Pandaloping

Suit Case, yet more changes

2011-12-31T15:07:00.000-08:00

I kept getting questions from one of my mentors about what the whole shot means in a story sense. I was setting up a situation, but never dealing with the results. After a lot of back and forth and brainstorming, I came up with an ending that I think resolves most of what I bring up in the test...at least concerning the girl... In addition to the question of the ending, I have also addressed a lot of notes from other mentors, friends, and coworkers. The set has now also been further tweaked to provide proper staging for the final idea.

The fat guy in drag came from a brainstorming session with a friend of mine. At first I thought it was too out there and strange, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it solves the issue of where the clothes went. To further extrapolate it out, she was in the shower, so she definitely wouldn't have heard him come in, and try on her clothes. The question then of, 'what are the consequences of her lost clothing-now on a fat guy', is solved by the fact that he has now stretched her clothes and ripped her skirt.

Hopefully I'm not too far away from being done with this and able to start my next test. At least I got it in before the end of the year!

Dr. Sketchy's 12-06-2011

2011-12-06T13:48:00.000-08:00

Last Dr. Sketchy's in Sydney. Hopefully I'll make it to some of the ones in LA, I hear they're pretty intense.

Dr. Sketchy's 11-08-2011

2011-11-08T14:42:00.000-08:00

more suitcase progress!

2011-11-03T19:40:00.000-07:00

I got another pass in on my suitcase test. I added an intro shot to help clear up the situation and do a bit of a walk. I also churched up the background with some shadow cards, effects, and even some sound!

Dr. Sketchy's

2011-10-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

Boxes!

2011-10-06T15:32:00.000-07:00

Woah, so I've finally managed to scrap together bits and pieces of time to put in a couple passes on the suit case assignment from my courses at Gobelins. Take a look! Any polish notes you have would be fantastic as well!

and for frame of reference, below is my blocking (I didn't upload my first pass spline)

Yzma Study

2011-08-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

Rough animation of Yzma from Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove

Easily one of my favorite movies. This shot has a bit of similarity to the shot I looked at from Pixar's One Man Band in that the motion has a sort of tension from and inward/outward movement. It's the simple squash and stretch principle applied to a more complicated network of limbs. There's a nice kind of dual whirlpool movement between her head and right arm that isn't in the One Man Band shot where things are more or less either coming to or away from the center with a nice elastic quality to it.

Study animating

2011-08-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

studimating? Whatever you call it, I was shown this amazing website the other day and got inspired to have another way to study while I wait on Maya. The website is http://framexframe.tumblr.com/ I'm not sure what a tumblr means, but I do know this is a really sweet site. It has frames to flip through (although I'm not sure how they're being grabbed, on 8's, keys, etc). Anyway, I thought, while it's amazing to just look at these and frame through the images provided, it would be better to draw the frames and really study what's going on that way. Learning through doing!.. sort of...

Pixar's short one man band

Don't ask

2011-08-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

While waiting on renders and stuff at work, I was playing around in the Plastic Animation Paper program I used before and this...sorta just happened. I started innocently enough with a ball that dropped then all gushy like rolled over and hit the corner of the frame then rolled back. Fun, then I asked, what if it had legs, then a torso, then arms, and a head! and...Ears! and and, flip flops, and capris pants?!?

Woodle

2011-08-09T09:11:00.000-07:00

Less doodles this week. A balance between more work and catching up on blogs

part studying part doodling, all stdoodling

2011-07-29T18:39:00.000-07:00

I'm back at work, trying to get back into the habit of making render times productive. I chose to study up on some of my favorite animators, John Lounsbery, Glen Keane, and of course Sergio Pablos.

Gobelins Summer School 2011

2011-07-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a summer masterclass program at Gobelins L'ecole De L'image. It was a two week intensive course on character animation. I don't have any really finished pieces from it, but I learned a lot and have some new exercises to polish up.

The main focus was on female movement. We spent a lot of time learning the differences between male and female physiology. To work on this, we did a female walk cycle. Mine ended up being fairly vanilla, but I definitely learned some things that can be taken beyond simply walk cycles.

The first clip here was my first take, it was a bit stiff and not very pushed. (sorry I don't know how to make these videos loop nor do I have time right now to render out a loop)

So I went in and did a lot of surgery and pushed it and made the motion fairly gooey. This clip isn't yet finished because the FK arms got messed up after pushing everything around and I didn't get to cleaning all that up.

The next assignment was pretty fun. We were given the beginning of a bizarre scenario. A character is standing on a bus/train. Then one of the handles comes down. From there everyone took it in many different ways, all very creative. Some made the handle come alive and become another character, I decided to make it blow up.

The final assignment was an interesting acting bit. The set up was that there's a character and a suitcase. The character opens the suitcase and reacts to what's in it. What I find interesting about it is that you don't show what's inside of the suitcase, so the communication of what's inside is purely based on your performance.

doodles

2011-06-28T18:11:00.000-07:00

I installed a simple pencil test program on my computer today. This has been a fun way to stay sane whilst waiting on renders and such. More to come in the future!

also...

Stop Motion!

2011-06-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

Howdy. My brother got me this toy during one of his deployments to Japan. The moment I opened it I knew I had to animate it. It comes with a display stand that's essentially a stop motion rig, his hands and face all have replaceable parts for different gestures, and each joint has a pretty good range of motion and is pretty stable.

I've never really done any stop motion with a character (only did some tests in school with clay), but it was pretty fun just doing some straight ahead playing around. I still prefer cg in it's infinite preciseness, but it's fun to be able to get away with rougher animation in a 3d format like stop motion. It's also great to actually get to work with your hands and feel the character in your hands.

step

jump

Next time I think I might use my webcam for a more stable way to shoot this stuff. I could also then be shooting from a higher level. My lack of a tripod kept me at table level with my camera this go.

Work Doodles

2011-06-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

I might just save it all up and upload just one a week.

work doodles

2011-06-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

In an effort to keep up my drawing, I decided to throw open good old MS paint for some non-processor heavy doodling while waiting on renders and such. Hopefully this becomes a habit.

Life Hiatus

2011-04-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

Just a quick what's up. I realized that I have a decision to make. I can either stress myself and work like crazy at work then go home and work like crazy on the creature fight and never do anything else, I could get it done, but I'd be super burnt out. It's always a balance between working hard and having a life. Working nonstop can make you better, but living life I think can help give your work more depth and experience. I think I'm going to give myself at least a couple weeks to get out and go live some life, especially since the weather is getting to be super gorgeous all the time(finally!).

I'm still working on the creature fight most nights after work but because I find it relaxing and like always it's fun and rewarding, this way it's more of an enjoyable thing to do than to be stressed and chained to it. I also downloaded a simple pencil test program that I've been fooling around with doing quick experiments in timing and spacing. If I do something I'm particularly proud of or when I get to the next pass on the fight be sure I'll be posting it. I'm close to finished on my second pass on the second shot. The last one should be more quick because I put in a lot of breakdowns.

creatureFight: roughing part 01

2011-03-24T00:04:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try and update my progress every night-ish. The last few nights were spent fixing up the 180 break and getting some critiques, but more importantly, studying. On recommendation from a friend I found some great clips from Fantasia's Rite of Spring section and the fight between Little Foot's Mom and the Sharptooth in The Land Before Time (the first one because that's the only one that matters anyway). I also checked out a lot of footage of rhinos, hippos, and elephants to get an idea of how they move. Apparently there are a lot of videos out there of those animals fighting too, which was interesting to study as well.

I just finished a rough pass on the first shot. Everything is linear tangents. I'm going to do a similar pass on the other shots in the coming days, getting them to a rough, linear tangent phase, then it's on to splines and polish! Oh, and I took out the camera shake and stuff so you can see the animation better for any critiquing.

creatureFight: blocking

2011-03-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

I want to work on physicality and timing, so I thought why not make two giant monsters fight? So much fun. It's funny how my work as a Previs Artist instantly came into play here with my camera work and composition. Doing at least some nice framing makes a huge difference on your work, plus it's fun!

I just finished a first pass at blocking it out. Hopefully I have most of the timing and physics worked out such that it just becomes a nice, easy process of refining(ha!). Let me know what you think. Input now is much easier to implement than down the spline.

My apologies, youtube really chewed up the beginning of it with compression, but it's just a hold on the environment for a beat before the first monster falls into frame, so you're not missing much.

11secondclub forum

Horseless Headman, 01

2011-02-13T19:29:00.000-08:00

Alright, so I had this idea about a headless horseman, except, instead of not having a head or having a pumpkin head, he'd instead have the cannonball that took his head off (per legend). Then I abstracted that to be a bomb because, lets face it, a bomb has sweet silhouette value.

So, in an effort to not get stuck noodling it to death in cg, I'm hoping to get that done before I get into Maya. Animation-wise, I'm hoping to get some good experience playing with timing and texture and rhythm with this piece. Unfortunately, when I did a quick pose test in Flash, it has become a minute long. Hopefully with some suggestions/critiques and another pass I can tighten and shorten it up quite a bit. I guess that's what happens when you just let your pencil wander.

About darn time!

2011-01-24T07:49:00.000-08:00

So, after a few more notes from some mentor friends of mine that I think really helped it out and I feel I'm finally ready to call this done and move on. If practice make perfect, I need to get on with more practice and stop wallowing in old projects. I have some stuff in the works that I'm pretty excited to get started on and ultimately be able to share with y'all!

Until then, I leave you with "Devil".

Also, I just updated my reel with this and some better selections of my past work:

01. Lunch Breaks: [May 2010]
Character animation for a short film. I was the Lead Animator for the project and developed the characters' personalities and movement styles in addition to animating a third of the film. This shot was my introduction to the main Character, Gabe.
Maya 2010

02. Devil: [January 2011]
Exercise focusing on lip sync and simple, more restrained performances.
Maya 2010

03. Lunch Breaks: [May 2010]
Decision time for Gabe.
Maya 2010

04. Dangerously: [April 2010]
Exercise focusing on lip sync and performance.
Maya 2010

05. Lunch Breaks: [May 2010]
Gabe stokes himself up.
Maya 2010

06. Lunch Breaks: [May 2010]
Dan steps on a plank.
Maya 2010

07. Lunch Breaks: [May 2010]
Harold Consoles Gabe.
Maya 2010

08. Lunch Breaks: [May 2010]
Dan gets nailed by an I-beam.
Maya 2010

09. Lunch Breaks: [May 2010]
Things are looking up for Gabe.
Maya 2010

10. Rocket Board: [April 2009]
Animation test to an audio clip from the 11 Second Club. My focus was on caricatured movement and posing. Maya 2010

Cloven hooves and lost time

2011-01-02T19:20:00.000-08:00

Oh hey there! It's been a while don't ya know. I have been consumed by work, life, and other excuses. If anyone's told you it's hard to do personal work when you have a regular 9-5 in this industry, they're so right. Especially since a regular 9-5 in this industry is actually more like a 9-7 plus commute, plus thinking about your work even when you go home. A quick recap of my professional life is that I got a job doing rotoscoping in LA, moved out here, then did some work matchmoving, then ended up landing my awesome current job as a junior previs artist for The Third Floor. Anywho, I have been toiling on this shot for way too long now and with my holiday break coming to a close tonight I thought I should do my best to finish it up. Like any art, it's not "finished", but I think it's pretty close. Hopefully there's just a few more minor tweaks then adding in some hand animated smoke effects. One thing this job has taught me is that you can do some neat little "video game" cheats and get a decent look out of playblasts, which is awesome for me because actually lighting, rendering, shading, is not really what I want to spend hours upon hours doing. Also there's always one or two frames I want to change and not having to rerender and composite it all again, woof, that'd be nice.

Enough jabber, here's that old interrogation scene I've been working on for forever

On a bright note, I think with my work as a previs artist, having to do a lot of rough animation really quickly with fixes and everything, I'm getting better and faster, so hopefully my next shot won't take as long. It's already affected my composition and thinking about staging (as you can tell if you look at my first pass at this shot).

Bus Stop take deux

2010-10-27T20:28:00.000-07:00

A while back I had posted about a little exercise I had started about a guy sneezing at a bus stop. After showing it to a couple friends, I got some feedback that the characters were really flat and there were some possibly confusing motivations going on. I totally agreed with them, but had hoped I could get away with it for the sake of a short test. I think this was another lesson in going all or nothing. By not going for something specific, I got caught giving something entirely vague and open to too much interpretation.

Here's the first take:

The comments kept digging at me until I decided to scrap everything I had and restart(even though I rather liked something about my first take). I think for sure this one feels a lot more solid and I think I explained everything much better this go around(who the characters are, why they act/react the ways they do, etc). I would love to hear how you guys are taking it to know if I am explaining things as well as I hope I am. This is pretty rough and you'll have to ignore the scarf in a few places as it's a fairly complicated setup of parenting that will have to be solved when I get into splining things out.

I think what I liked so much about the first one was how when the guy on the screen left sneezes on the screen right's scarf, the screen right guy is watching the whole time in disbelievement, building suspense until he finally makes his move towards the sneezing guy. In the new take I'm trying to recapture that thought of 'wait, did he just do what I think he did?!?' for the guy on the screen left. The whole shot is more or less a build up to the point that the guy sneezes on someone else's scarf and it seems like both the natural choice at the time and the completely wrong thing to do and I think that the payoff could work by having the guy sneezed on have the same thought as the audience.

As per my comments in the first post about this shot, I think I'm going to be leaning more toward the realistic side of things than cartoony. I love cartoony animation, but there's just something about it I'm not getting right yet with how and when you can break physics and logic. This just means I'll get to enjoy it all that much more as I try and unravel it more.

Posing as the Devil

2010-10-25T05:25:00.000-07:00

So, last month I did a test for a prospective job at a video game company in London called Black Rock. Part of the test was a walk cycle and a jump that I think turned out pretty well, but because it was with one of their rigs, I don't have the rights to show it unfortunately. The part of the test I can show is, they wanted me to do blocking for that month's 11SecondClub competition. I was all set to finish it off in time for the competition, but life got real crazy on me. I know excuses excuses, but I did move across the country, got a job, bummed off a friend's couch for a week or so, moved into my own place, got a better job, etc.

Anyway, here's the roughed out version I sent to them:

I think this is a pretty good example of how I'm working now, starting in spline. I'm not letting things just float around with splines, in fact, because I'm working this way, I'm blocking in solid areas for holds and seeing where I'm thinking about transitions and roughly how the timing of all the beats is going to work out. From there on, it's a matter of working out the transitions and building eases and overlap into and out of the held sections. In the end, I'm not necessarily holding the characters as still or for as long, but in general, they are in those areas and it helps me keep the performance contained. That way when I go in to add things it's coming from a pretty stable base and things are less likely to get off course. The main thing I've found with this approach that you need to be careful about are making sure that you don't get your head stuck in the computer and you create nice breakdowns and overall solid posing. I seem to have been working faster with this method and have thus been losing my poses in all those splines.

I just finished a few passes of refinement and lip sync. I'm looking for comments on either where you think I went wrong and could improve upon next time, or where you think I can improve things now.

Oh, and yes, when all is said and done I do plan on animating in smoke effects, at least for when he blows out at the end. And yes, it'll probably be done by hand frame by frame because that's just kinda fun to do from time to time.

Animation Hotkeys UPDATED!

2010-10-18T21:01:00.000-07:00

I've been fairly busy with moving to LA, working, and finding a place to live, BUT I have been animating, I've just been animating things that I either not ready to show or can't show because of copyright.

In the mean time, since I'm working in Maya at my job, I decided to carve out a bit of time to dust off my old hotkey script and give it some much needed updating. If you aren't familiar with my little script, I made it a few years ago when I was working in the labs at school but wanted a nice easy way to port around my hot keys since I use them so much. Yeah, there are ways to copy paste preferences and files like that, but I've taken enough scripting classes that this somehow easier and clearer to me.

I put up my old script on Creative Crash (back then it was still High End 3D) in 08 and it has since been downloaded 390 times which isn't a whole lot compared to many scripts, but for a little text file I made two years ago I think it's not too shabby.

It now makes hotkeys to perform more common tasks like moving keys around in the graph editor, opening the outliner, and performing playblasts. You can check it out to find out all the goodies, but essentially it all saves time by not having to navigate to any menus to do most of the common tasks while animating. I'd pick my favorites, but it's just about all of them, especially the moving frames keys and the copy paste keys for the graph editor (and the key individual attribute and...)

Oh and what's a post without any pictures to look at?

Here's a quick test I just did for a video game company in Oregon called Cinematics. Sadly I don't enjoy working with rigs when I'm not a fan of their design, so I could have probably strengthened just about every pose. That's also a factor of my new working method in combination with no real planning, just sketching out the animation as I went. All in all, I had 8 hours to do the test and I think it turned out fairly well considering. I'm especially just enjoying my new method of working in spline from the very first pose and how that speeds me up and makes me think of the physicality a lot better. The main thing I'm combating right now is that it also makes me sloppy with my posing, but I think some more solid planning and taking more time on each pose will help that tremendously.

PS: If you check out the script and have any problems with it, let me know. It should be fairly straight forward as I'm a huge fan of simple scripts where you just have to paste it in and hit go.

bus stops

2010-08-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

Lately I've spent a lot of time at bus stops. I don't know if it's something particular to LA, or if it's just something everyone everywhere does, but people love to walk into the middle of the street, sometimes into traffic, just to try and see the bus coming. Some people play it cool for a while, then break down and run into the street, for others, it's the first thing they do.

At my internship at Sony one of the exercises we did was animate a sneeze. The basic direction was that a character anticipates a sneeze, sneezes and changes emotions. I got taken onto a film and didn't get to do all the exercises, so I thought I'd try my hand at this one. I had done a take where it was a guy at a chess match, but I felt I needed to get a character up off the ground and move around a bit. Watching some Chaplin, I got some inspiration for this little bit. I'd love it if you could give me feed back, what's reading, what's not reading, what you're reading that you may think isn't right, etc.
I got sidetracked for a bit with a test where a guy had a cup full of coffee and was trying to get out a door. It was promising, but staging issues kept coming in the way and when the question of to go just realistic or cartoony and fun came up, neither had a good solution, so I took a moment to stop and change gears, for the better. Now I have a situation that I can not only relate to, but that I have a pretty solid understanding of what I want out of it and a nice clear open stage to play it out on.

This is just my first pass at blocking, so a lot can still change. I feel a lot of the poses can probably be strengthened yet and the timing could be tightened up (I stayed pretty close to my reference for now).

I was suggested to figure out what I want to do and go for it, be it cartoony animation or realistic. I feel that things aren't quite that black and white because my favorite style of animation is a nice blend of the two. Like how caricature is a bit of an inbetween between realistic rendering and cartoon drawings. There are things that are accentuated, but the whole of the idea is grounded and recognizable as coming from reality.

Observations

2010-08-07T11:29:00.001-07:00

So, a friend of mine made a post about some peculiar things she saw people doing on her daily commute. I have been doing something similar for a while now in a little book of mine and thought I might share some of the things I've seen.

When one of my art professors was lecturing about watercolor, something he knows very well, he didn't blink much when trying to recall information. He'd only blink if he'd catch himself saying something he'd retract, like when he'd say an opinion as if it were a rule. Instead of blinking when thinking about something, his lower left cheek muscle would twitch.

A guy was on a computer waiting for a DVD to load up and he was fiddling with a banana he had with him.

A young guy was reading stuff to himself on the internet, but he was highlighting each sentence as he read it.

A really cute cheerleader-type girl offered her hand for a handshake, but instead of holding it like anyone else, she kind of offered her wrist while her hand went limp with her palm to the floor.

A guy was riding his bike with headphones on, but instead of tucking the cord under his shirt or something, he just held the cord in his mouth.

A twenty-something guy just picked up smoking. He kept fidgeting with the cigarette. He would hold it between the two joints nearest his knuckles too which gave him a burn scar. He kept passing the cigarette back and forth from hand to hand. Sometimes he'd hold it like most people do when smoking, but would get real self conscious or something and after taking a drag he'd return it to near his knuckles.

A guy was talking on the phone while walking. Both of his hands were free, but he was cradling the tiny cell phone in his shoulder anyway.

A guy was taking a nap in the shade of his(maybe someone else's) motorcycle in the middle of a parking lot.

A bunch of twenty-somethings were sitting around in the grass and everyone was absentmindedly ripping up the grass.

A little dog was barking in a window, but the timing of the barks was really intriguing. In an abstract way the barks came out kind of like a bouncing ball. It would do a bunch of small barks followed by a long bark that would cause it to lift it's head real high. Each time it did a long bark it would hold it for a long time, like hang time on a bouncing ball, then do a bunch of smaller barks like the residual bounces after a big bounce. A couple times the dog would do a long bark with a small bark right after while it's head was still way up. It was kind of like hitting a key pose then accenting it before transitioning to the next pose.

George Clooney had a really smarmy smile where the corner of his mouth went down, but it twisted enough to still be a sort of smile

Reality Check

2010-07-05T20:35:00.000-07:00

The results are in for the 11SecondClub contest I entered last month. My score was a 5.32 out of 11, the winner had a solid 7.63, and I was away from my hopes of ranking in the top ten by 1.24.

There are a host of factors that played into my lackluster ranking, but the main thing is the same old same old, keep things simple so they are both accomplish-able and stronger.

I was dealing with some 12 points of control to shape the tentacle which in and of itself was a pain to manage and figure out. I was also basically doing one action for each breathing noise, but not only that I was having him do big quick motions between each. In the blocking I didn't realize that with those moves I'd need much longer holds than I ended up with. It became a series of movements snapping from one pose to the next never really stopping to enjoy any of them in particular. If I had cut down those actions to fewer I could have strayed away from snapping in and out of each pose and also spend more of my time refining the movements into, during, and out of each pose. Lip sync was something people hit me hard for in the competition which is unfortunate but I did basically slam the lip sync in last minute. Literally, the morning it was due, I did the girl's lip sync in like half an hour before I left for work. She also suffered from a lack of attention because I spent all my time wrasting the tentacle into place and a lot of people wanted to see more from her. Since I really wanted you to not pay attention to her I guess I should have cheated and just done a rack focus away from her to beat people over the head to ignore her. Either that or just completely ignore her and stage the shot closer on the guy.

The main thing I had going for me was my idea. I worked on it with James P. Gibson a storyboard artist friend of mine. We went through a lot of ideas and explored what the sounds could be about that would make sense. (my apologies, I don't have a scanner, so I took these pictures with my webcam)

I'm going to at least skip this month's competition so I can work on my problem areas and hopefully I'll do better next time. It's definitely tough to do one of these while working 40 hours a week especially when those 40 hours are spent animating, it's important to step away and get a breather from time to time.

Where did all that time go?

2010-06-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

Woof, the final week or so for this competition has come around and I haven't gotten terribly far. I have my excuses, but we all know about those... Hopefully since some normalcy and regularity has come back in my life I'll be able to really start cranking on this. I'm afraid the polish just won't be where it needs to be by the end, but this could prove to be good practice in what Carlos Baena talks about on his blog in terms of polishing based on what needs most polish/seen more. I'll take a simpler approach to his facial expressions and hand gestures even in the second half focusing more on his physical performance and working out the lip sync on the girl and giving her just moving holds to keep her alive but not steal the show.

Animation and coffee consumption have a direct connection

2010-06-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

I haven't been drinking much coffee lately and now I know why. I haven't been animating, and boy does it feel good to be doing both now. I'm doing this month's 11SecondClub competition.

I had a brain storm session with my story boarding friend James Gibson and we came up with this idea where the dialogue clip is set on a Victorian beach. I wanted to try and come up with an idea that will be different, so instead of using the weird breathing noises as the guy just making funny faces, I came up with a context I could put it in so it fit in, but was equally unexpected. So I went with a monster tentacle that chokes him. Usually in my efforts to be unexpected I often over-complicate the matter, but I think this time it works pretty well. I'm really focused now on simplifying ideas. What's hard for me is using that mentality of simplification, but not letting it simplify my poses and actions. Simplification should mean stronger poses and actions that describe clearly what's going on.

I did some thumbnails and a quick test in Flash just to prove there was potential in the idea.

After realizing that the first shot, while filmically an important establishing shot, was too long and unnecessary, I decided to simplify it down to the core idea. He looks at the shell, listens to it, it chokes him. I could even probably cut out the look at the beginning now that I think of it, but I think it's a fair compromise for not having an establishing shot.

I think going into the next stages of adding extremes and breakdowns is where I often make a misstep. My thumbnailing is, well, rough. And my blocking is often different from the thumbnails. And while I'm doing my blocking I get these ideas for actions that I start to block in, mostly as notes to myself for later on. I think what I need to do now, is look at all this as preproduction work but not jump into full on animation production quite yet.

I've been taught about the importance of the x-sheet, and I like to be able to implement it, but my drawing skills honestly aren't up to par yet to be able to go from thumbnailing to x-sheet to cg. I kind of need to start posing things out in cg and see things in the timeline.

I'm thinking that the next step should be a step back to look at the whole picture and really look at the overall texture of the timing I want to have and plug this stuff into an x-sheet. Everything I've learned says that the more you do upfront to have a strong base, the better your result will be. With tight deadlines this isn't always possible, but I have a month to do this, so I don't want to short change myself by trying to be done too quickly.

"If at first you don't succeed

2010-05-20T17:59:00.000-07:00

You can dust it off and try again
Dust yourself off and try again, try again
Cause if at first you don"t succeed
You can dust it off and try again
You can dust it off and try again, try again"

I know, way old Aaliyah lyrics, but hear me out. I'm graduating Saturday, and as many of us know, the road to employment can be long and difficult one. You send out your work to as many places as possible, hoping for just one yes, that foot in the door. Shooting for the top, I tried the major studios with little luck. I tried a couple video game studios I knew about and got close, darned close, but still no luck. I am happy to say that none of that got me down or made me want to stop. I just kept on it and now I am proud to say that I have an internship at Sony Pictures Imageworks in L.A. It's an eight week program, so we'll see how it goes. It doesn't start until mid June, so after all this hard work on my thesis (which I'll post in it's entirety once we're done trying the whole festival circuit thing), I'll actually get a chance to relax a bit before going nuts with work again.

I have talked to some of you about doing some tests for a video game company in Boston. It was two parts. The first shot would be a heavy character running at full speed and stopping with difficulty. The second was any sort of melee attack with it's hands or feet.

Stop:

Attack:

They liked what I did and gave me some critique asking me to submit a second run of the test. I reworked the second half of the stop animation and tweaked up the attack some.

Stop:

Attack:

In the end, I should have taken a step back from my thesis and given this the time it would have taken to really make it a lot better. I was too stuck in trying to get it done within the week and afraid of adding frames to actions. Lesson learned, don't be afraid to really push your frames around and add if you have to. The limitation of a set number of frames can be fun and good in terms of keeping your actions simple, but unless I'm going to basically restart from scratch, I should really just add in some frames if I need it and I'm able to.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

2010-04-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

My senior year is dwindling to an end, but not without putting up a fight. It seems no matter how much work I put in or how many extra miles I go, at every level of completion where I'm supposed to be able to say, 'phew, I did it, now I can relax', something new comes up and I'm right back into 12 hour work days trying to stay on top of the insurmountable pile of work in front of me. It's because of that mountain and my inability to reach the summit that my posts have been lacking.

One of the projects I recently had to work on was an animation test for Insomniac Games. While I got the email today saying I didn't get the job, it was still a cool opportunity and meant that there was something about my work that peaked their interest.

They gave me four fairly specific cycles to make as well as the rigs to complete them with and one week to do the test. While I feel the walk was probably the weakest point, I'm fairly proud of how they turned out.

Walk:

Attack:

Death:

Alien Enemy:

No Rest for the Wicked

2010-04-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished up putting all my eggs in one basket and sending it all neatly wrapped up to the big studios. I was planning on taking it easy for a few days, give myself a break and all, but I got a few responses right away. Two no's and a maybe. The no's were from some real long shots anyway, but the maybe came from none other than Insomniac Games. They sent me an animation test to do in one weeks time. It's four fairly short cycles, but I want them to be as polished as I can make them in that time.

So, until then, here's my new demo reel!

Animation Demo Reel from John Fielding on Vimeo.

Dangerously

2010-03-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

Johnny Dangerously. . . I'm doing a lip sync test to add to my reel before I send it out. I realized that I've cut out the lip sync pieces I had and that my thesis didn't really give me a chance to show my lip sync skills, so here I am.

Johnny Dangerously is a young cocky cowboy who doesn't know what an adverb is. Here we see him unsuccessfully trying to hit on a woman(off screen).

I don't have my thumbnails scanned yet, but here's the first blocking pass:

Blocking Plus:

New Blocking Plus:
In an effort to do the best I can, I've gone to a lot of people for feedback and from that I went back to square one. I've now actually added in the woman and decided to do lip sync for both of them. Since it's the same rig and model for both characters, it will be a fun challenge to make them feel like completely different people.

04-03: I just started on polish. I'm polishing it in pieces, and you'll notice when it gets to the point where I stopped. I haven't polished the face yet and the lip sync that's in there is definitely in progress.

PS: I'll be updating this one post to consolidate things.

sketchDump

2010-03-14T14:10:00.001-07:00

So, I haven't been keeping up a sketchbook very well as of late, and it shows. Here are some sketches from classes, screenings, open mic night, the airport, and Animal Kingdom in Disney World.

Polishing. Done.

2010-03-11T07:20:00.001-08:00

It's taken some time, but I have finally finished a pass of polish on all of my shots for No Strings Attached. I'm not out of the woods yet as I have a host of notes and corrections to do before I can officially call my animation duties on this film done, but this is still quite a relief.

Here's all my animation polish in one easy to watch video. When I'm all done, I'll put something together that is more comprehensive with all of the preproduction work I did as the Lead Animator in terms of model sheets and animation tests before we went into animation production.

With this work done I have cut together a new reel. I'm kind of embarassed by me last reel because as I was doing this one I realized that something in After Effects was causing it to hold and take out random frames. Anyways, I fixed that but it's kind of fat right now and could probably use some trimming and I would really appreciate if anyone has any suggestions as to what to keep or lose. You can post it here or email me at pandalope@gmail.com. As shots get rendered (hopefully) or things corrected it will evolve a bit. I'm also planning on taking a shot at this month's 11 Second Club Animation contest. The audio clip sounds like a lot of fun and it'd probably be good to get some more lip sync under my belt and on my reel.

Animation Demo Reel from John Fielding on Vimeo.

So close yet so far away

2010-02-24T06:34:00.000-08:00

I am so close to being done I can almost taste it, whatever that might taste like... Anyway, I have a handful of shots left to polish for No Strings Attached, but I'm actually going to take a vacation over Spring Break. Hopefully that'll be good to come back refreshed and recharged. After I've taken a pass at polishing all of these shots, then the real fun begins. Going back into each shot and addressing fixes and notes I've gotten and making it as good as I can in about three to five weeks because then we need to start rendering this beast out. We did a calculation based on what the test renders have taken and it'll be about 54 days of rendering or something if we were to render it all on one computer in the lab for 24 hours a day. Luckily we have a sort of renderfarm here that'll expedite the process.

Here is my work in sequence 03, and easily my favorite work on the whole film. It's chock full of awkwardness. Shot 03-01 was particularly troublesome getting the right actions timing and physics. It was easily the most difficult physical shot I've ever attempted, but in the end I'm pretty proud of it, especially with Dan Cirillo's voice in there for Gabe. And yes, that paper flip is hand animated. So much fun.

The next bit is still in progress, but since it's been a while since my last post I thought I'd share it anyway. I haven't done my shots with Dan here yet and simply because how much fun it is to work with him this could possibly be the funnest sequence to work on(maybe not favorite, but funnest).

Oh yeah, it's not as recent as this work, but we did an update on the work reel.

No Strings Attached - Work Reel from Group of Six on Vimeo.

And I updated my animation demo reel. It's not my final reel before I try and get a real job, but it's an update with some work from my thesis nonetheless.

Animation Demo Reel from John Fielding on Vimeo.

Hand Drawing!

2010-02-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

I've been able to get going a bit better on the hand drawn thesis film. It's an entirely different situation from the cg film because I don't have creative control over the action so much and I'm try to stay close to what the key animator has laid out in terms of timing because, frankly it's her film. There's still some room for creativity in terms of getting from each pose and I get to think more clearly about timing and spacing because the mess of splines in cg isn't there. I do often wish it were easier to tweak or make changes though because that's something I've come to love about cg animation. You can tweak and adjust things and test ideas out fairly quickly. That becomes a bit of a pitfall at times because I could spend a lot of time noodling a shot.

I've been playing around with teaching myself some Toon Boom since that's how we plan on coloring the film. I tested some coloring in the first shot to get my feet wet but it's a rather long complicated shot, so I did a more full-on color test on the last one there with Ben getting his sticker. I didn't choose the colors terribly carefully and I think we're going to need to overlay the lines on top of all this because the lines didn't exactly come out on top all the time or dark enough and also note that the background is a temp one that the illustrator did and doesn't have the linework on it either.

Polish Progress

2010-02-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

Polish has been going slowly but surely. It's been good to be able to just sit down and focus on polish. It becomes obsessive after a while making everything as polished and smooth as possible. It's definitely a different mental process than blocking and it's real scary to start each shot, but after a good day's work and things start falling into place it's incredible to feel like the characters are actually thinking.

(we're having some technical goofs right now after having recently updated some texture stuff, so please excuse parts where Gabe's eyes are just pure white)

Starting Polish

2010-01-23T18:51:00.001-08:00

We've all finished our blocking and the edits have been tightened up so progress is coming along well. We're a touch behind schedule, but the good thing is that it's a schedule that would put us way ahead, so in reality we're probably doing just fine.

Here's the work reel in its current state. Things will still be organically plussing at each stage, so there are some tweaks that'll happen between here and final polished animation.

No Strings Attached - Work Reel from Group of Six on Vimeo.

Speaking of polished animation, I just finished up polishing one of my mini sequences. Polish is a kind of scary stage for me because now everything starts to get real. The fun time of posing and working out acting is mostly over and now it's a matter of keeping all that in mind while I obsessively track arcs and spacing on everything. It's still fun, but a different kind of fun.

This is the section where Gabe just saved Dan and thinks everything is cool for a minute, Dan steps on a plank of wood and Gabe looks to his book for help.

Blocking, done.

2010-01-15T11:47:00.000-08:00

I just finished up blocking out my shots on the cg thesis film No Strings Attached.
We had a big critique session last night and small things will be changing in the shots, but this is pretty darned close to how it'll be acting-wise. Since some small tweaks have happened in sequences previously posted and to give a in-one-look view of my work I'm going to just post all the sequences I am doing. It comes to about 90 seconds of work.

Now comes the scary part where I spline everything out and make it work for real.

And another one

2010-01-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

Here's another piece of my cg thesis. This is a small sequence where Dan steps on a plank for comic relief and Gabe figures he has some time to look something up in his book.

Another Sequence!

2010-01-03T07:33:00.000-08:00

I just finished up blocking out another sequence for No Strings Attached. I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out. I have to say again how helpful it has been to throw everything into After Effects and see how the acting and cutting all works in the bigger picture. The new thing I started doing is, when I'm looking through my reference footage and choosing a performance, I'm actually doing it in the After Effects sequence so I know how it will feel against everything around it.

I added in a bunch of shots for continuity but they are all from the layout stage where the animation isn't something critique-able. Basically, our main guy Gabe has been failing pretty hard at this Guardian thing and just successfully saved his person Dan.

Vacation Working

2009-12-29T06:45:00.001-08:00

So, I've been trying to listen to everyone and not work like crazy over the break but that has presented one big problem. I took a break for a few days around Christmas and my Birthday, but when I was trying to get back into it, I felt really fumbly and wasn't as productive/good.

Anyways, here are a couple things I've been working on.

First, I did another shot for the hand drawn thesis Tug of War:

Second, I've been working on the cg thesis, No Strings Attached a bit. We are currently working on blocking out all of our shots before going too far into polish. I started just kind of hitting random shots based on how much time I have and how difficult the shot should be. This break a sort of revelation occurred to me. We have been assigned shots in small sequences throughout the film, and it seems like the best way to attack this would be to tackle it by mini sequence. I threw my shots into After Effects so that I could see them working together and it has been really great to work out not only what's happening in each shot, but how each one works with the next. This has both created and helped solve problems, but being able to step back and look at how it's all working together has helped me tighten it all up into a much better sequence.

In case you don't know, blocking means that the characters are going to pop from one pose to the next without smooth transitions. I often get a little overzealous and do what would be called blocking plus, where I don't just put in the main story poses, but put in more poses to help describe the action and timing.

Another last note, the camera staging and such is being handled by someone else, so the staging and layout is still sort of organic at this point.

wholeBunchOfStuff

2009-12-21T18:34:00.001-08:00

I must apologize for not posting in quite some time now. The lack of updates is a result of all the work I have been doing. I haven't had much time to stop and breath in the last month. Enough with the same old busy sob story...

The cg thesis film I am the supervising/lead animator on has gone through a big rewrite and a bunch of changes since I've last posted, so it's worth it to post the video again (if you're ever curious how the film is progressing, the link to the film is always going to be the same-until we're done of course).

You'll notice the sequence-shot numbers in the bottom right hand corner have different colors behind them and that represents who's shot it is. The orange ones are mine, Blue are Rory's, Green are Ryan's, and the Purple are Dave's (he's doing cinematography and those shots have no characters in them)

No Strings Attached - Work Reel from Group of Six on Vimeo.

I just today did my first shot on the other thesis film, the hand drawn one about the tug of war game. It's not finaled and the pencil test was done in a jerry-rigged manner as I am home on break for a couple weeks and don't have a proper pencil test stand.

Up until last night my sketchbook has been looking like this from all the furious thumbnailing I have been doing for my shots for No Strings Attached as well as some sketches I did trying to get comfortable with the new models on the Tug of War film:

Last night I got bored so I busted open the internet and did some drawing. I particularly liked one of the drawings of people that came out. It didn't look a whole lot like the woman I was trying to draw, but she came out more beautiful and oddly sort of like Mary for some reason. I also came to the conclusion that Labrador puppies are the most adorable things in the world. I also did some quick sketchings while at the mall today that I threw in there.

Huzzah!

2009-11-13T13:51:00.000-08:00

After a week of 17ish hour days, we have pushed through and gotten to the next stage in one of the thesis films I'm working on. We have taken every board and translated it into 3d getting what's called a layout version of our film. From here on our we will be updating this work reel and I'll repost about it when important/interesting things happen. Right now some effects are missing like some red lights glowing and whatnot, but for the most part it's rather clear.

Please, don't hesitate to leave comments, whoever you are. I am personally fascinated to see how other people interpret our film so that we can see how effective we are in getting across the film we want to get across.

Enjoy!

No Strings Attached - Work Reel from Group of Six on Vimeo.

How To Enjoy Wine

2009-10-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

For a class I'm taking, Wines of the World, we have to do a final project that can be basically anything. Naturally I had to do an animation, so a friend of mine, Rory Riggins and I did a short on wine tasting techniques. We cranked it out in about six days. It was definitely a lot of fun and since we didn't do a single pencil test before compiling all the layers working only from a rough animatic, it was a good test of our theories and sense of timing.

How To Enjoy Wine from John Fielding on Vimeo.

Oh wait, I'm working on another thesis film too

2009-10-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

So it hit me today, I have been doing a bunch of short pencil tests for the 2d thesis film I'm working on but haven't posted them yet. This film is an underdog story of a group of kids playing tug of war while we go into each one's imagination. The various imaginary obstacles they confront are an octopus, a lava monster, and ghosts.

My official role on this film is an assistant animator. While the story is still in development, layouts are being done, etc, I am doing these little tests, exploring different things and figuring out how these designs might actually be moving.

This was the first test I did. It was done in Photoshop:

Then I took some time when I wasn't working in the lab to do some tests on paper and did one of the octopus (there are some bad frames in the middle where I was trying to do quick corrections but had the pages in scanning order, not animating order and was all sorts of confused):

And then I did a test of the lava monster:

New Demo Reel

2009-10-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

With the completion of Surrender! and a possible demo reel review on the horizon, I thought it'd be good to update my reel.

And then I thought I'd just share it with everyone while I'm at it.

Animation Demo Reel from John Fielding on Vimeo.

No Strings Attached

2009-10-05T06:38:00.001-07:00

For those of you that don't know, I'm working on two thesis films this year as a character animator (I also throw my two cents in wherever possible). One of the films, No Strings Attached, just got a new story reel up and I thought I'd post it here. We love getting as much feedback as we can. That said, we have been developing this story since last winter, so a lot of decisions have been made, but any comments, no matter how off the wall will definitely be taken into consideration since we are still in preproduction and changes are *relatively* easy to make.

One quick note, the audio used is a temp track the Story Lead is using for timing/pacing as talked about in the book Prepare to Board by Nancy Beiman. The sound scape is planned to be mostly sound effects driven, with possible music book-ending the film. There will also be some dialogue, but none of it is expository.

I Surrender! A postmortem

2009-10-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

So, two months is a long time to work on a piece. Especially when, at the end, you still see things that could be better. I'm going to generalize and say that that's the case with a lot of art, it's never done, you just take it to a place where you can let go and hope it can stand on its own. I've been working on this animation I've dubbed Surrender! for some time now and have learned quite a bit. As a way to remind myself that some good did come of it, I thought it'd be good to do a postmortem after finally being able to call it done. That, and I thought just adding it to the end of my previous post, it might not get noticed by those of you who do come to my little blog.

Things I need to improve on:

Having clear concise ideas from the get go
Tighter lip sync
Making people walk
Slow in and out of movements better

Things I learned/did better with:

Animating two very different characters with the same rig through different types of movement
Holding back from overanimating
Using holds
On that note, getting into and out of holds with overlapping action
How much a shot can change given an unlimited time frame

Here she is:

Surrender! Finally from John Fielding on Vimeo.

Scribblings

2009-09-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

Here's an update with what I've been up to in my sketchbooks. The first is just stuff for fun, the second is stuff I've been doing for one of the thesis films I'm working on.

flip book update

2009-09-08T16:04:00.000-07:00

It's been quite a while since I've made a legit update on here. I've been lost for almost a month now in this Surrender! animation, but I have been doing other things. I've tried to keep a stack of index cards and a marker or pen with me so that I can record these things in my crude way(some are actually me trying to work out ideas for the Surrender! shot). Some of the cards got all wrinkled when we got rained on camping, so please excuse the poor quality of the images.

Surrender!

2009-08-12T14:00:00.001-07:00

Here's my newest project. I'm trying for a more emotional and less funny piece. I got this clip from The Patriot off the internet. I haven't seen the movie for some time now, so I'm not really sure what's actually going on, but that's a good thing in my mind.

[8-11-09]I got this idea rather quickly but knew I wasn't quite happy with it. The staging was annoyingly boring, I ultimately didn't like the idea of the first guy coming off screen from nowheresville, and the whole dropping to the knees felt a little cliche.

[8-12-09]After talking with my friend Dan about it for a bit and doing a ton more reference footage, I got some better ideas for the staging and action.

After a short day in Maya, here's where I'm at with it. For some reason I'm working straight ahead but in sort of a stop-motion way where I know(from my previous tests) what poses I want to hit and about where to hit them. This way it seems to grow more organically and new ideas get put in(that may have to be taken out later) as I go.

[8-14-09]I've blocked out most of the action and quickly thrown in some smoke animation because the French guy blowing smoke at the over emotional American is an important part for me to underscore the Frenchman's frank/cold look at the war and death.

[8-18-09]I'm taking things back to the drawing board. When I went into Maya things just weren't working out right. After a good critique, I'm trying to tone down the Frenchman more and simplify what the American is doing.

[8-21-09]Another crack at simplifying things and adding to the story has left me with some new blocking. Something weird happened and my rig files got deleted, so the next time you see these guys they'll probably look a bit

[9-1-09] So, I've done one last bit of restaging and changed a bit of action, but now I'm (hopefully) on the final stretch. It's been a bit since my last post because I started to do some polish, but then stepped back and realized that I was moving a lot of things for no reason and needed to refocus on slowing things down(still).

[9-7-09] Talking with my brother inspired a new way for the American character to get down on one knee. Right now he's also very still from when he goes down to when he yells at the end. The plan is to build in more interesting things later instead of trying to throw it all in at once. I'm trying to figure out how I can make a good performance out of him being relatively still that people won't go, you should have him checking the body, etc.

[10-3-09] After having lost a lot of steam coming back to school and dealing with endless classes and thesis meetings, I'm finally willing to call this done. I'm honestly just tired of doing, redoing, and re-redoing parts of this. That being said, in all those re-re-redoings I feel I have learned a good deal on this. I think what I learned is best reflected in the French guy who I did second. I was focusing mostly on pulling back and being able to just hit a pose and stay with it for a while and having clear, direct motivation. I'll make a new post today with a better postmortem.

Anyways, here it is

Surrender! Finally from John Fielding on Vimeo.

Sketchings

2009-08-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I last dumped some things from my sketchbook, so I figured I ought to get caught up.

Sketch Experiement

2009-08-02T15:18:00.000-07:00

The other day I was going through some stuff in my basement and came across some index cards. After having finished Walt Stanchfield's Drawn to Life Vol. 1 (a great book by the way), I was inspired to take sketching to (hopefully) another level. Now, I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing with this (studying poses, actions, timing, etc), but there's something there and hopefully if I keep up with it I'll figure out what that something is. I'm basically doing sequential gestures from life.

Morning Coffee-Done

2009-07-23T08:10:00.001-07:00

I have to call it quits on this one. I took it a distance, learned some things, but at this point it'd be a lot of headaches and fixing things that I just didn't do right in the first place. I think it's going to be better to leave it where it is, take what I learned from it and apply that to my future projects.

As a way to more formally call it quits, I threw in a physical sun and sky (because I can't do lighting to save my life) and rendered it out. For some reason the lighting gets drastically darker when the camera angle changes, but I'm not planning on really doing much more with this one anyway. Enjoy.

Popsicle

2009-07-20T19:10:00.000-07:00

So, I've been watching Rune Bennekie's Blog and had a short conversation with him about his work. For fun, he does these crazy good straight ahead tests. His latest post is one he did some 14 years ago that rocks. Straight ahead animation is something really difficult for me as I have trouble keeping things on model throughout, but what makes his work more impressive is that he said he didn't do any thumbnailing or multiple passes or even use an x-sheet. In my small attempt at getting into that freestyle groove, I nabbed a little skit that is at the end of a MC Frontalot song called Charity Case and went sort of straight ahead. I'd often get a bit too excited and jump ahead a bit to throw in a pose, but it was very organic and free flowing. It didn't take very long (and the drawing shows), but I think I ended up with some fun, spontaneous acting choices.

In an effort to learn from my 2d efforts, I am currently working on working this out in 3d. There are some things I'm planning on changing, but I'm just enjoying finally animating a nurotic, jumpy character.

[7-22-09]From some feedback I got on that cg test, I have decided to start over and actually think about things first. I got a bit ahead of myself, but am definitely still pulling ideas from that first pencil test, I'm just reorganizing that right brained mess into something that is more put together and solid.

[7-24-09]Okay, so here's where I'm at. I shot some reference footage and using the timecode text effect in After Effects I'm able to pull out better reference from it. I've restarted in both Maya and Flash. I did some quick "pencil" tests in Flash after looking at the reference, then I took that into Maya with my reference footage to pose it out and plus what I had.

At this point I needed to put in more poses so that I can stay in control of the poses and timing and not just hit spline. The problem is, working in 3d has, at least for me, is less spontaneous than working in 2d because you're so caught up in just trying to bend and key the puppet in place. I've decided to go back into Flash for a more refined pass a the animation (in number of drawings, not quality). Tomorrow I plan to take this with me back into Maya and work out a lot more of the action and plus it even more.

[7-26-09]So, I've started working it out more in 3d. Some good things are starting to happen here and there, but I'm still struggling with trying to have just 5 main poses. Whenever I look at it, it seems like I have closer to 7, but a few are really close/similar. I'm definitely planning on taking out the bob forward as he says popsicle though.

[7-27-09]I think I'm gonna keep with this whole adding to one long blog post so everything is contained. It's also neat to see the progression of the shot all in one location. I put in some more work today and feel like I'm getting pretty far. It's time to start putting in some lip sync and facial animation.

[7-28-09]

[7-29-09]I've finally hit spline(actually, plateau tangent) and worked it out as far as I can, for now.

[7-30-09]So, I got a render out of this thing. MC Frontalot has been cool enough to try to get me the original audio file without the music in the background but, because of the way things are gonna work out I'm not going to be able to post that version for a week or two. Until then, here it is (pre critiques-I've already noticed some wonkiness with the shoulder at the beginning and how the hips just stop dead around frame 61 and have fixed that but won't have a chance to re render it before I go home for the day)

Thesis Walk Cycle Tests

2009-07-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

So, last week I was fooling around with some walk cycle tests. I am heading up animation and character development on one of the thesis films I'm working on next year and wanted to get a head start at figuring out these characters. There are three main characters although it's basically about one guy Gabe:

He's a nervous fellow and it is his first day on the job.

Then there is his boss Harold:

He is a bit of a wash up who once had a promising career that never got past middle management. It's his job to train Gabe, but he's a bit distant.

And It is Gabe's job to make sure that Dan doesn't die:

Dan is a construction worker in the 1930's and sort of gentle giant kind of guy. Loveable and happy, but a bit clumsy- sort of like he's not fully aware of how big he really is.

I have a ways to go before I've actually figured them out, but these are just my first cracks at it.

Sketch Update 7-19

2009-07-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

Quick update of stuff from my sketchbook. Most of it is from Curb Your Enthusiasm. I also found a couple amazing short films that had Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and others in them which were wonderful.

The Atomic Wombat!

2009-07-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

So, I asked my friend Dan a while ago to do a couple poses of this character he made called the atomic Wombat. I wanted to try my hand at working with someone else's style and plus it was a hilarious character. I finally have found a good chunk of time to devote to animating this out.

Updated 7/14

Rough (IN PROGRESS):

Thumbnails:

Model(Drawings by Dan Valvo):

Laser Animation

2009-07-07T04:22:00.001-07:00

So, as some of you have heard, I was doing some work for this local animation show. The drawings had to be simplified as much as possible and played at 6 fps. It's not like creme de la creme but it was certainly a great gig for someone in my position. If you happen to be in the area you can catch it Thursday-Saturday night all this summer at 10pm at High Falls in Rochester. More information can be found here.

Here are some clips of the shots that I worked on
NOTE: I did not do all of the Frederick Douglass shots, just up to where he gives his speech

George Eastman:

Frederick Douglass:

Nathaniel Rochester:

I also did a couple other quick shots of Cab Calloway and Renee Flemming

WIP Morning Coffee

2009-06-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

To keep things more neat and orderly, I'm going to just update the video in this post with my progress. That way I can update what I've been doing and not have a blog full of posts of this one project.

Updated 7/22

Percolasaurus Rex

2009-06-25T05:16:00.001-07:00

We used to have a sweet coffee pot/monster in my computer lab, but it's owner graduated and took it with him. This gave me the chance to take my old coffee pot and turn it into a sweet new coffee pot for the lab. I give you, Percolasaurus Rex!

WIP Morning Coffee 6-24

2009-06-23T16:46:00.000-07:00

I have a lot more blocked out and am starting to slowly go in and polish things up. I also have slowed down his pace and adjusted his posture.

If you see it and want to say something, good or bad, don't hesitate!

WIP Morning Coffee 6-22

2009-06-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

I'm really enjoying fooling around with this shot and taking my time with it. I was having trouble covering the action with just one camera, so I'm trying out adding another one. Silhouettes have yet to be adjusted, but I like having the close up at the beginning but also being able to see more of him when walking over in the second angle.

In terms of animation, I'm concentrating mostly on roughing out the walk over right now. It's kinda funny looking and floppy, but I like it. I'm pretty sure when all my breakdowns are in there I'm going to want to slow it down and pull back on a lot of the wobble to his step, but at this stage, I haven't done any offsetting of keys yet, so that should be a manageable change to make.

If you have any comments, feel free to leave them here or drop me an email at pandalope@gmail.com.

Work In Progress

2009-06-19T16:04:00.001-07:00

I just finished up an actual animation job doing animation for this laser light show that goes on here in Rochester. A lot of my friends from school and I have worked on it. If you are in the area this summer and are interested in checking it out, it'll be playing (for free) every Thursday through Sunday at 10 in the High Falls area of Rochester. I got a couple short sequences of Nathaniel Rochester and George Eastman, but I also did a couple shots for Frederick Douglass and got to animate Cab Calloway doing his boogie, which was awesome.

Now that that's done, I have a few shots stirring around in my head that I think would be fun to work on. Right now I'm working on blocking out what would be the perfect morning for me. Being out on a balcony in the morning, drinking coffee. I'm trying out a new rig this time, his name is Goon. He looks similar to the one I usually use, Norman, but there are some different things that his rig offers and he's fairly simple and easy to work with.

First off, I have been trying to do a fair amount of exploration before I start setting keys in 3d.
Here are my initial sketches for the shot:

Then I hopped into Flash to quickly work out a few things for the walk:

Here's the first pose test with really rough timing for the shot:

I'll be sure to keep posting updates as this shot progresses.

Open Mic Night

2009-06-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

Boulder Coffee Co on Alexander has Open Mic night every Wednesday at 8. You can be sure to see some interesting locals performing. I love going there to sketch.

Sketchbook Dump

2009-06-07T20:09:00.001-07:00

To get you caught up, here's what's been going on in my sketchbook lately. Some things are better than others and apparently I keep a very messy sketchbook. Hopefully using pens more often will help with that. I'm planning on coloring a few of these especially the elephant and the cartoon guy drinking coffee.

I had so much fun making this character. I need to animate him sometime.These were some exploratory sketches for a 3d caricature of Chuck Jones I did. The guy with the egg shaped head is a random caricature of a professor of mine that found its way into that blank space.

Boredom plus being home without cable equals watching pro bowling tournaments on TV...

Old man

2009-06-07T19:35:00.001-07:00

Some of my more favorite sketches come from commercials. I think this one was about some old guy who didn't have life insurance or something.

Bananaz

2009-06-07T18:47:00.001-07:00

So, after reading about a billion times to draw all the time, I had my sketchbook handy when I watched this awesome documentary about the band the Gorillaz. If you are like me and were a fan of this band, I would definitely recommend it, especially if you're also an animator. I think some of my better sketches were the last ones. I'm particularly fond of the one of the guy with the afro.

New blog!

2009-06-01T06:12:00.000-07:00

So, I've never done one of these before, but I figure I should try it out. My guess is that I'm going to be like most other animators and post sketches from my sketchbook and links to interesting websites or blogs I happen upon. I have to dig out my scanner from my basement so, no sketches yet, but soon.

I just submitted to this month's 11 Second Club animation contest. I did fairly well last month, hopefully I end up around the top 20% again. I'm not sure though because I'm not as proud of this one. I didn't get a chance to render it nicely, but more importantly, my curves became a tangled mess so diagnosing exactly where a problem was became difficult. I think I'm going to take a break from all this acting stuff for a while and focus on the basics. That way I won't get so bogged down trying to make a puppet think while struggling to get the movements just right when I get back into the acting side of animation.