And there's More

Once I had created what seemed to be a stable character design it then had to undergo animation tests. This is to see how far you can push the design, see just how much movement the design will allow while assessing the point at which it perhaps starts to loose shape. You may also find that certain actions just do not match the character's nature.
On top of this you also need to asses whether it can convincingly carry off important actions that need to take place within the film. For example our mouse needed to say "yes," and "no." As his mouth was so long I was a little concerned I would not manage to make it work.



The end result was very pleasing. I was able to make his mouth articulate yes and no with a defined difference. I then continued my test with a bit of action and response and a full turnaround.





I was very pleased with the turnaround as I had never done once before and hadn't had any tutorials for it. It runs fluidly and demonstrates nicely that he can he takes to full angles nicely.

Anyway whiles doing this I was directing the storyboarding and animatic. This is a "final" animatic (there is always a possibility that change could take place.)



Tadaaaah!

More on Project Cheese

Ah! Sooo busy!

So what is the state of my project so far?
Story boards-done
Background concepts and tests-done
Character concepts and designs-done
Test animations-done
Animatic-done
Pre-production bible-done
Me-exhausted.

Ok, I think I'm gonna elaborate over stuff now. Character design. Creating the general look of the character was rather interesting. The distinctive style of cartoon I had gone for meant the design needed to be simple but with a very defined silhouette and lots of charisma.

Here is an example of early experimentation

I ended up with this. As this Little guy was so easily expressive I stuck with the design. One of the most important assets any design could have, with a character that says so little, is one that can portray emotion through facial expression and physicality.

And here is a pretty final turnaround and set of expression tests just for the sake of it.

So once that was sorted I moved onto colouration. Bellow I experimented with three sets of colour: brown, grey and white-colours most people imagine mice to be. The brown was far too dark and the grey seemed to merge with the general colour scheme making it less defined. The white was clear and crisp and added as a subtle hint to his techie nature-a white lab coat was in mind.

The extra lines, used to separate the skin from fur, made the design all too complicated. The result was he looked lovely alone but became detached from the over all appeal of the cartoon. I liked it but it had to be cut.

Bellow you can see where I attempted to include flesh tones by just applying it to the tail (because it had a natural division line where it met his rear) but as the ears and nose were left white it looked unusual. In the end he was just white but I found it had a simple fresh appeal.

And this is the finalised design.

Anyway directing has been hard work but very enjoyable. I haven't really had the opportunity to implement an idea into film before so its been fantastic to finally do so. As well as character design I've been working on general concept design making sure that there is defined and cohesive imagery through out, story boarding with the group which involves many redrafts, building an animatic and hand drawn animation on the side.

So, rambling over, this blog was kinda long so I'll save some more for another.

More on Project Cheese

So just a brief update. We have a rough story board and we're in the process of replacing shots with completed backgrounds. This is the original story board without sound and moving shots so it makes very little sense but the second half is a little more interesting and easier to follow.




Perry and I recorded the speech but I've discovered I was not able to upload the file type so once I've got that converted I'll upload them here.

Project Cheese-Test animation

So over the weekend I've been hard at work hunched over my lighting box completing some animation tests and I've got to admit it was really nice getting back into it again. Drawing images of the same thing again and again and again with an attention span worthy of a nat and an impatient disposition should result in incessant boredom but some how I find all my thoughts slow down and I can concentrate.

Anyway work resulted in a lighting box encampment: character sketches perched atop, completed images ever rising on my left, caffeine fuel at my knee, food an supplies to my right butt cheek and necessary pillows and blankets sort of drifting about. I didn't really ever leave.

Each of the animations, 24fps, vary between thirty to sixty frames depending on their nature. I did four animation tests. These were a run cycle, "yes, no" speech test, action and response head swivel and a general gesture and idiosyncrasy test. While I was uploading the completed work to my laptop my external hard drive (perhaps due to the delicate displacement of my elbow) decided its USB cable socket was going to become dislodged and fall into the hard drive itself. So this means I only have two pieces of animation to show and that there is currently no way of accessing any of the work I did last year...

...I really hope I can get it fixed.

So this is the action and response test.

This was the first animation I did. At the beginning I wanted to create expression using just the eyebrows but as I went on I found it easier to squash and stretch the goggles as I would if I were animating eyes.

The second animation to survive the hard drive was the "yes, no" test.

I'm very please with this one mostly because I've never done speech with hand drawn animation and the test has proven to be very fluent. Another reason why I am pleased is kinda also because I didn't get a chance to run parts of the animation to see if I was doing it right until today. I didn't make any mistakes.
Anyway the tests (including the two I could not show) prove the character design is ideal for animation and suits the traditional style well.

Project Cheese-a delayed update

So work on the project is running rather smoothly now. At the beginning I'll admit we were a bit behind but now we're bang on track.

Anyway I thought I'd begin this post by rambling a bit about the idea. I'm not actually sure how it arose. I was just presented with the brief "yes, yes, yes, yes, no," and then, *PING!* it just materialised in my brain: there was a mouse, he was stealing cheese from a podium with a mechanical hand, he was quivering with the kind of excitement that only a mouse charged on pure caffeine could do, "yes, yes, yes, YES!" and the cheese was squished, "NOOOOOOOOO!" That's basically what happened.
After a minute or two had passed the idea had evolved a little. The little film in my head was in the style of a Chuck Jones version of Tom and Jerry, which I enjoy too much...I may happen to have had a Chuck Jones' Tom and Jerry box set for a few years...and suddenly, perhaps with the nature of the cartoon in mind my idea became set in a cheese museum.

Anyway I ended up as the director, which I'm actually really enjoying, animator and character designer. I have Brian working on concepts and backgrounds and Perry working on story board and sound. I think my self lucky as they're both doing a great job.

Here is a page from Perry's story board. It's nicely paced and there is some nice composition. This is subject to change and is changing as he is currently doing e new draft.

This is an example of Brian's background work. It's a downward shot and its in mid progress but anyway he's captured the style perfectly. It is epic.

We've progressed since all this work and over all I'm rather pleased with how much we're doing and the pace we're going at. I've just finished some test animations and hope to blog them soon.



Toon Boom

So today I was confronted with Toon Boom for the first time. The lecture was mostly about getting to grips with the interface (especially the storyboard tools).

Toon Boom was designed to make the transfer from traditional media to technical media easier (also this makes it much easier to learn.) Plus it's capable of a large number of applications so looks its kinda evil.

Sooo many tabs!

It is capable of storyboarding, full animatics which encapsulates the use of time lines, the ability to apply sound, drawing tools and the application of cameras. It can also be used to animate so yeah its kinda a bit like flash.

Anyway while experimenting with the interface I couldn't resist but...

Rendering stuff

So this is gonna be a quick one. Today I learned different ways to render in Maya for the perpose of creating separate layers. For example a colour layer or a shadow layer and there are many, many others.

Here was the origonal simple scene rendered.

And bellow are some other render types.

Diffuce No Shadow

One Depth Remaped

One Spectar No Shadow

Anyway there are some examples. Tadah! End.

Project Cheese

So the scenario is we've all been split into groups to create a short piece of animation. The brief is to realise a script with the words, "yes, yes, yes, yes, no," and it can't exceed ninety seconds and must not be any shorter than thirty.

Currently we have the first full term to create an animatic. Anyway with this brief in mind I came up with the concept of a high tech mouse attempting to pull off a heist of which he attempts to steal a highly expensive piece of cheese from a specialist cheese museum and goes like this...
The scene opens late at night, raining. You see the silhouette of a huge building. Lightning flashes dramatically. It highlights a sign. "Cheese Museum." Next you're confronted by a piece of cheese in a glass case, surrounded by lasers. The shot fades to look like that of a cheep flickering TV screen. Then a silhouette slides into view before it. "Yesss." A mouse with techy goggles leans over the screen an moves some leavers. Back in the room with the cheese a mechanical hand lowers from the ceiling and misses the cheese. Close up on the mouse's paws as he adjusts the leavers. Back with the cheese again the arm moves across a little, lowers and grabs the cheese. It ascends towards the ceiling. The mouse leans closer to the screen, "yes," we see the screen over his shoulder, "yes, YES," The hand squishes the cheese. The mouse is still. He twitches. "NOOOOOOOO!"

Anyway that's my idea. Here are a few character concept sketches I created. They are subject to change. There were two things I knew when I started and that was I wanted this mouse to look nothing like Micky Mouse and the other was I didn't want this character to look fluffy or humanoid. Sometimes the best elements of a character can be found by exaggerating elements of the animal itself.

For example when I saw these images I thought big head, round body, huge eyes, stumpy legs.

These were my first preliminary sketches as I was attempting to define a style.

Once I had found a style I was able to create the rest of its from (while just experimenting) and once I was happy with it I continued with facial expressions.

I simplified it a little and added goggles...and accidentally left the whiskers on the bottom image. Bah!

So that's that. I think I may have landed my self with the director roll some how and I think I'm excited by that but maybe I'm just a little mortified. Meh. 

Dem Bones

Today I was introduced to rigging. This is when you build bones or joints for a character or object which will later be used to animate them. In effect its a little like putting strings on a puppet.

This here is a chain of bones.

Creating the bones them selves was relatively simple (and I didn't fall behind. Phweeew! ) The next part of the lecture was spent adding the motor controls to the joints. The first enabled me to grab one end and when pulled the rest would follow and flex accordingly. The second meant that and animator could grab the central point and make the structure pivot let and right.

Anyway I added pictures so my blog is a little more interesting to look at...probably still a little boring though...

Oh and Dell wiped my laptop clean. All is lost...

Nuke

So I decided I would take the post production side of my course to keep up to date with special effects technology (and to also keep up with animation) but I'll continue to practice drawing and the like in my own time. Boom baby!

Anyway yesterday I was confronted with a program called Nuke. It's like a more advance After Effects (and has a very similar visual interface) but it can keep up with you essentially. Anyway the lecture was about layering. We were presented with a piece of footage of an adorable little girl adorned with a pretty baby blue frock and blond pig tales perched on a hill who promptly whipped out a huge bazooka-like-lazer-alien-gun-thing and fired it across the landscape. Upon opening the file on Nuke it came out in separate layers such as a distant hill, the hill in the foreground and the girl. There were more but you get the idea.
Basically that lecture i leaned that these layers could essentially be "plugged in" to on another. I struggled with it at first but eventually got the idea. In the proses of getting lost and catching up I managed to accidentally pick up a couple more skills. Next time I should print screen some of my work so this can make more sense...and perhaps to make my blog look prettier.

Technology...

Imagine you worked diligently on several pieces of work and imagine you spent many, many dedicated days that could merge to make entire weeks on this work, ok? Then imagine you saved all this hard work on a wonderful, reliable laptop then to have that  wonderful, reliable laptop die...

...yes...

...it happened...

And this time all this work was saved on an external hard drive. The issue is the computer is now so dead, (so very, very dead) that I can't continue with my work because the machine needs a new hard drive which means no maya so I can't complete any maya animation, can't scan and post some of my most recent drawings, display updates of my project; I have nothing to show for all that work I did this summer and there was a lot of it.
The computer has been out of commission for a good couple of months. Dell has betrayed me.

Ah, well...

*shrugs*

Oh, you know that project I mentioned...?

I'm blogging again. Its been a while since I last did but its not that I've fallen out of the habit or that I've lost interest, its mostly because I haven't had anything to write about and that I've just been kinda busy...with that project.

...You remember it right...

...maybe...?

Ok its my fault for saying so little about it in the fist place. Anyway a larger portion of the time was spent through drawing practice (yes more of that) which had been aimed at capturing a style and improving anatomy. I'll admit progress has been kinda slow deterred mostly by the need to find a flat for the coming year but things have escalated a bit sine then. Here are some of my studies.





The photography is kinda dodgy but I hope this gives you an idea of what I was going for.

I think, looking at this stuff, my human anatomy is definitely improving but I'll have to diligently keep this up if I want things to stay this way. Once I had grasped a style I could then gravitate towards some character concepts. More examples below.





Anyway that's a small portion of the work I've done so far. I'll try to keep this blog up to date with progress. Any thoughts would be much appreciated. : D











Ok I want to do some interesting stuff now

I haven't done any of my own animation work recently...and I just realised I've really begun to miss it.

There was a time when I would come into the animation studio from nine in the morning (when it opened) till late evening just because I wanted to. I'm in the midst of doing a couple of animations on Maya so I should actually try and finish them. I'm annoyed at myself for slipping out of this habit.

Oh and I must do more hand drawn animation. Ok its hard...but oddly kinda fun...

Oh, oh, oh annnnd I've started work on something big. I'll be exploiting my free time in the summer hols to get it truly grounded. Hopefully when I've got to a decent point I'll start to blog some of it....



...I'll keep you posted.

Ok, Finished

We finnished it a couple of days ago actually.

Say Yes, Say No Title Sequence

So there it is. Over all I think we did pretty good. The pacing is nice, it has a good uniform sense of continuity (it's not unnecessarily sporadic) and the animation is relatively smooth with just enough jitter to compliment the hand-made appeal. Vwalah!

Fluffy Mugs!

Ok so since my last post we've progressed pretty far since. We've almost finished the final cut...then there's just a bit of flapping about on After Effects.
We aren't at that stage yet and anyway I was planning to talk a bit about the fluffy mugs I had to make for the animation.

You get the idea...

I made these for the animation as after all it is about the DADA movement and one of the artists at the time like to make fluffy cutlery so tadaah! They are made out of pieces of Tropicana juice boxes, fake fur, thread, glue and staples. Oh and they were sprayed with hair spray so that when they were handeled in the animation prosses the fur would not shift. If I had not done that the fur would just appear to flinch and twitch randomly as if on their own accord. Ya see? I thinks about these things.

I should maybe try talking a little more about how we've been working. Well this stop motion animation works on four tears. The bottom is a sheet of rotating newspaper which, as we can rotate in a loop, easily gives the illusion of an endless stream of newspaper. The next three tears consist of glass. We then place the props on the glass an animate them accordingly. Above that is the camera stand.
Usually when we get round to the actual animation one person is in charge of the camera, another animating the props and the third person rotates the newspaper. We then swap round every so often. And that dudes is our method.

Hay Blog. Long time no see.

Ok so its been a looooooong time since I last created a post but I'm here again.
Anyway my feeble excuse for this is that I haven't been able to document my work with a camera as I couldn't charge the battery. (Yesss, feeble, I know, but a blog can be so boring without awesomness to look at.) Anyway I now have a charger in my possession and the new time my group an I congregate to continue with the project I can start taking photos. Huzzah!

Yeah...I should probably briefly sum up what the project is. My group and I have to create a film title sequence. And that's it. Although I should probably add the title sequence is for a nonexistent film called Say Yes Say No about DADA artists within the time of the DADA arts movement so we've gotta consider things like the period this occurred, the music they would have listened to and so forth. You get the idea.


Anyway this is what we've cooked up so far. Its very late in the process as this is a rough cut but I'll do more analogy stuff in my next blog when I've got some visual awesomness to back it up.




Besides this I had begun my own little animation project on Maya a while back but I haven't touched it for a while, plus I've had a couple of other ideas for extra things I want to do. I really enjoy doing my own stuff on the side so I'm going to work on it and blog my stuff over the summer.

Anyway that just it for now.

The Third and the Seventh.

Such a wonderful piece of film.

Concept Art

If there is one thing I've always loved its concept art. Its fascinating. If I ever get a film with extras I will always check out the concept work. Its an art that tests the imagination which also makes it so enjoyable to do. My most recent drawing assignment was to produce three concept pieces. I was allowed to draw what ever I wanted as long as I followed the theme of scale the idea being that I could for example draw something disproportionately small like a tiny elephant fleeing from a mouse or disproportionately too large. This was too fun!
Have a gander.

I love anything with a steampunk theme so this was inevitable

The tribe's hunters launched into the clearing just before the tiny hairless primate could disappear from view

It was an epic battle of great proportions

Anyway that's my concept work. Its been a while since I've done much with a biro so I thought I'd give it a go. Right, its 3:010 in the morning and I haven't actually slept since posting my last blog....oh and this blog will probably say its a completely different time of day...and when I created this blog I did state that I was from the UK. I'll have to check those setting anyway.

...I should probably make an attempt at sleeping now...

Hectic times!

I think I managed to complete all my work, die, and live to tell the tail.

My experimental animation is finally over. I had actually been looking forward to this and I enjoyed it but the editing part was savage. It resulted in my partner and I practically finishing the thing, loosing the thing and having to resurrect the thing again. I still don't know how we managed to do it in time.

Ok the animation consisted of over one hundred and forty pieces of card, each hand cut. The  fist entire day from something like ten in the morning till eight in the evening was spent by me drawing each individual piece and together, the both of us, cutting each and every piece out.

I had fuel for my hefty task.



...and here is some of the card...

...and some more...

...and more...

...and yes, some more...

We were able to begin animating the very next day. I would position each bit of card and my partner would take the photos. Unfortunately we had issues with our camera which slowed us down greatly. Also we had found we were a little low on card. This meant one shot we filmed took several hours longer than it needed to as after each take we had to trim the cardboard used. Over all the animation process took two days.

Editing our work was complicated. We did it on After Effects and it took about a day to complete and once it had been completed it would not play the whole way through. We were unable to find sufficient help and when it did come along the individual came to the conclusion that we should rename each individual photo but by doing so the computer no longer recognised them and so our work was lost. I then had to spend an entire day re-editing it and a working day that I had planned to end at perhaps twelve ended at quarter to nine. Ack!

Anyway here's the finished thing.



And here is my finished flash project too.



Its kinda ok but I feel that it lacks a sence of life and character. The animation feels very static.

My Model is done!

Yay! I've finished it!

Ok modeling has never been my favourite subject but I've done it....and er (whispers) it has actually started to grow on me...anyway here is the original image.



And here is what I ended up with.

TADAAAH!

That little diary was evil. It had eleven little holes down the side and two metal rings in each but I was determined to make this as accurate as possible so I created each of those little holes and metal rings. I was also intent on making my plug sockets as close to the original as possible too like so.

And here are the plug sockets completed.

For some of my objects I had to create my own textures. My Bunny Suicides calendar for example.

I do love that calendar

I found in the process of creating my model that I actually knew more about modeling than I originally thought as well as the fact I began to enjoy it more as I went along.

Anyway I don't think its quite perfect. for example I think I the curvature of certain surfaces and objects could be improved. I think maybe the lighting could be a little better too as it looks a bit abnormal although I think this could partly be hindered by the fact that the lighting of the original image was unusual and as I have simulated this onto my model it automatically looks unnatural.

Over all I think my textures are ok but a couple could probably be ether made a little lighter or darker. Apart from that I think my levels of reflectivity are pretty close and I think I managed to excel in spacing, proportions and composition.

Anyway thats my blog for the day.