The Adventure of Animating Abney & Teal

In March 2011 I started working for Ragdoll, probably the most prolific and successful children's television entertainment company in the UK. To name a few of their successful productions: Rosie and Jim, Brum, Tots TV, Teletubbies, Badjelly the Witch, Boohbah and In The Night Garden...

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My days at Ragdoll were always numbered. Then extended. But ultimately numbered. And it seems the phrase "all good things must come to an end" is very appropriate to use. Ragdoll was an amazing place to work and many others are of the same opinion. I was fortunate to meet a few industry veterans who were there on a short term contact and would tell me that after Ragdoll "it's all down hill from here". I'm sure that isn't entirely the case as there are literally hundreds of studios in the UK alone, but I understood the sentiment that Ragdoll was a really great and unique place to work. Unfortunately the emphasis is on was, because the future of the company is uncertain. I can only wish Ragdoll the best of luck and I hope they will continue in business... because I would love to return to work on another season of A&T!

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I feel very proud to have worked on The Adventures of Abney & Teal for just over a year until the series wrapped up. It was my first time working on a full animation production and in an animation department. I was truly in my element. I wasn't involved in any of the early story, style or character development, but I'm going to try to recap all the good times and the bad, all the milestones and achievements I made in that year and share what went into making this CG Animation Television series.

I can still remember my first week really well. I was the first Junior Animator to join and right away I was made to feel at home. My first episode was The Radio.

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I was immediately excited to work on this episode because of its musical appeal. The first shot I worked on was of the Poc Pocs at the beginning of the episode where they are dancing on the shore next to Bop. At the time I was pleased with my work, but as time went on and I grew more accustomed to the style of each character, I realised that I could have made a better acting choice. I also animated the Poc Pocs being entranced in Abney's house, by the static noise of the radio tuning between stations, and that was much more like the Poc Poc style! I found a rhythm in the static noise and synchronised their movements accordingly.

After this episode I was given more Neep and Poc Pocs shots. Neep was my and pretty much everyones' favourite character so I was really happy to be given the Neep shots. For inspiration, I always tried to think of silent movie actors such as Chaplin and Keaton.

Part of my role as a Junior Animator was doing a lot of fixes. It is one of those 'messy jobs, but someone's got to do it' kind of things, but for the most part I really didn't mind. I actually enjoyed doing the fixes because it gave me the opportunity to analyse shots by looking more closely at how the more experienced and senior animators animated the characters. They were always happy to answer any questions. This was a good way of speeding up the learning process of the animation styles for all the characters. Early on in the show after the director had set the characters' personalities, the characters were assigned to specific animators who had full creative reign to develop their movements following the set of personality guidelines. By the time I started they knew the characters inside out!

There was one episode early on that was a nightmare to fix and we ran over schedule by quite a few days. That episode was Sky High.

Although I had some really cool shots animating Neep doing mid-air cartwheels and a Bruce Lee style flying kick to pop all those bubbles, I had the gruelling task of reanimating some colleagues' work on Abney & Teal because the wrong music track was used as a guide for the animation. It was no-ones fault, but I had to battle between keeping as much of the original animation as I could do and erasing some of it to fit the new music.

A little joke reminder I made

Shortly after this episode around May '11, I moved into a new and very nice apartment (whole other story why I moved there!) only 20 mins walk away from the studio. I was on the second (top) floor of a new build and had a fantastic view of the sky, and would see brilliant sunsets almost every night until the winter. Feast your eyes on some of these...

The sunsets really inspired me. After talking to a few people at work about these sunsets, I discovered that we had a digital SLR (Canon 40D) and after enquiring if I could use it, I found out that a time lapse remote control was on its way! The timing couldn't have been better. So with a lovely camera, tripod and brand new remote control to bring home with me over the weekend, I was able to experiment and create my first time lapse sequences. The sunsets weren't enough though. I wanted to spend the whole day shooting, so I would take the camera around the town and here's what I captured...





I also did three time lapse videos from within the animation department. Hopefully they will be included in a Behind The Scenes on the DVDs... if there are going to be BTS and/or DVDs!

During this period I also co-formed and drummed in a band, called:

The name was inspired in 3 parts:
1. Our mutual appreciation for Wacom tablets.
2. Our mutual appreciation for The Karate Kid movie. and
3. Our mutual appreciation for not really caring about a band name! We just needed one to book a rehearsal room.

The music was a mix of continuous drumming (like heavy Motorik), big-spacey guitar solos with lots of effects and groovy bass riffs. I miss jammin' with the band a lot.

Back to Ragdoll...

After 10 months of being a Junior Animator, a day before we all went our separate ways for Christmas and the Winter Holiday, I was called in to a meeting with the producer and animation lead and supervisor. They said they needed someone to fill a position of Animator and had me in mind. And so for the final 3 months of production I was doing pure character animation. A lovely Christmas present indeed!

I have to leave a gap here because none of these episodes have been released yet so I can't talk about them. Moving swiftly on to the wrap party...

The wrap party was a fantastic success. Held in a popular bar in town, we hired it out for ourselves for the evening. We put on our own music, there was a light buffet and free drinks for practically the whole night. During the wrap party Chris our Producer, made a funny speech that included the total amount that it cost to make our show. I have to thank Nayden for recording this speech on the night! "For the geeks among us"...

On average 110 - 120 shots per episode
6000 composited shots
572 minutes (9.5 hours) of broadcasted content (4.8 feature films)
134 TB of data
2 Keyboards
5 Monitors
480 loaves of bread
36,000 tea bags
1,440 packets of biscuits
1,927 dishwasher cycles
36kg of instant coffee
480 pens & pencils

So there you go. Now you know exactly what it takes to make a quality CG Animation Television series!

...and then it was time to say Goodbye

My contract might have come to an end, but the journey of my animation career continues. On reflection I can see that I have achieved a lot and have made some really good friends over the year.


Image sources:
1. http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/Ragdoll_Productions
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/programme/abney-and-teal
3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015sl50

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.

PRP Artefact 1 - Final Animation & Feedback

I got some very useful feedback today from the tutorial. Most notably was the comment about Secondary Action. From the very first moment the secondary action is missing where Ren is tugging at Stimpy's arm. Stimpy's body should be moving after it as an affect of Rens pull. Even just a slight movement would've improved the opening ten fold so it is something I am going to focus on in the next artefact.

There are also moments where both characters, especially Stimpy, are just looking dead. This is because I haven't thought about blocking any smaller movements between the main poses, such as breathing. It will be important for me to think about this in the future when I do character animations where the characters movements are spaced out between each other, where something else needs to fill in the gaps.

Also mentioned were some obvious things about framing. Obvious to me anyway. A close up shot of the faces would've been ideal. It's just something I overlooked and spent time on the background instead, which probably wasn't needed. So next time no background!


Soundtrack: Earl Klugh - Moon and Stars

Year 2 Ends. Summer Begins. Still A Lot To Be Done...

I feel like this year has been great for me. I have accomplished a lot of things for myself. I created a board game - MAYAN EXPEDITION - with such detail and depth that kept growing further than my initial expectations. So I'm very proud of it. And in October it will hopefully be entering into an exhibition.

In my second and third term I spent a lot of time researching for my character animation which ended up having a solid story, though lacked in style; THE MIMES. I'm again proud and happy with my work and have entered it into the EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards competition. I have no hopes that it will get anywhere. But acknowledgment of it's existence and perhaps some feedback is all I'm really looking for.

Also in the second and third terms I created and completed my visualisation project to a standard that I feel I am happy with but can see the flaws and areas which look a bit empty.

I can see the huge leap I've taken in the quality of my work from the first year, using Maya as a complete and utter amateur, to using 3ds Max at a capable intermediate level.

So where am I to go from here?

I already have lots and lots planned to have completed or get ready for when I start back in October. These are...

- Continue working with my DINO building bones into him and produce a few examples of him moving around
- Find some work experience in London. Milton Keynes is a very boring City for me, so to spend a few weeks in London AND working in a 3D studio would be amazing!
- Begin to experiment and develop my own 'style' in 3D work
- Create a working and pretty looking website portfolio using Dreamweaver
- As third year student rep, organise two things: 1) Q&A seminar with a professional from a 3D studio. 2) A pre-final year multimedia exhibition which will see the amalgamate of all 3 pathways working together to create an installment or exhibition for the general public, students and lecturers.
- Contact the Linney Group and begin talking about my 3rd year Client Project with them.

I'll try to update this list as time goes on so, watch this space! :)


Music: Fatboy Slim - Praise You

Reflecting on Todays Lecture

It was great to finally discover whose painting i've been using as an avatar/profile picture all this time (pictured above: Not To Be Reproduced). It is René Magritte, here are some other of his works that I've also seen before and liked but never knew who it was...




I love the work of surrealists. Their images stir something inside of me more than any other art genre or artist i've come across.

Here is a famous painting by Hans Holbein; a German Rennaissance painter and it's called The Ambassadors. The first time I saw this was on a TV program like the Culture Show where the image had been blown up onto a wall somewhere in London and the presenter was talking about it very fondly describing the significance of every object. Then talked in great depth about the skull at the bottom that you can only see by positioning yourself up against the wall looking down at it. I think this could be an early example of surrealist work... perhaps Ernst and Dali et al liked this painting too?



This is an image by John Heartfield; a German Photomantage artist and it's called The Spirit of Geneva



And finally M.C. Escher. Another artists whose name I didn't know but was already very familier with his work. He used mathematics, polyhedras and geometric distortions (amongst others) to make the impossible realities look real. in Eschers world everything is relative.







Franz Ferdinand took the cover of their second album:

from:

This is a poster by Alexander Rodchenko where he has used the face of Lilya Brik. Read this

That's enough typey-clicky-cutty-pastey for today!

New Recording

Well Hello There,

I've had a pretty rough week this week, I can safely say. So to end it on a nice note ;) I've recorded a new acoustic song. It's sounds just like how I felt earlier today, it's amazing! There are no lyrics or singing just yet but there might be before the end of the year. It's on my myspace and it's called Fall Asleep (Watching A Movie)

Thanks.

Music: J. Hearn - Fall Asleep

Assignment: Example of Reflecting Into The Course

The assignment set today by Julius (cowboy who will make you dance!) was to reflect on work that we have done so far since starting the course. Well I can think of one example from the course, but also another reflection I had a few days ago that completely consumed me for almost the entire day.....

1. Narrative Stage 1 was a project I thought I would have many ideas for, when in fact my mind went blank. See unlike the first starter projects (beer can / whiteboard animation) we were given a medium to help prompt our ideas, such as the box getting over the tree. But we had to think for ourselves here, which I found to be a great challenge at first until we all started to "put our heads together".
However, we soon forgot the principle method for making a stop motion film.... take LOTS of images... something like 20 frames per second and ours was more like FOUR.
So on reflection I will not hesitate in future to make full use of the flash memory within a digital camera!

2. This has nothing to do with the course, or maybe it does, it depends on your perception of things, but here goes. See if you can work out what the film is :) ...
I was watching a film a few days back; written, directed and the main role was played by a very famous actor; a pioneer to the movie industry. In this film the story goes that he was stuck on a scene in the film that could not evolve unless he found a solution. The problem in the scene was this: How do you get a blind woman to believe that a tramp is really a millionanaire? The solution he came up with to this problem was in fact completely genius. In the film, as the tramp stands in front of the blind woman with the road to his back, a very rich man walks behind him and gets into his car and slams the door. The sound of the door slam leads her to believe that the car belongs to him (the tramp) - now this may not sound like a very clever soultion in today's world because everyone from Adam owns, has owned or knows somebody that owns a car (or three!). But this was written and filmed decades ago, almost a century ago when only the rich and wealthy could afford a car.
So to summarize I tried to think up ways of myself, making a blind woman think a tramp was a millionaire in today's society. I don't think I've come to any solution yet, but it's still there at the back of my mind.

This film will be revealed in the next issue of MY BLOG !!


Music: Art Bears - Maze