Dear Sweet Morpheus

We were given a character rig, the beautiful Morpheus, which we then had to put in different poses, each one showing a different emotion (hopefully you can tell what each one's aiming for). I enjoyed this as it was fascinating to see just how many controls the character had, especially on the face, where you can even move the corners of the upper eyelid. I did find it challenging to get a decent expression on his face, for example I think the one of him laughing could easily be confused for him feeling sick.... laughter or pain,,,, two completely different states but they look so similar. The mouth was also quite annoying as I couldn't really get the teeth and tongue to fit in it properly and found them quite difficult to control. I've given you different angles of my poses, simply because I'm generous like that.

Squishy On A Mission...

This task involved creating an environment using polygons, which we then had to place our little squishy ball character in and make it interact with the scenery. The ball needed to have a personality and bounce around of its own accord. The stairs could have been made better, they have a few random edges that stick out and if I did it again I would make the steps 3D as at the minute they're just flat faces, they have no thickness to them.
I'm quite annoyed as you can't see that when the ball recoils from the edge at the top of the stairs it starts to shake in fear before he jumps in the air, as the video player is too small, before I ran the file through Premiere Pro you could see it fine.
I think I've managed to give the ball a bit of character though and the good news is Maya is no longer my enemy, but it's still not a friend by a long shot.

Bouncing Balls

This is my second attempt at animating a light bouncing ball in Maya, as my first attempt was awful! This is definitely an improvement though and although it's still got maybe a bit too much squash and stretch it's definitely getting there.

This is my heavy bouncing ball, it's better than my light one and was a lot easier to do, probably because I used a minimal amount of squash and stretch.

Pirates Storyboard is Complete!!! Woohoo!!

So, as promised, here is my finished storyboard. This took me a long time and I know I'm going to have to draw a fair few more frames to be able to create my animatic, but for now I'm happy.  I did lots of thumbnailing and working out of compositions before I arrived at my final shots. The changes I was told to make were to have more people running about on the ship in the storm scenes to create a sense of chaos and to show the Captain taking over control of the steering wheel from someone else. These changes really did improve the storyboard. Next time I do a storyboard though I need to have more interesting angles, as I don't think I'm utilizing the 3D space enough.

Pirates!!

Here are some of my concept drawings for our storyboard project. We were given a choice of three scripts, I chose the one about pirates, and had to create a storyboard of at least 30 frames. I really enjoyed designing the characters and am pretty pleased with the outcomes. 

I'll post my finished storyboard in the near future.

Cartoon Take

So our latest task was to take our little cubey character from the previous 2D assignment and animate a 'cartoon take' (so basically a double take but more extreme). I found this harder than the previous one and am nowhere near as happy with it. I do however like the 'boil' method I used when I held frames for a while, as it makes the animation seem more alive and full of energy. But there are just loads of little things that could be improved upon... ah well.

'Deep' Storyboard

We were given a short script and had to create a storyboard for it. In order to do this we needed to design the two characters. On the right is Sam Small and on the left is Caroline. I was fairly pleased with the woman but I think there is something wrong with the man's proportions, his head is possibly too small......

My storyboard is a vast improvement from my previous 'Banana Thief' one, mainly because the drawings are a lot better (except for shot 3, I am well aware Sam Small looks like a clown in it! Damn extreme angles.....) I've tried to think about angles and composition to make the story interesting, but this is something I think I really need to work on, as the narrative makes sense, but I probably could have shown it in a more visually exciting way.

Life Drawing: Session 3

Here's more life drawing. For the top set of images we had to split the body up into cylinders. Even though we had 5 minutes I didn't finish any of them as it took me a fair while to work out where to split the body. It was quite an interesting task though.

JUMP!!!!

Our task was to animate a cube shaped character jumping from one spot to another, see something happening off screen and then react to it with an emotion. Hopefully you can tell what the emotion is! 

I bought myself a stop watch and acted out the scene, timing how long all the actions took, which really helped improve my timings and the general flow of the animation. I also used a dope sheet which made using the line testers a much more organised experience. I tried to include the anticipation and overlap techniques we learnt about in our last lecture as well as remembering about squash and stretch.

I'm really pleased with the outcome, as I managed to get some power into the foot stomp and arm motions, although maybe the movement should be a tiny bit faster. The only part I dislike is the kind of shrug the character does once he's seen the off screen incident, as I intended it to look like an aggressive, outraged 'what the hell!!??' type action, but this didn't come across and it just looks like surprise. Another thing to add is that I clearly need to watch the head shape, as it keeps changing volume as I squash and stretch it. Overall though, I'm pretty damn happy! 

Life Drawing

Thought I'd put up some of my life drawing, so that hopefully this blog will document my progress. Prior to this I had only ever done life drawing once before on my art foundation course last year, so I'm basically a beginner.

I just want to say that I absolutely love life drawing and I wish we got to do more of it on the course, as a couple of hours a fortnight is not enough in my opinion....
The first image is from my first session and the rest are from my second session.
I need to get faster as I rarely get the whole figure down on paper before that particular pose is over. I hope we get to do more longer poses though as I want to have time to actually put tone in, as all my drawings are very linear.

Of Monkeys And Top Hats...

So here is my first attempt at storyboarding. The task was to have one character moving slowly, one character moving fast and then make them meet at the end, with between 7 to 20 images. I love monkeys and top hats, so this seemed a pretty standard place to start when coming up with my storyline. We were shown in class ways of showing speed, such as using markers (I used a tree with a snake on it) and changing the scenery drastically. I presented my storyboard in class and received some helpful feedback. The main issue was that I needed to include the hat-less monkey walking amongst the trees in the jungle in shot number 4, to make it obvious the top hat monkey has spotted him and his bananas. I found it pretty hard drawing the monkeys at different angles, which is especially evident in shot number 4 (so many issues with that shot!) so I really need to just work on improving my drawing skills....
I really enjoyed this task though, as I liked coming up with a little plot and getting to be a bit more creative.

Waltz With Bashir

Today I watched 'Waltz With Bashir', an animation by director Ari Folman. I was really impressed by the very stylized animation, which was created in Flash. It was quite hard hitting, dealing with the unpleasant and violent subject matter of the Lebanon War. The director, Ari, realises he can't remember anything about his life during the war and so interviews his old comrades, trying to piece together what happened.
The style of animation used has a realistic quality to it and everything is very detailed, possibly to help push the fact that it was based on real events. At the end of the film the animation turns to some horrific real footage of the massacre, with the camera zooming and focusing onto the faces of the dead, which was quite difficult to watch.
The opening scene where a vicious pack of dogs is tearing through the streets is one of the parts that really sticks in my mind. I thought the power of the dogs and the fear that they inspired was conveyed brilliantly by the differing types of shot and the contrast between the darkness of the streets and the unnatural yellow sky immediately gave you an unsettled feeling, setting you up for the rest of the film.
I found this film really interesting, both visually and from a narrative point and I am now looking forward to more screenings.

Squash And Stretch

We had to animate a football bouncing and a bowling ball bouncing so that we could experiment with how to convey different weights through animation, as well as playing about with stretch and squash techniques. So this was basically the same task as we were set in Maya, but I found it so much more fun to just be able to physically draw all the frames out by hand rather than manipulating it on the computer. I'm not too happy with my light bouncing ball as I needed more frames as it doesn't flow very well, but it's alright for my first try.



I was really pleased with how the bowling ball turned out though and you can definitely tell the difference in weight between my two versions of the bouncing balls.

Morphing Animation In Full

This is the end product of the class's morphing animations; all edited together so they flow on from one another and with some funky music playing in the background. Watching this makes me really happy as I think it works really well and everyone contributed to it, so its our first team effort to create an animation. When we all first watched it together in our lecture there was such a good vibe afterwards that I think I wasn't the only one who was pleased with our joint effort :)

Frustration!!!!

Ok so I have never used Maya before and I'm finding it insanely difficult and frustrating. There is just so much to take in!
As our first assignment we had to animate a light ball bouncing and a heavy ball bouncing. This is my light ball version. I'm really not happy with it as I think I've used the stretch effect far too much and I think this is what's making it look so erratic. I do however like the little roll the ball does at the end. Hopefully I'll have time to go back to the studio and improve this before I submit it as I'm sure I can do better. But on the bright side I do feel a bit more comfortable using Maya than I did at the start of this task and I'm sure with practice I'll get better.

Morphing Animation

This is my first animation from my course, where I had to morph a snake into a dog. I'm fairly pleased with it considering I was worried it would look jerky as each frame is very different from the previous one. However, since it is played very fast this is not an issue and it flowed quite smoothly.