my scene and I'm planning to start blocking this out this week. I have until the 30th of November so I think I'll have enough time. The rig that I have chosen to use for the girl is the Andy Rig by John Doublestein - I wanted to try using a rig that I haven't used before and I found this one seemed quite good and you are able to change the appearance of the rig from male to female and also the clothes and hairstyles.

Animation - Personal Project

I've recently been finishing off an animation I was doing as a personal project. As I had been doing a lot of animation with male characters, I wanted to have a go at animating a female. I decided to use the female mod of malcolm as I'm quite comfortable with it and wanted to see what I could achieve. I took the sound clip from 'My Best Friend's Wedding' as I really liked the tone of voice and thought I could play around with expressions a bit more.

Coming from my 11 Second Club entry in August, I tried to improve my animation and the flow of all the movements. I've paid a lot more attention to the whole body this time as back in April I realised that I just focused on the top half of the body. When one part of our body moves, it has an affect on other adjoining bones, so I made sure that there was movement throughout the body but in a subtle way. As always I took reference videos to help plan out my animation and made sure I created a thorough blocking pass before moving onto splining. The splining process, I did a bit at a time so it was more manageable and this way I could concentrate on each section and really try and polish them off. I've been trying to understand more about the graph editor, overshooting keys and breaking tangents to get more subtle changes between each motion. There's still a lot more I feel like I don't know and what I really want to try next is more exaggerated animation. The animations I've done so far have been quite realistic in the way I've followed my own reference almost exactly. I need to try and break away from this and really push the poses some more and go a bit more over the top with it.

The animation that is below is almost complete - I had already uploaded it to Vimeo as at the time I thought my file had corrupted and wasn't able to complete it to the extent I wanted to. Turns out it is fine now so I'm planning to go back to it and edit the eye darts, lip sync and render it out fully so it is showreel worthy.


Dumbest Thing from Siobhan Parkhouse on Vimeo.

11 Second Club - August

So it's been awhile since I last posted but I've been doing other animations in my own time including 11 Second Club in August. Compared to my previous entry I can really see the improvements. I really tried to use more controls and add in those subtle movements of the body. The woman was a lot more successful than the man, though I'm pleased with how his hand moves across the chair. I still need to work on my walks, this seems to be quite an issue at the minute but hopefully I can sort it out soon with more practice.

I got some good feedback overall and I'm happy with my progress. It's given me more confidence in my work by seeing how I have improved so now it's just down to more hard work and practice! I've got another acting shot currently blocked out that should be done quite soon, and then after that I think I'll be moving on to experiment with motion capture. If I get time hopefully I can put in for another 11 Second Club - it's always great to work on personal work, even with a given piece of dialogue.

 
11 Second Club - August from Siobhan Parkhouse on Vimeo.

Animation...near complete

I had a lot of issues with the animation as I was going through this module and found myself getting very overwhelmed by the whole task. Looking back at it now I feel like I could have done a lot better on some shots. I made the mistake of not create playblasts of some shots so the animation ended up being quick 'jolty' without myself realising until it was rendered out, at that point it was too late to change anything. I think I'll go back to it at some point and change the shots I'm not happy with, but for hand in it'll have to do. I didn't think I would get it all rendered out and completed on time so I'm impressed with myself that I got this far.

There are some shots where the lighting could be improved upon, the images below show the ones I'm on about. In one shot the man's face catches the light too easily and it can be quite noticeable. I tried turning off the shadows and making his face not casts shadows but this didn't work. In another shot I think I forgot to put another light in, hence the dark forest in the background. Just little things that could easily be fixed if I had a bit more time. I took each image sequence into After Effects to export out and also tried to do any subtle colour correction here. I also created the title and credits in After Effects too.

Animation Showreel 2013

I created a new showreel a few weeks back to include some more recent work. I've improved my animation skills a lot since my last showreel, so I thought it would be best to update it. I included my entry to 11 Second Club and also a weighted animation, along with scenes from the VFX module. I think it shows a range of animation skills but also shows my improvement over the course of 4 months. I showed this at the last All Animated meeting and got some nice feedback from it and it was nice to hear that other people thought I had improved a lot too. Keeping your showreel up to date is always a crucial thing, skills can easily be improved and new work produced, you just have to make sure that what you put in your showreel is the work you are most proud and confident about. If there is ever any doubt in your mind about a piece of work, don't put it in. When it comes to show your showreel to other people you need to be able to explain your work and your love of what you do needs to come through this.


Animation Showreel 2013 from Siobhan Parkhouse on Vimeo.

Chris Oatley: When Jobs In The Animation Industry Disappear

This post from Chris Oatley was posted a while back, showing his views on the state of the animation industry and how to cope with the lack of jobs being on offer at the minute. There have been a lot of layoffs within the animation industry lately, and as someone who is going to be graduating in a year it's quite worrying. The people who have been laid off have been in the industry a long time so going up against someone who is far more experienced than I am is quite scary. I need to remember to keep my morale up and don't give up.

Chris Oatley brings up a point: If your dream dies, what will you do?
I can't let dips in the industry discourage myself, I have to keep striving for what I love and my passion. I've come to realise that I don't get the same enjoyment or satisfaction out of anything but animation. Animation is my drive and I'm not going to stop pursing my dream, I may be scared or nervous about not finding that job but hopefully if I keep going for it, I'll get there one day.

No, I don’t think you can guarantee success with a great attitude, hard work and persistence, but you can guarantee failure without them.

I feel like I should be able to achieve my dream, I have the motivation, persistence and I always try and work as hard as I can. It will just be a matter of time and building up experience. All I can do is just keep working and improving. Practice, practice, practice.

You have absolutely NO control over fluctuations in the economy or the waves of change in the industry.

What you DO have control over is the quality of your work, your focus, determination, passion and imagination.

If the animation industry is in a downturn, don’t go down with it.

Stay strong.

No matter what, there will always be layoffs, in any industry you go in to, you just have to remember to keep going. If there are no jobs going, make some. Create my own projects to do in my spare time, by doing something it keeps myself proactive and shows that I'm not just sitting around letting my skills go to waste. This is something I will have to consider once I graduate next year, I'll most likely be moving back home until I can find a job so in the mean time I will have to keep doing small projects to keep my skills fresh. This would also be a good time to collaborate some more with other people and produce something we really like and enjoy.

Issues with animation

I'm progressing with my animation, however I know that it won't all be completed on time for submission next week. I'm going to try and get the most important shots done, polished off and hopefully rendered out. These will be the shots that will shows the most diversity and storytelling. I've struggled a lot with some of the scenes I set out to do, the one that really caused myself problems was the walk through the forest where the man is meant to be sad and defeated. I took reference of myself walking, however I just couldn't seem to get the motion and weight right. I'll work on it some more and hopefully be able to fix it or get it to a standard that I'm okay with.

I think what would have been beneficial for myself, would have been to get accustomed to the rigs before hand. I found that I was learning a lot about the rig as I went and it would have been better to use a rig that I was more used to. The Malcolm rig would have ideal to use as I have used it for previous work and find it really flexible and have a lot more control over it than Morpheus. The reason for using Morpheus was that it was easier to customise and change the appearance in order to make it my own character.

Initially I had planned for my animation to be around a minute, but after putting together the blocked out shots, it ended up being about 1:40. I'm not sure why it extended by so much, the lip sync may have been longer than anticipated and some shots may have been slowed down once I went about animating it properly. I did cut out a few shots that I found were unnecessary and didn't add to the story, however I forgot about other shots, which ended up bringing the total to around 21 shots. I think I've been a bit overwhelmed with this project and may have bit off more than I can choose. I'm going to try and get as much animation as I can do as possible, polishing and rendering out the most important shots. I will need to leave some time before the deadline to gather some sound effects to add in as this will just help move the whole animation along better.

Progression of an Animated Shot: Gothel & Rapunzel Disney's Tangled

The video below shows the progression of an animated shot by Jamaal Bradley who worked on Tangled. It's great to see the whole process and for this project I created pre-viz (layout) in order for me to get the positions of the characters and timing roughed out before I dived into animation. With Jamaal, he also did 2D drawings, other animators I've seen have done thumbnails before animating, so it was interesting to see that extra detail he went into before going into blocking. I can see the benefits of this as it can flush out your ideas more and give you more of a basis to work off, and from here you have a better idea of what you want to act out in the reference videos. It's also good to see how even though he is a male, he does his best to put himself in a female role in order to get the references. I've mentioned in a previous post about the possibility of getting an actor in at another point to take reference from them, as good of as an idea this is, it worries me that I know what I want to get out of it, and whether or not the actor will be able to portray my ideas. A lot of animators take reference from themselves, I need to get better at it and put more emphasis in my actions.

Going through the whole progression you can see the different stages, and how many passes there are for blocking and splining. For myself, I think I need to work on defining the key poses more as when I've attempted it, and then went back to add in breakdowns/in betweens it's come out a bit messy and I've found it easier to just work my way through the whole scene. Most animators will do it Pose to Pose rather than Straight Ahead Action. The advantages of pose to pose is that it is planned out more and this is how key framing works when using the computer. I do work with poses, however I tend to put the breakdowns with the key poses and work with it all at the same time. I'm not sure if this ends up being more time consuming or makes it harder for myself, but I think I need to try defining key frames more and working with breakdowns as this is how it's done in the industry. Everyone works in their own way but when it comes to industry, there will be dailies where you show the progression of your shot, and I need to have the blocking of the key poses done to show. I can't try and have every detail blocked out as there won't be time, that's why it's broken down like it is. It's something I really need to explore and experiment with further.

Another interesting thing is that with the lip sync, it wasn't put in until the spline process. As I've mentioned, everyone has their own way of working, and for myself I've found it useful to block out the lip sync with the blocking of the poses. I picked up this method through Keith Lango, who produces a lot of great animation tutorials. To me it made sense with what he said about blocking, put everything in in order to get a critique because then you know you're showing everything you've got. The director then can see everything, he/she won't have to second guess about something because you haven't put it in yet. For myself as well, I find it easier to put in the lip sync along with the emotion of the face and the reaction of the rest of the body, it just all seems to flow with each other. Your body is always doing something.

It's really useful to see the whole progression of a shot and the specific in-betweens  not just the basic blocking and straight to spline. I'm constantly learning as I go and this is just something to aspire to and to learn from.


Progression of an Animated Shot: Gothel & Rapunzel Disney's Tangled from Jamaal Bradley on Vimeo.

Animation Process

The main focus for myself in this module is the animation, I wanted to push myself further and work with more than one character on the performance and acting of the shots. As I've been working through the shots I've found it quite a challenge in some respects, as I've never really pushed my poses before and trying to achieve more performance is not as easy as I thought it was going to be. I took reference videos of myself but that in itself is something I need to work on. I need to exaggerate more when I do them, I think it's more of a confidence issue and being able to free up and get into the role of my character. In that respect, it's more like acting so I need to be more accustomed to the whole process.

Working my my pre-viz I had worked out the rough timings of each shot and from here I blocked out the main poses in stepped mode, before changing to linear to add in more of the subtle details and then onto spline. Some of the shots that I have been working on have taken me a lot longer than anticipated and has set me back quite a bit on my schedule. At the minute I'm just working through each shot (the majority are all blocked out now) and polishing up the animation. As I've been working through them I've realised I could cut a few of the shots out which will free up some of my time, but also they weren't really needed as they tended to be walking shots. Walking isn't storytelling unless an emotion is portrayed through it, a lot of the time you don't see characters walking to their destination. Instead you see them about to embark and their destination in sight, then in the next shot they arrive. If I had more time I would have liked to keep the shots in, then make the decision when it comes to editing, but at the moment, I have more important shots to complete which attribute more to the storyline.

The animation below is a test I've done with sound. It took me awhile to get the slap sorted, I took a reference video, but also looked at other examples. I think the sound adds more of a believability to it, as without it seems flat. I've added in some extra details, such as the movement/fidgeting when the man is sleeping, I found that without this it was lacking and there needed to be something else. I hadn't really thought about putting this in until the other day and for me, it really makes a difference. I think it still could be improved but for now, I think I'm going to move onto another shot. I find that if I spend too long on one shot I end up adding things that don't need to be there, it's best to get a fresh eye on it on another day. I want to keep adding these extra details in within the other shots, but only when necessary. Before this module I've never really gone into this detail, I've just concentrated on the main pose and left the rest of the body. It's something I need to practice more and get my head around as I always find it quite overwhelming as there is just so much to think about and do, what with overlapping and secondary motion, the little nuances to make it that much more believable. It's a process and hopefully it's something I can keep improving on and will get to a stage where I feel comfortable and happy with what I've produced. 

 

Exaggerated Performance

This animation is an example of an exaggerated performance. It really fits the style and tone of the piece and you can really see and feel the emotions of the character. In animation, you are always told to push your poses and put more exaggeration into it, obviously it depends on the scene itself and the characters you are using. For the animation below, it works, however if I tried to transfer this into my own animation I think it would be a bit too much. As the animation is really stylised and cartoony it makes sense to have an over the top performance. I really do love the whole shot, the performance flows from one pose to another fluidly and the whole dynamic is really powerful.

I would like to do something like this but I don't think it would be appropriate and wouldn't fit too well, as even though my animation is stylised, it's not cartoony enough to pull off the whole exaggerated performance. That doesn't mean however that I can't still push poses and get the extremes, it just won't be as much as the animation below. I've never really pushed my poses far enough before so it will be a new challenge for myself, as I have to make sure that the poses I create will be believable and fit in with the rest of the performance and the story itself.


Muffin Jack & Jeremy - Acting test from Salesman Pete on Vimeo.

Animation Practice

So I thought I would get in some more animation practice as I had some spare time just before and during Easter break. I wanted to get a pushing animation done as this is one of the basics and something that needs to be practised. I made sure I created reference videos so I could analyse these and refer back to them when animating. Reference videos is something I always do now, they are so useful, trying to do it from your head, I find just doesn't work. There may be parts of the body that move without you really noticing unless you analyse that video.

From this I broke it down to key poses which I started creating within Maya. I decided to use the Malcom rig, courtesy of AnimSchool. It's a really good, comprehensive rig that I've slowly got accustomed to. There is a lot of flexibility within the rig, stretchy limbs, IK/FK switch, good amount of facial control and the ability to use abxPicker (unfortunately I had issues with trying to get this to work within my Maya so couldn't get to try it out).

I really took my time with this animation to try and get it as good as I could, whilst I had the time. I made sure I got feedback from several people whilst in the process, to see what I could improve on and if the timings were correct. As you can see below, that's my blocking stage before I went into linear. I followed the same workflow as I did in the visual effects module and can really see the benefits of it. Below the blocking is my final animation, I spent the time cleaning up the keys in the graph editor and making sure the curves were smoothed out. This extra time does help, it smooths out the animation and makes it more fluid. I lost some work near the end and had to redo a lot of it, but it was for the best really as I ended up doing it better than the last time and in a quicker time. I've learnt a lot by doing this, and got to use the IK/FK switch for the first time. By changing the arms to FK, it allowed me to have the hands stay in one position whilst the rest of the body moved. The next thing I want to improve on is rendering, I want to render my animations out nicer, for example how Animation Mentor do it. By the looks of things it might be ambient occlusion or final gathering, but I will look into this further soon.