It's not easy to find a solution with picking, 1 -4 images that sum up three years of work, but I think this might be it. I might tweak the glow on the Genie a little bit and the green background colour before hand in but this is the gist of it. What do you think please?
After the feedback from my 4th Artefact, not only did I want to add the second layer of animation, but more importantly was that I had to contextualise the animation for the viewer. Hence, I have given the Squirrel a start and end pose which fits with the yawn and put sound of a boring voice over the top.
If you have any other comments please leave me a message
I feel that these images will best represent me in the catalogue for my exhibition. The showreel will tell another story which is more about the animation.
Please let me know what you think of the design and layout. Cheers!
For my forth artefact I am exploring the timing of acting. As an example, in this animation I am making this squirrel yawn because it is a really great exercise to further understanding how to space apart moments of acting and how long they hold in place for. I've almost finished, but if anyone has any material worth reading or watching that focuses on timing in acting, please let me know.
During the Spring Holiday I was able to have a weeks work experience in the very prestigious company; The Mill.
I arrived on Monday not knowing what to expect. I met another runner before starting and we were taken to the kitchen and given Mill t-shirts. I was now a runner at The Mill. They explained that because they were so busy at the moment, HR wouldn't be able to provide me time with an artist in my particular interest. However, I still had the great opportunity to explore the building and meet everyone.
At first I was really shy about approaching the artists while they work, even though it was a very relaxed professional environment. Fortunately I was paired with another runner, Dan, who had been there a couple of months and new quite a few people already, so he told me to approach one of the artists he knew very well and ask him a question. When I did this it gave me the confidence to talk to anyone so i'm very grateful of his encouragement. - There was this 'theme' that consisted throughout the week of everyone trying to help each other out.
So I began to talk to a lot of the 3D artists and some of the compositors too. I met a tracker, Nick, who once was a runner but got promoted and he introduced me to one of the lead animators!! Once i started talking to the animator, Dave, we got on really well. Some of his work was Chicken Run, Creature Comforts, 10,000BC and Hellboy II. Amazing animator! After we spoke for a while he suggested that I come back tomorrow (Tuesday, the second day) and test my animation on one of their rigs. This was exactly what I wanted!! So for the rest of the day I quite happily cleared away peoples mess and finished promptly at 4pm!
When I finished I met up with the tracker again who was working on till 5pm and he said that I could shadow him for an hour to see what PFTrack and the basics of tracking was like. This was a great little tutorial for me. Nick mentioned that another one of the artsts was going to be giving a tutorial on Massive at 6pm. So when we finished there we went over to a board room and sat in on a fantastic half an hour session about Massive. It's an incredible piece of software that I would really like to experiment with in the near future.
The next three days were again a shift of running 10-4pm. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday evening and Thursday evening and afternoon I worked some more on my animation test. This was a Walk Cycle for a Dinosaur called 'Van Gogh Creature' (pictures below).
On Thursday I showed my animation to the Head of 3D. He said it was cool (as I am a junior artist) but I should show it really to another person who knew a bit more about animation. So it's a shame the other person couldn't have seen it. But talking to the head of 3D, I got his e-mail address and the other person who I was told to contact again in May, when my showreel is finished and enquire about working at The Mill as a junior animator!! This was music to my ears.
So after four LONG days it felt like a very short week. But I did all that I could. I spoke to many people there, gave my business cards out and made a few very good contacts. I'm looking forward to keeping in touch and hearing from them soon.
Anyway, here are some pictures from the week...
If ever you have the chance I recommend going to The Mill. It's a great place to work!
Soundtrack: The Cinematic Orchestra - To Build A Home
Right then. Back from the Holiday (oh little how it was) and i'm getting ready for the FINAL TERM OF FINAL YEAR OF FINAL ACADEMIC EDUCAAAAAAATION. Yowzerr!
Here is the final product I handed in on Friday 26th March. The first video is the full shot for the Robot Sheep Dog and the second video is the project breakdown video I made to demonstrate the different 3D disciplines that I implemented into the project.
(Don't blink or you might miss it!)
It's a very short piece, the reason is because I had to learn and re-learn some areas of 3D that I don't enjoy or had just never done before such as rigging, rendering layers and compositing respectively.
Problems Rigging I faced a lot of problems when I was rigging. First of all I really don't enjoy it, which is annoying because I know that I will probably keep having to do it in the future when I make my own characters! However, the way I got past this was to use Anzovin's The Setup Machine (Maya's equivalent to CAT). I really like it and i'll probably use it more in the future. It makes rigging very easy. I still had to make changes to the deformation of the dog because parts of him were being squashed about so he didn't look very robot-like, but once the changes were made the rig was quite convincing.
Render Layers: Before this project I had been meaning to explore the wonder of Render Layers/Passes, but just hadn't got the project to give me the way into it. Exploring this way of rendering really opened my eyes to the possibilities in the future, especially if I want to work fast and efficiently as a Freelancer. What I had trouble with though was understanding the basic concept that every layer that you render has to be manually customised, so the settings for everything (the scene, dog etc) were different for: Beauty, Diffuse, Shadow, Reflection and so on. Once I got my head round what was needed it became a very logical process, but it just took some time because of the stress of looming deadlines.
Compositing: Absolutely brilliant! I loved compositing. You have so much control over your footage afterwards, again it opened my eyes to more possibilities in the future. So although I had to learn a new piece of software I enjoyed using it so it didn't take too long, but there was a lot of going back and forth to make changes, especially with the shadow layer. You might notice that the shadow is spikey from the blades of grass beneath it. Will it's actually smooth and what I did to 'fake' that look was apply a displacement effect and some blur. I had to keyframe its intensity a little bit in some areas too, so it really gave a feel of running over different patches of grass.
No Problem Animation The animation side went very well, although I did have to make major adjustment to a few areas right at the end. I started by following the poses in the Animator's Survival Kit, so I had the basis to what the stride and squash and stretch of the main body was going to look like. From here I looked at slow-motion videos of dogs running. But I mainly did everything in a straight ahead method. It was a lot of fun, especially the tail. One thing I noticed about my animating personally was that I am very reserved! Han-ter at Smoke & Mirrors kept telling me to push the animation further and further. I thought I was but when I did push it further, it went further and I was surprised!! Great learning curve for me.
Anyway, that's all I can write about at the moment. I really enjoyed this project and working with Smoke & Mirrors has been amazing! They're a great company and I hope they will have a spare seat for me there one day.
If you would like to leave me any comments about this project I would really appreciate it. Thank you!
I have now handed in my client project onto DVD and also posted thank you letters with CDs of the finished video to the relevant people at Smoke & Mirrors who made this project and its completion possible.
It took me some time to find the right templates so I thought i'd post them up.
