Hunting for dialog!

The smoker shot is finished, and going through a tiny pimp-my-shot procedure, also called texturing & lighting. So I´m withholding it until that´s over.

While you´re waiting, why not cast a vote for the audio track that´s going to be the backbone of my next shot - the multi character assignment?

-> A couple of audiotracks <-

Well shoot your votes!

Head first into facial animation!

Gosh, this stuff is hard!

I mean seriously! It´s like animating backwards. We all went through a life long school of understanding the facial expressions of everyone around us. We see a face, and within milliseconds, we´re able to tell that this person is "very angry, but with a hint of understanding with the other person, and currently trying to find a compromise for the situation". You see that face, and you instantly get it. For what.. 600 babillion different facial expressoins. Ok I just made that word up.

Now try to do that backward: You have a character that´s sad, and also the tiniest bit angry because the person he´s talking to just doesn´t want to understand his standpoint. Then there also needs to be a bit of pity in that expression the others lack of understanding. And then of course a big helping of anger for that third person who´s fault it was in the first place.
How does such an expression look like? Don´t go for anger, that won´t justify it. Don´t go for any of those. You need to find the proper mixture of feelings in the face, to make it come across.
A Hint: you´ll instantly know the face when you see it. Not a big help, right? With 600 babilli... whatever.. possibilities.
This is how my last two weeks felt like!
"Ok what happens if I move this outer corner of the left eyebrow up for 0.05 units? Aw no.. now there´s too much pity in his look. Maybe lift the right cheek for 0.0012 units? Naa... "

Now the lip sync.. that´s something you can grab with both hands and put it right. Though I created quite a machine gun type of mouth by hitting every letter with the proper mouth shape. I spare you that version. In this current one, I hit about one or maybe two letters in a word with a fitting mouth shape - the ones that describe the word visually. Maybe 3 mouthshapes for a long word.
Take for example "We got screwed" - all you see there in the mouth is the "W", A/O, S, OO and D. Wassuuuuud! Not the best place to learn reading from lips! But it works! Amazing!

I have to find out if this is done in the same simplified way when you´re working on a photorealistic character. Like.. could you read Gollums lips?

Anyway, enough boring rambling. Here´s the shot, a week before the final.
(click to play)














I still have to change all the furniture and dress the guy. I don´t want to leave this shot in this visually .. well... unbeneficial state. But first things first.

Hooray for Advanced Acting!

Heyho fellow readers!

Both of you.

(Hi Mom, Dad!)

Another great term has ended. A big hand to Supermentor Michelle Meeker for great crits, great (and always extra long) Q&A´s, and re-evoking my interest in Chaplin and the Muppets. I missed out on a lot this term, work was in crunch mode and my assignments visibly suffered from that. Just mentioning it in case anyone wondered why my shot hardly progressed in the past 4 weeks.

Anyway, I quickly added the puppet mouth in the final week of Class3, and also did a bit of polishing, at least on the first 60 frames. *cough*
More to come!

Without further ado, here´s the shot as it was last submitted:

(click to play)

Look what I found!

Just a quick one - this is an animation I did over a year ago. Call it one of my first successfull attempts at character animation. It has nothing to do with animationmentor.com. Except maybe that this might just as well be the piece that made me realise I could really be one of those guys who animate for a living!

(click to play, this time it´s an mpg)












Micha!

309 - The first time I post work in progress!

I figured that since the assignments span over so many weeks now - the current one is not even half done, and the next one will take about 8 weeks to finish - I better stop posting only finished shots.

So here´s the current state of the assignment I´m working on. It´s a monolog shot. This is now 4 weeks into the assignment, including the brainstorming/planning/video referencing phase.
The face is not animated on purpose, this will happen in the advanced acting class - class 4.

(click to play)












And this is the video reference that I shot for it. I added bits an pieces in the animation that I don´t do in the video reference - mostly because I´m inept to remember a line, wave a cigarette, and do something else also. If you are a smoker, you´ll clearly see I am none. I had to build a cigarette with paper and scotch tape. Also, somehow I figured the way I do it would be the most logical way to tip the ash of a cigarette, but according to several smokers, it´s not. The entire smoking thing - be it how you hold a cigarette, how you tip of the ash, and how you take a drag - went through various revisions while consulting smokers. How on earth am I supposed to know that woman smoke different than man??? You didn´t know? I spend hours animating a smoking hand just to be told that "he´s smoking like a girl". Before that, the previous version received the critique that "he´s smoking like a beginner". But cool, you never stop learning eh? In any case, I am now obsessed by smokers. How do they hold their cigarettes.. do they do the macho drag or the feminine two-fingered-wrist-in-line-with-forearm drag?

Here´s my go at macho smoking:
(click to play)














Micha!

Unbelievable! An Update!

Wooohaaa!

Unbelievable (and, for most people unfortunate) - I am still alive and kicking. It´s about time to update this blog! Class 3 is almost over, and I didn´t post anything since Class 2 ended.

Before I type endlessly, here´s the result of the first 5 weeks of labour in "Class 3 - Introduction to Acting". A pantomine shot, showing a change in emotion. And, without further ado, here it comes:

(click to play, and remember you need quicktime 7.something)













I have to add that I am not too pleased with this assignment. It leaves a lot of polishing to be desired, but I blame that on my shortage of time these days. Also, a couple of things just don´t work - especially when Stewie twists while he enjoys the cake. This went through various revisions, but I was never able to do it in a way that was convincing enough. Maybe I should have kicked it out and replaced it with some other business. I have not yet given up on this shot, but right now I don´t have the time to work on this any longer. The current assignment is taking up all my time. And righteously so.
So what did I learn in this shot, that I named "Ratatouille", in the hope that no feature studio comes up with something similar. (hehe, FIRST!):

- if you are given a frame limit, then stick to it. If it means cutting bits and pieces at the beginning, middle or end, then learn to life with it. Sooner or later, you have to obey them down to the single frame, so better get used to it now. I had a beginning in which Stewie walked in, walked past the cake and then turned around in a pleasantly surprised way and goes into just the gesture with which the shot starts now. I liked it, but it added at least 75 more frames to the shot. And since it didn´t support what the shot was about - the emotional change - it was a waste of time anyway.

- emotions are huge! There are only a couple of basic emotions, far less than you would expect at first: sad, disgusted, afraid, happy, surprised and angry. That´s it.

- here comes the trick when you play an emotion: don´t describe your character as "happy". This is too general to be acted out convincingly. There are 100.005 different ways to be happy. Happy because you just won the lottery. Happy because you became father/mother. Happy because it´s friday and you can sleep long the other day... etc. All of them will play in a different way. The more specific you are, the better your acting will be. You might think that by narrowing down in what way exactly someone is happy you limit your acting choices. Instead, you broaden them, and even more important, you put quality into them. Think about it - which of the three ways to plan a shot conjoures a more detailed and believable picture in your head:
a) John Doe is happy
b) John Doe is happy, because he won 1 Mio. $ in the lottery.
c) John Doe is happy, because he won 1 Mio. $ in the lottery. He bought the ticket out of mere desperation with some of the last money he had. He lost his job a few years ago, his wife left him shortly afterwards. He is not able to see his two kids anymore because their mother moved to a different state with them and he can´t afford to travel. On top of that, he wasn´t able to pay the mortgage for his house, and so the bank claimed his house a week ago. Today, he bought a leaf of bread and saw the lottery tickets at the counter. With his last $, he picked up two. Now he is happy because he won 1 Mio. $.

Now aren´t you glad I put the animation up front? Otherwise you´d have had to read through all this in order to see it! And it doesn´t even stop here! What I have learned, part 2:

- When you are doing your golden and key poses, make sure every pose describes what´s going on in the clearest way possible. You have to be able to see this one pose alone, and be able to tell what is happening right now, and how the character is feeling.

- Break up the darn timing. No tap-tap-tap-tap. Go for a tap-taptaptap-tap-taptap. Whenever something feels to even, think of how you can break it up. And then force yourself to break it up.

- Do NOT, I repeat, NOT rotoscope your video reference and then re-create it in your animation. This will suck like nothing has sucked before.

- Finally, the last thing I learned: if you shoot video reference eating a cake, try to constrain yourself when you throw pieces of it through the appartment. You might still find crumbs of them weeks later.



Oh, btw., to all who are interested in it - this is the life action video reference I shot. It helped imensely to find acting ideas, and served as the basis to the animation. In fact, it served so well that it can still be seen clearly in the final animation.

(click to play)













Micha!

212 - That´s it for Class 2!

Yay! That´s it for the Body Mechanics class.

I spend the last week to put all the critiques that I got into a final-final version of both the Pole Jump assignment, and the Heavy Push. I didn´t really touch the Turn again. I wanted to polish it (yeah it´s crap right now), and I also wanted to finally revise the walks of the last term. But then I decided to get sick during the school break.

Not before I rendered out the other assignments neatly and put them together on a sweet lil´ Quicktime! Wooohooot!

Click the image to get the big (768x576) resolution, or click here to get the smaller (480x360) version

211 - Big Steps, minor fall

The final assignment - how I dreaded it!

We had a big family vacation planned this summer - long before I even started with animationmentor. So I knew that the assignment would come, in wich I´d be away from home for two weeks. Leaving me with either only half the time to finish it, or force me to carry my notebook with me and animate at night. I can´t stay away from animating anyway, plus I didn´t feel like ruining this last assignment of the term. Thus my hand luggage consisted of sunglasses and a notebook. And when everyone was leaving the beach to get dinner and cocktails, I locked myself up in my room, got compfy on the balcony and animated away. It was a feast for the mosquitos...

Anyway. My big mistake with this assignment, and a big lesson learned - do NOT establish the timing as late as the 2nd pass of blocking. Big No-No.

I didn´t really think about the feeling of weight, timing and rythm before I had practially all breakdowns in it. As a result, what seemed like a 300 frame assignment became - once timed - an almost 900(!) frame assignment. Far to long to be polished. So at the end of the third (of alltogether 4 weeks to finish it) week I realised I´ll never ever finish this in time (and by time I mean lifetime). So I had to cut it short. I picked a part of the animation that would work in itself - gave it a different ending - and then had about 250 frames to animate from layout to finish, in 4 days. The Nescafe went down like water!

Here´s the result at the end of week 211. I spare you the long version, I´d only get a lot of "Oh this would have been so much better". No it wouldn´t have.

Click to play!

207 - Dancing and Pushing

Hey folks!

Yesterday the ballet dancing pole jumps went to final. Yay! It´s been a cool assignment. I had more time for it than usual, since work stayed pretty quite *knocks on wood*. It was a good feeling to be able to give this as much love and care as possible, without being limited too much by time. Of course, there never is enough time. But still - I wouldn´t know what else to improve. It´s not perfect, but it´s as good as I could make it.

I also did the planning for the next - and last - assignment this term. I decided to do the heavy push. This is an animation test I´ve been looking forward to ever since I started Animationmentor. It´ll be a tough one to pull, for several reasons.
First of all, it´s simply heavy. Secondly, the rig that we have for it is way more complex than that used for the pole jumping. It got arms and shoulders, and those will be used extensively during the action. Thirdly and lastly, I´m leaving for a big family vacation saturday, for two weeks. That´s half the time that we have for this assignment. Phew.

Still, all that didn´t keep me from really pushing the action I got going on. I dunno - the ideas just kept coming in and I didn´t have the heart to throw them away. Below you can see two 2D animatics I did to explore both ideas. I tend to like version B better, though it will be twice as much work. However, I found not only a clever excuse to do Version A, but in fact also one that makes sense in terms of the stuff currently covered in the lecture - camera and staging. Version B would call for a sideview, which is something I´ve been doing all the time. Version A could be staged in a nice perspective view, lookin up the ramp. A 3/4 sort of thing wich could turn out fun and make the animationtest more appealing visually. See, I told you my excuse works!

Enough blabla, click on the images to view the clips:

This is the pole jump assignment in its final form.













and here comes the planning/exploring of the push assignment:

204 - Plastic Animation Paper in action!

A new assignment, a new boost of euphorism. And quite some pain in arm!

For this 2nd assignment of class2, we were again given a list of several animations from which we were to pick one. And again, I had to pick the one rated as the hardest. I never learn eh? Nah. Not true. I just love to dig in. When I have the feeling that this could be easy going, I don´t feel as challenged as if I have to fear that I´ll probably not going to finish it. I decided to animate Stewie - a character with spine and head, but no arms yet - jump over a series of thin posts.

Whereas in the first assignment - the turn - I filmed myself for reference, I decided to look for video reference on the internet for this one. To see how that works for me. What I didn´t expect though was that although it was laborious to browse all those video databanks, I was confronted with so many jumps of all sorts and styles, all of which I would have never thought of myself. I was thinking Indiana Jones like, but seeing all those different ways in which people where jumping - it kicked my creativity into gear. In the end, I decided to have Stewie go through the course in a Ballerina sort of way. I had a variety of vide clips on my harddrive by that time, and I cut them together as seemlessly as possible. In the end, I had bits and pieces of videoclips stiched together.

It made perfect sense to me, but everyone else seeing this would have no idea what I´m trying to do in the end. Also, no cut worked seamlessly in terms of body mechanics - e.g. one jump might end with a leg up, while the next jump (from a different videoclip) started with both legs down. And last but not least, sometimes a videoclip was shot from a different view than what I needed - the Ballet dancer might be shown from behind while I would need Stewie to face the camera, but do the same jump.

All those problems called for something I had thought of doing for a while - to do a quick 2d animation. Now quick, as I should soon learn, was the wrong term for that. The 2D animation in Plastic Animation Paper took me about 8h to do - including some mistakes on my side and trying out different ways. Since I was starting with this sunday morning, I had only one day to do it before the deadline was due. After 8h of constant drawing, I didn´t feel my arm and fingers any more. But in the end it worked

• it showed a more fluid motion that was easier to understand than the stiched together clips
• I had to think of how to connect the movement of the various clips where it didn´t line up in the cut (so in every cut)
• it showed that the series of jumps (seem to) work in terms of body mechancs. This is not yet fully proven but I am optimistic.

(Click to play)

204 - the end of a turn

This is the final result of the first of three assignments this term. There has been quite some confusion about it, concerning planing and execution. And by the time this was settled, it was already time to start planning the next assignment. (Finalising of one assignment happens in the same week as the planning of the next one.) I decided to be content with what I have learned in the turn - mainly the studying of reference, and the workflow applied to animating it - and leave it to focus entirely on the next assignment. Sometimes it´s just too expensive to try and rescue something. I rather focused my energy on the next one. Yippie! Watch the next post for that. Pun intended.

This is the turn, as I handed it in as "final".

112 - The grand end and a big misunderstanding

This is me at the beginning of 111 - making big plans with everyone, scheduling a lot of family time with my folks, preparing for some serious partying. After all, there´s only 2 more weeks, and then after 112 there will be a week holiday.

This is me at the beginning of 112 - "What, there are NO holidays? We´re going right into the next term???". So in 112 I had to do the reel, revise both the perspective personality walk AND the totally crappy perspective vanilla walk. Not to forget that I had told my family I´d come over for a week, and also the numerous meetings I had scheduled with friends that I haven´t seen for the entire term. Oh - and my dayjob. That´s 3 weeks in one. In the end, I didn´t find time to revise any of the walks, I met only one friend, spend only two evenings with my family, put together the Class1 Reel in the wrong order, and then was thrown into Class2 without a single day to take a break and breathe. What a start.

So here´s the reel with all my works from class1, including all the sketches that I did. Of the sketches I am particularly fond, since they clearly show a progress through those 12 weeks. However, I doubt that anyone would watch it long enough to come to the better sketches after seeing all those crappy ones. If anyone got that far at all! Demo Reel Lesson learned.

Click to play, but beware - it´s about 4mb.

111 - A perspective on catwalks

Wow it´s been a while. Haven´t posted anything for such a long time!

I´ll try to recap and update this blog back from 111. That´s an easy start since there´s not much to say about Lesson 111 - we took our personality walk from the previous week, and tweaked it so that it would be able to stand a perspective look. Which was sort of easy since I already animated the catwalk in both the mandatory sideview as well as the front view. Adding a 3/4 perspective just meant to track the arcs according to the camera. Just in case there was something off in this particular point of view.

I also did the vanilla walk in perspective, though I totally sucked here. I rushed it in an hour before the deadline, thinking that I could do the same thing here: just add a 3/4 camera, render it out, and that´s it. Unfortunately, I didn´t pay any attention to side to side movement back then. The vanilla walk in perspective was terribly off balance wise, and as a matter of fact I didn´t even keep the rendered movie. Lesson learned. Check.

Again, click to play.