Animation Showreel 2012

As the Gregorian year of 2012 draws to an end, a compilation of my work at Animation Mentor and Ragdoll is here in my showreel.



Soundtrack: Supergrass - Caught By The Fuzz

AM Master Class Assignment 11

The final version of the final assignment in Term 1 of Animals & Creatures Master Class is now complete...
I have enjoyed working on this piece immensely. It's the first time i've been able to animate an angry character and an anthropomorphic character that can change from animal to human characteristics.

I enjoyed everything from the planning stage, watching practically every video of gorillas and chimps on youtube and reading The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris (to learn how I could incorporate human/animal traits). To blocking; creating the environment, getting the timing of his positions and the camera action the way I wanted. Through to blocking plus (adding the inbetweens), polishing and final animation. It's been a fantastic journey. Along the way i've had such great support from other students, a peer buddy, my mentor and the AM staff too.

I can't wait to get stuck in to the second term. There will be so much to learn. For starters i'll learn how to animate to a back plate, which I have done once before back in 2010, but I basically taught myself and haven't done it since. And I'm already reading Birds In Flight by Carrol Henderson, to get a head start on flight, because i'm going to animating this creature...

AM Masterclass Assignment 10

I made a couple of changes from the original blocking after some new ideas suggested by my mentor. And once I got into the swing of animating after being ill I noticed a couple of areas that could be pushed further. One week left to go!!

AM Masterclass Assignment 2

My second assignment was really fun and interesting to do. I had to block out a vanilla walk cycle - an exercise to get a better understanding of the quadruped body mechanics. A vanilla walk is a term used to describe a walk exercise that explores the body mechanics without personality. They don't have to be on a treadmill, so next time i'd like to attempt animating a vanilla walk through space. After the first two attempts didn't go very well, the third time I found a workflow that worked for me.

I got an A- grade for this assignment, which i'm very happy with, but there are a few places that could make it better:
1) Move the scapula forward and backwards with the arms,
2) Lift the paw so that it flicks of first, then the wrist/palm, instead of breaking the wrist first,
3) The shape on the back paws needs to be pushed further in the flick off on f1,
4) The bend of the back right paw on f9 should only appear when the foot has landed,
5) Roll the front paw from the outside (in Z axis) as it places down on the ground.

In the planning and sketching stage, I hadn't quite grasped the pattern of the foot fall, as you can see in my first drawings...

Once I saw the problem I checked my reference videos over and over again and then sketched the walk cycle once again, this time leaving out the details of the body and just focusing on understanding the foot fall pattern. I left out some poses at the end because I felt confident enough with what I had and I was dying to just get into Maya and start working! Plus i'm not a big fan of lots of drawing.

Now that i've blocked the walk cycle and got my feedback, i'm going to add another layer of detail and start polishing it.

Check back soon for more updates!

Ten Things To Think About

I'm back again. This time I've been catching up on my blog feed and found this excellent post by the fantastic Angie Jones titled Ten Things To Think About...

#1 - Listen
#2 - Subtext
#3 - Experiment
#4 - Rhythm
#5 - Empathy
#6 - Simplify
#7 - Texture and Psychological Gesture
#8 - Honesty
#9 - Eyes
#10 - Commit

Really really useful resources! Thanks Angie.

Her Morning Elegance

Her Morning Elegance was a music video created for singer-songwriter Oren Lavie by Oren Lavie and Israeli animators Yuval & Merav Nathan, featuring Shir Shomron and photography by Eyal Landesman.

Twinings Gets You Back To You

Just brilliant! A very unique and warm style of animation. Animation created by Psyop. It's a shame about the music though. Muting it works better!

The First Snow of Winter

The First Snow of Winter (1998)

The main characters voices are played by:
Miriam Margolyes
Dermot Morgan (Father Ted) who died sadly before the completion and is dedicated to him.
Kate Sachs





It was made at Hibbert Ralph for the BBC.

More sources of information:
Wikipedia
Toon Hound
Mark Mason Here is Mark Mason's showreel from the film...

Get A Job!

This reminded me of my school days where the teachers and career councillors would tell us to do everything that this animation says.




"Out-of-print and hard to find , but deserves a wider viewing, Brad Caslor's 1985 film "Get A Job" follows the tribulations of a cartoon character, Bob Dog, as he hunts for a job. Technically, it's an "educational film" dealing with self-motivation, preparing a résumé, contacting people by phone and mail, getting ready for an interview and the interview itself. More than that it's a brilliant homage to Bob Clampett and other cartoony animation of the 1940's."

Found on Smears, Multiples and Other Gimmicks

The Flaming C

Back story:



First 2D animation:



2D animation returns:



First CG animation:

Mickey Mouse - Runaway Brain

In 1995 Walt Disney Feature Animation Paris produced this 7 minute short film; Runaway Brain.

Animation by Andreas Deja, Garry Dunn, Deboissy Sylvian.

I love the reference to Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, see if you notice it.

Animation Gig #1: Review and Reflection

I've been meaning to write this post for a very long time. But changing jobs, moving city, moving house (twice), seeing family, friends and general bus-i-ness it's been a little delayed. But, here it goes...

My first animation gig at The Charactershop wrapped up at the beginning of March 2011 and I moved straight onto my second gig straight after it and i'm still there. I got very lucky, both The Charactershop and Ragdoll are fantastic places to work.

The Charactershop was the first time I got to work on pure character animation. In the scene were two characters; Rory and Ned, both rigged from 3ds Max's Biped system - not much of a joy to animate but gave me lots of questions to ask about animation. I tried to make a note of all the comments and feedback I was given and now I hope to be able to embellish on them here a little bit.

In the following clip I did the animation, adjusted Rory's whiskers with morph targets, rendering, compositing and editing. The title cards before and after were added in by The Charactershop.



Review:
- The first problem I see in the animation is the result of the process I underwent... I should've blocked (stepped) each line of dialogue before splining and then refining the animation. Instead, I blocked (splined) chunks of 250f/2.5 seconds dialogue and then refined the splining in one pass.

- I didn't know what twinning was until half way through - it was one of the feedback I got - and although it doesn't happen very often now, there are many other acting choices I could've made that would've avoided twinning. Twinning is where the character does a symmetrical poses/action e.g. shrugs shoulders and raises both hands at the same time.

- I did make a conscious effort to keep strong poses and good silhouette, but what I forgot to do a lot of the time was check my poses in different viewports. I only started to do that half way through and realised that the characters were way out of line from each other. Animating to one static camera wouldn't make it much of a problem as you can see, but it's bad practice and could've got some stronger poses if I had checked the animation in other viewports.

- There were a few moments where the characters feel uber robotic. The cause of which came from not knowing how to create anticipation and moving holds.


- This was the first time I got a storyboard to follow. I wasn't sure how much of it I should follow so I tried to keep as close as I could to what I saw, but there were many instances where I had nothing to follow and this was a great test to see how well I knew the characters and if I could keep their action choices 'in character'.

- A great lesson I learnt was that happy accidents can occur when you start from scratch - try to avoid polishing turd!

- An important lesson I learnt only through doing this - as I had already heard it from a Digital Tutors guy - was to leave the facial animation right until the very end. It's important that the body can tell the story and 'speak' the dialogue before any facial animation and lip sync has begun. I knew this in principle, but now in practice!

- Hitting walls is often I find myself doing... not literally... but in my animation! This is where a characters movement suddenly stops, as if it has hit a wall, or is still in the blocking (stepped) phase. At the same time, I can see my animation floating a lot here. I have to say though, on this occasion, this was more something that was a result of the rig and the program I was using. If 3ds Max gave easier control I probably would've done it less.

- Hitting the accents was often in the feedback I got. What had to do more was find the accents in the dialogue and hit those fluctuations by emphasising parts of the animation.

- Watch your arcs! Heard that one before, right? But that was something I wasn't doing enough here. A lot of the movements were very linear and lifeless. I only had enough time to go back and work on the arc of the head turns.

- Blink. The blink timing I used was something like this: |..||...| (| = Open . = Close) Everyone prefers different blinks but this way seemed to work well.

- When a character needs to interact with an object, or another character, it's good practice to link them to an IK Dummy (3ds Max) or Locator (Maya) with a parent constraint. This gives you loads of flexibility and it's what I did when Rory pulls Ned back at the start and when Ned pats Rory on the shoulder.

So that just about wraps up all the notes I had for this. If you would like to bring up any other points that I haven't included please leave a comment or contact me directly.

Here are some pictures I took while I was living in Birmingham and work at The Charactershop.

Common Blocking Tangents

Via Spline Doctors

"After looking at about 50 people, it seems that stepped mode for blocking is the preferred approach. The following graphics show Industry to blocking style and years in the biz to blocking style. Take a look at the graphs. Some interesting results. It seems like I am in the minority… I have used spline transition blocking for my 14 years at pixar. It was one of the only ways to work when I started and it all changed when the incredibles go going. I do see the strength of Step mode and I do use it in Pre Production. Linear for me does not make sense and Layering is good for certain types of shots in my honest opinion (mostly action shots). All in all what counts is clarity. Everyone has a different way to work. What I have seen not work is too much complexity in the beginning. Keeping is rough and simple seems to be good. Some animators really work for strong poses in the very beginning stages and I see the benefit to this. Thanks to everyone for participating and please keep adding feedback. Next I am going to Poll animators around the office."

Olliver's Adventures - "The Singing Pickle"

I don't think we ever got Oliver's Adventures in the U.K, but this show looks really good.



Directed and via Ron Doucet

Man As Industrial Palace

Created by Henning Lederer

There's something appealing about putting little people inside the human body and seeing how it all works on a more grand scale; Osmosis Jones, Fantastic Voyage etc.

Hoodwinked

This doesn't look too bad. Although, I really don't like the chipmunk voice of the squirrel character!



And here is the trailer from the first film. Massive difference! Squirrel character has a way better voice and movement. More like scrat from Ice Age.





The animation reminds me of Terkel In Trouble! Although a little less sinister :D

Raving Rabbids Travel In Time

For Christmas 2010, my girlfriend and I bought my friend Raving Rabbids for the Wii. We played it literally straight after he opened it and i'm now a fan of the game! So I was more than happy to see a short film of those raving rabbids created by French studio AKAMA. This short has been awarded Best Advertisement at Imagina 2011.



Here are a few more to watch...

Nosy Bear

Here's another great short film created by Frank Ruse titled; Nosy Bear. It is followed by a short making of. Very inspiring, thanks Frank!

Superman Classic

There are a lot of great short animation films being created at the moment and it's great to see the flood of creativity. They are so inspiring to me. Here is without exception another great one by Robb Pratt. Thanks for doing the making of at the end Rob!

You May Now

Here's a really fun short animation film about the wonders of stereoscopic 3D in cinemas, created by Dan Keeble and Dane Winn. Apparently it only took a few days to make!