AM Q5 ASN2 Dialogue Week 4

This week is the start of a new assignment. This Assignment I will have until the end of the quarter, this one will be two character dialogue scene.

Here are my audio clips, the first one is from Serenity, the second one is from Office Space and the last one is from Planet of the Apes, I didn't list the source in the video because I got kinda chewed out for being excited about clips because of their sources. I picked these 3 clips out of a total of 12 that I found and showed to people and probably twice that many that didn't work for one reason or another.

 

This is my character description and scene description, hopefully you can read this if not well you'll get the feeling for it from the pictures and from the later animation I will do.

Based on what I can do with Bishop 2.0, I created these sketches for my potential characters and sets.

I have already hear from my mentor on this assignment and I got and A, which is awesome because those are hard to come by, and he was impressed with my drawings which was also a feather in my cap seeing as he was an old school animator for Disney. He really liked number 1 and number 2, those were my favorites as well, I am kinda leaning towards number 2, I have a better idea on what I want to do and what it is going to be.

This week I also had to make another face, I really like doing these assignments. I bought two books all about people making faces a reference for artists, one was all adults and one was babies to teens. These books are great references for people making faces, I could do with out the images of people using them to make art, those seem kinda dumb and make it seem more like a joke then actual reference book. Great books though and I recommend them.

AM Q5 ASN1 Dialogue Week 1

New quarter and a new mentor, the mentor I have this quarter is old school, Jay Jackson, who learned from the Nine Old Men and who worked on films with Tim Burton. I am very excited to learn from a mentor
"No school, like the old school."
-Frank Thomas The Incredibles

This week I kinda worked out of order, I did start with my reference but my reference didn't really capture what I wanted. Though I feel I need to look at it more and taker note of the times where I do extenuate the words and find more small things to add to sweeten what I have. I also need to do a pass where it is just my mouth. Need to make sure I brush before that one.

 

After shooting reference and kind of ignoring it I went into the animation, I don't know why, I think I just wanted to play around and then I just couldn't stop. I ended up with something that I am actually kind of happy with. It helped me to tighten up the body in some parts and to better know what to accent with the body. I kinda needed the face to know the body. Even when I draw I start with the head and all things lead from that.

 

After the animation I did some of the worst planning drawings I have done yet . I know I can do better and I think I will do better next week. Need to figure out a time of day to start doing animation every day.

I am looking forward to next week and getting some feed back and just making the shot better step by step.

AM Q4 ASN2 Week6 Dialogue

YAY! I finally get to animated a character with a face, I love drawing faces and I love working with animation face rigs.

I shot reference for this assignment however, for some reason I was feeling really self conscious and out of my element having to shoot it on vacation, so I really didn't like what I did and didn't find them useful (so I am not going to bother to post it like I usually do). So when I went into planning I decided to just ignore it and try and do something better. This actually led to how I want to plan animation from now on. Before the way that animation mentor kinda taught me was to film reference first and then do sketches and now I want to do sketches and then film reference and change the sketches to fit the reference. I still need to re-shoot reference for these shots but I think it should make things a lot faster this time around.

SHOT 1: the idea is that this a high ranking knight (I have been reading "A Game of Thrones") is sending his lacky squire to go retrieve something for him, the knight is preoccupied with something else in the room playing the squire little mind.
SHOT 2: a creepy, vicious and soft spoken sweet shop owner who has a malicious relationship with his customers sees a regular who loves a particular candy that he buys exclusively and the sweet shop own is out of the candy and takes great pleasure in pointing out to thus man that he is out of the candy.
SHOT3: a father playing with his daughter who is a selfish who always wants more, he is fed up with her materialistic attitude. He can not take any more when she was complaining about how the couch she just bought her was wrong and she wanted the nicer one.

AM Q4 ASN1 Week3 Redux No More Milk Blocking Part2

So last week, my mind was all about working on the part where the character was tired, I am not sure why. I think it was different from what I have been doing, but that is not where the entertainment is or where the point of the scene is. So I kinda needed to go back to the drawing board and needed some new ideas for the ending. I decided to go back to planning. I started by going to facebook and asking people what I should do, after my mentor that we should consult with more people and that it doesn't matter where an idea comes from. Facebook quickly devolved into something unhelpful and very internet like, it was not the most focused feed back. Though it had some cool ideas and helped me to actually think of what I wanted to do that would not be cliche. After I figured out what I wanted to do I filmed more reference, where I broke a bowl trying out my new idea, for that reason I only shot it once, but I was able to get everything that I wanted from it.
Revised page 1
This is very similar to the last planning or more it has the most repeated drawings from my last planning. My mentor said to nix him turning to the fridge it didn't add emotion and it just wasted time. This was great and gave me a lot more time for the tired part to be slow and for there to be more ideas in the angry part.
Revised page 2
Here are all the new ideas that I had for the little tantrum that the character has, I have him slam the empty jug down, throw the bottle cap and then shove the bowl of cereal back into the box. I know when i discover there is no milk when I have already poured a bowl of cereal I put the cereal back. With that in my i figured this character was so mad that he wanted to do that but was too angry to simply do that and just shoved the cereal bowl into the box. I also like the idea because it leads to lost of big fast movements to be a counter point to the minimal movements of the tired part.

Revised blocking for this week
I feel like it could still use some fine tuning, I didn't have the best time management skills this weekend and could have spent more time on it, but I feel like I have all the ideas there now and that I could move into splines and refine as I go. I am looking forward to my critique and I want to try and show it to more people and get more feed back so I can be doing splines all week.

AM Q4 ASN1 Week1 Redux No More Milk

Once again back into the breach.
This Quarter my mentor is Melanie Cordan and she has quiet the impressive resume. She seems super nice and intense as a mentor, I am really stoked for this quarter this I feel will be my make it or break it quarter.

It took me about half the week to come up with the concept for this. I kept trying to figure out a catalyst for the change in emotion, this assignment needs two different beats where the character changes emotion. Last time I did this I tried to have the character have an internal shift, and it just takes too long for 10 seconds of animation. All the other ideas had to do with the character getting hit on the head, which felt too cliche' and then one morning I drank all the milk and Laura was none too pleased and I thought this would work great for a change in some ones attitude, from tired/ lethargic to angry/ energetic.

I started out by shooting video reference again, I feel a little out of practice and I have to be mindful that I am in an apartment now and can't just bang about really loudly. I wasn't 100% on what I wanted to do so i tried to shoot 10 different attempts. From those 10 I decided that these 3 were the best of the different ideas that I came up with while we were filming the piece.

Based off the video reference I started picking and choosing my favorite parts, the first shot was my favorite and i tried to base most of it off of that one and I took what I wanted out of the other ones.
I stated as I usually do by just kinda hand animating/ laying out the scene in photoshop, however this time the end result was less then aesthetically pleasing. Because all of the action happens in a limited space it's hard to see the variation in the movements, I usually take up more space in the scene, so the layered effect was not very effective. However, the point of this is to get my break downs looking correctly and help me to make it all flow and look correctly with each other. (I already saw my crit, because I forgot to post this on Sunday, and my new mentor Melanie was to take this and make an animatic with it, which sound like a great idea)
page1
page2
Based off of my critique I need to work on the ending where he is mad. Some of the things I did were kind of Cliche and I need to add more fury and make him a little more animated in the end. I have a couple of Ideas on how I can improve them and Melanie gave me a couple of starting points for me to jump off of to improve the idea. I am really looking forward to getting back into Maya and doing some blocking.

AM Q4 ASN1 The Painters Lament

Whoo! Another quarter has started and I am excited. Had some trouble getting started but once I did you couldn't stop me.
This quarter I am in Introduction to Acting with Dave Vallone, who has been in the business for 25 years and has done it all. he seems like a cool laid back guy, I'm looking forward to having him as a mentor.
The first assignment is to have two different beats, I chose to star out with a happy painter who steps back and looks at his piece and realizes that it sucks and then becomes very sad and decides to quit. I started out by filming this reference.

I ended up filming like 40 or so of these, most of them were very similar, I don't think I need that many in the future, or next time I will try and make them more different. I picked the 8 best to put into the reel to show my mentor.
Based off of my reference I started planning out my shot. I wanted to make sure that when I planned the shot that I left the character more open to the camera. Most of my reference was in profile, not the most dynamic angle for silhouettes. When drawing this I tried to get as many poses in as I could, it ended up making it look more like a mess then usual, however, I felt when I took any out that it felt bare.
Here is a closer look with some more break downs as to what I want to do. I tried to add as many break downs as made sense and adding as many actions as I can, I probably have too many, but it will be easier to cut things out then have to think about what to add.
I have already got a bunch of great suggestions on how to make it better. I think to make it work the best I need to play down the change from Love to sad. Make him step back and instantly know that he sucks. I think I need to shoot a little more reference with that in mind. I am going to try and keep it in the 10 range this time. 40 was far too many.

AM Q3 ASN2 Final and ASN3 Video Reference and Planning sketches

The Critique I got this week was hard for me to watch, because it was so true and so easy to see the errors afterward. Pretty much watch Jalil told me to do was to look at my reference and copy it as best as I could. So I started over I re-blocked the shot watching the reference and started getting my key frames from the reference.

I don't think I broke a lot of my keys down enough before I moved into splines, wich has lead to some linear looking movements at time, lesson learned. This shot is not done, and it needs more refinement, but it is well on it's way. The first 100 frames are the most refines and I spent a lot of time making sure that the sword arcs are really smooth in that section. The only down side is that it make the elbow do weird things and now it has a jittery quality to it that I'm not 100% on how to fix, because I tracked the arc on the elbow and it makes a smooth arc, but looks jittery.

For the next assignment I wanted to do something easier with less big broad movements and more subtle and direct movements. No more swords! So I decided to go with drinking.

The thing taped to the counter is supposed to represent a keg. I tired to tape little paper horns to my hat, I don't think they were good substitute for real horns, though luckily Laura has given me a a big drinking horn from Scotland so I had that. Next Halloween I need to buy a viking hat, for reference. Based off of the reference I came up with this planning.
Here is the lay out with the key frames. I'm going to have to make some barrels or hope I can find some free models on line.
I'm looking forward to refining assignment number 2 and for working on my next assignment.

AM Q3 ASN2 Video Reference, planning and Blocking

After my e-critique from Jalil, I decided to start over and redo my reference and my planning for this scene. He suggested that I use something that I can actually hit with all my might so that I can get better arcs in my body and more honest acting and poses. He said to make it simpler and to take out any walks that I had going on it it. So I spent a couple of hours shooting reference, it took me a while because there was a guy across the way working on some ones roof and I felt really self conscious. Though I shot it twice after the first time I found out what I really liked about the scene and I was trying to capture different subtle ways of doing it.

After shooting the reference I did my planning drawings. I found a lot more interesting actions to do this time including the sword rolling off the shoulder and moving into an attack stance. I feel that could look really slick.



I e-mailed my new reference and drawings to Jalil and he said that I need to hit the "tree" harder, I'm still holding back. But he said that some other guy from Weta saw my drawings and said they were really nice, so I got that going for me.

Though I didn't get that e-mail until after I had already finished my blocking because Weta is in New Zealand and is a day in the future and He doesn't answer our e-mails on weekends and I sent the e-mail on Friday.

I feel pretty good about my blocking. I think I need to do some more reference with the sword hits and to vary those two hits a little more. But this is a great start.

AM Q3 ASN1 Final and ASN2 Reference and Planning

The final animation was due this week and I didn't quite make it. This week felt like two steps forward and one step back the whole time. I actually made a lot of changes to my animation, however, after I got pass the brick wall I had when working on re-blocking most of the scene I was pretty much out of time. This week I am starting on Monday and going to get as much done as possible. Not going to let this happen again! I am also going to continue to work on this shot and take it as far as I can. I hope that my mentor Jalil will continue to give me critiques, if not I will have to start bugging my friends.

This is also the start of Assignment number 2, I wanted this one to be the counter point to the first one where the first one was chaotic and haphazard, I wanted this one to be more subdued and controlled. I don't know if it is reading the way I want or I am just tired and hate everything. I think most of it will be in the timing.

Note to self week 8 go out and film reference with a friend, last time it went so much better when I had the help of Rick to act it out and just do some different things and give me ideas. I feel like a lot of my reference is all the same. Maybe I will try and hang out with a friend this week and shoot some better reference, damn why does it have to be raining this week.
Yes I know this looks like a jumble, in all my other addignments this worked really well, I guess it is all too close to one another to work well visually. I was also surprised when I brought in a render from my scene from last week and that the spacing was really close to how I drew the planning for the last assignment. I didn't even know, it was kinda cool.
Here is the break down where it should make some more sense. The shot has pretty much 3 steps, he picks up the sword, he hacks at the tree and then he kicks the tree down. I'm hoping that I can get some subtle animation going on, where he is breathing heavy.
I am hoping that due to the fact that there are less keys that I should be able to add a lot more interesting texture in my timing and get more a sense of thought from the character.
On a side not I plan to give the viking character a beard, mustache and an eye patch, so no matter what it will be more epic

AM Q3 ASN1 VIKING reference and planning

A new quarter, a new mentor and new exciting assignments. This quarter I got Jalil Sadool an animator at Weta, he has a reputation as a tuff love kind of kind of mentor, I'm looking forward to it (and dreading it) becuase I know it will be tough but it should help me to be a better animator which is the whole idea. This quarter I am doing the animation Jam, where we pick a theme and animate a series of exercised in the theme, when the week started I was overwhelmed with the possibilities and had no idea what to do. Then I looked at all the props that they gave us and found I could make him look like this!
It was now clear what I was going to do. VIKING WARRIOR! So seeing as I wanted to the animation jam the idea is to make 3 different excersizes that embody this theme and relate to one another with out be necessarily seamless. So my idea is that in the first assignment that he is a viking in training and he isn't very good. Then assignment number two he is still in training but he is awesome! Then in assignment number three he goes out to fight the mythic beast, played by our old friend Ballie.

So this week I was hanging out with my good friend Rick-O and I asked him to help me film my reference video. I didn't have a real specific plan, just to have the viking use his shield and sword and attacking a tree (pillar) with mixed success and then reacting by running away. Here is the best of what we came up with, we shot 36 shots and I picked the best ones that had similar things going on in them that I really like.

We filmed a couple of other ideas too but I liked this idea that he screamed and ran looking all crazy and bad ass and then when he hits the sword flies out of his hands and he freaks out throws his shield and runs away.
Page one
I drew out the whole scene with the staging on top of each other like a 2d animation along with arcs and general notes about how I plan to break up the scene.
Page two
Break down sketches of all the keys with notes on how to change between them. I needed more break downs for the run, but it would all just be a repeating cycle of the run and I felt it would be redundant. I feel the hardest part is going to be this swing over the head.
Page 3
Fleeing away very timidly breakdown sketches and notes, again here I didn't full draw out the keys because it is a simple bent knee run.

After shooting the reference I am really excited to start animating this! I can't wait to hear back from my mentor and get a feeling for his critique style.

Animation mentor Q2 ASN3 Backflip Blocking02

After last assignment I was determined to get my blocking in splines this week, so I had more time to clean them up and figure out how to keep nice hold and get smooth splines. Try and get that elusive "A."

This week I decided I wanted to add some work with the hands because nice hand animation always really wows me so I added a brush off after he gets up. I first Shot reference for the end of the shot.

Based off of the reference I drew these panning sketches.

I added these keys to the blocking, which went really smoothly and added a few additional break downs. I had thought it was going to get complicated and messy for some reason, but it was pretty straight forward.

This week I got into refining, I decided to post the stepped key blocking as well as the refining because I think the Blocking looks stronger in stepped keys. Though after I spend some more time cleaning up splines and and working on some of the timing I think it will be pretty good. Though I do like the feel of stepped keys for some reason, feels more like 2d animation which is awesome.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 2 Polish and Assignment 3 planning

This week was a lot of work, I should have taken my blocking into splines last week, however, I wanted Chad's opinion on what I had before I did. Had I splined out my animation last week I would have found I had not blocked it very well for splining, because I had changed the poses in the spine in inconstant ways. So I had to delete the whole spine and redo it. It took me a long time to commit to deleting the spine, but in the end I think it was the only way to go. I was much happier with my blocking then I am with the final product. I lost some of my holds that I really liked and the timing changed too into something that just wasn't as punchy. I mainly focused on trying to have nice arcs and smooth animation. I hope chad has some good feed back on how I can work the animation and make it punchier. I learned a lot from this one that I feel will help me a lot in the next assignment.

I originally wanted to do hop on one leg and fall down. But I felt it would end up being too similar to my last one. Plus I had some trouble when it came to splining this one so I wanted something straightforward. So I decided to do a back flip off a box (yes for some reason I feel a backflip is easier then a fall) so I went to Youtube and looked for back flips off a building. I combined 2 videos for my reference, for some reason, all the really good back flip videos cut out the part where the guy anticipates the jump off the building.

From The video I made some planning sketches. In the end I may need some more, but this time I am going to try and keep my blocking less detailed and watch the splines.
I broke those down into the individual Keys and breakdowns.

I feel pretty confident in my ability to pull this off. Going to try and get a lot of blocking done next week so that I am able to spend more time cleaning up the animation.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1 Polish and Assignment 2 planning

This was the last week for assignment number 1, this week I turned in my polished version of my animation. It is really smooth and i'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure when a more seasoned eye sees it there will be some errors that I can tweak but for myself I am really happy with how clean it is. Never got it this clean at Ai.

I also started assignment number 2. I chose to do a drunken stumble, because i thought researching this part would be alot of fun. I'm always amazed at how difficult it is to get get drunk when your plan is to get drunk but not sick. Needless to say I was unable to get drunk enough to do a proper drunken stumble, but I think my acting skills make up for that.

From the reference I created my planning drawings. I only did the main keys, except for the last line they are broken down a little more. But last time I did this I found more inbetweens when I was working on the blocking. So i figured that should all work out well.I wasn't really sure what to do with the second page. I did the same thing that I did last time where I layer all of the poses on top of each other and it turned out looking really clutter and made me feel like it was missing something.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1

Ref Yay quarter 2 has started! I'm in Psychology of Body Mechanics and my mentor is an animator named Chad Seller who works at Disney Animation studios right now.
The first assignment for this quarter was to pick an action from a list, there were about 10 of them varying in difficulty. Students were supposed to turn the actions into an animation and work on it progressively for the next 4 weeks. I chose to do jumping over a gap. When I was reading the list the first thing that popped in my head was the scene in "Up" where young Mr.Fredrickson jumps over a small gap in the sidewalk.

The best way to figure out how to do the jump is to do it myself and film it. Reference footage helps for noticing small things that one wouldn't think about as well as provide me with real body mechanics to refer to.

Planning sketch 01
The assignment didn't have any limitations beyond the motion. Though after watching the lecture I decided to give myself the limitation of 120 frames and to try and make the character look proud while he is doing this action. I decided to do this with some cocky hip gestures.
Planning sketch 02
This is the break down of the motion, all the key poses with notes going along with it to explain how the motion works. I didn't add any real frame notations on these notes. I feel that that should be a much more organic process and something I have to see and feel right now. One day I hope I can look at an action and just know the timing.

The next step and the next assignment is to block this motion out - so stayed tuned.

AM week 11

Week 11, only one more week to go and I will have completed my first quarter at Animation Mentor.
The animation assignment this week was to finalize and polish the character walk that I blocked out last week. This week it started out really rough until I redid my blocking then everything just fell into place.

Igor walk. I really want to do this walk with a torso. I think I will work on that.
Week 11 Balance sketches. The assignment was to have the character have more weight on one leg then the other but have the pose still look balanced.

Week 11 balance STU pose.


Week 10 Exhausted pose revisions. I seem to perpetually choose the wrong sketches to go forward with. I usally base my disision on what other people think works the best and what I feel I can pull off. That seems to lead me down a cliche and boring path. Here are two poses that I didn't do that my mentor liked.
Week 10 Exhausted pose revisions

AM Week 10

Week 10's assignment is a character walk. I decided to do some one with a limp, which quickly turned into an Igor style walk.

Reference video that I filmed of myself so that I could break down the motion.
Planning for the walk

The Blocking for the Igor walk. Next week the final version of the walk
Week 10 Exhaustion pose sketches
Exhausted STU pose

Revision on last weeks assignment, I'm still having some problems with knee wobble, i'm not sure how best to track the knees and how to make them not wobble.

Animation Mentor Week 8 and 9

Week 8 assignment was to block out a vanilla walk (a plain and boring walk) and week 9 was to finish animating the vanilla walk.








Week 8 planning


Week 8 blocking


Week 9 walk
Week 9 Concern Sketches
Week9 Stu pose

Poser 1

Week 2, 3, 5, and 8 we had sketchbook assignments where we pose a character to personify certain emotion or ideas.
Week 2 observed real people
Week 2 Stu Pose
Week 3 excitement
Week 3 STU pose this is the one I turned in I needed to pick something more extreme and with a better curve in the spine.

Week 5 devastation
Week 5 STU pose, I did a revision on this one but I like this one better. This was too subtle in emotion. I need to exaggerate the emotions a little more make them more like cartoons.
Week 8 physical strength
Week 8 STU pose