11secondclub week dos

in the second week i blocked out the keyposes of the aniamtion using the aniamtic and live action footage i took and also dope sheeting the sound file for lip syncing later in the animation but also to be able to write down at what frame roughly the key poses occure which was very helpful. Th ough as i had to do this using premier the frame rate wasnt exact but i was able to tweek it to how i thought it looked right quite well. and i also took into concideration that the live action footage wasnt gospel it was there as a guide for the timing of the animation of the keyposes which it work as quite well. below is the first pass (blocking of key poses) that i did with a few inbetweens technically as it would have looked very wierd without so technically the second pass.

more week uno

from this acting video i then drew out the keyposes into a animatic taking most of the poses i would need to concider for the block through in the following week.

I also used this to put the character into a few key poses i would be using. I found in doing these key poses and making a n animating it gave me a better understanding of the timing that would be required for each keypose. I then went on to pull the character into a few key poses which was a bit wierd as he wasrigged different from what i could see to the dee rig i had been previously using and i had forgotten about fk rigs and ik rigs which we had done in class but i missioned on with the new setup and got him into a few poses.


After this i then went on to add the scene layout which isnt much at the moment but then i dont need much more than a bed and a pillow and a tight room with some cans but thats not the focus at the moment the animation is what im being judged on, i will update and change this later if i get time and make a better looking bed and scene but for now this is what my scene layout looks like.

11secondclub_week_uno

Ive been really busy working hard on my aniamtion and have had many ups and downs with stuff going wrong left right and centre but have finally got on top of the issuses i need to address and have now found the time to blog my progress on the project so far. ive been so busy i havent even had time to go surf this week bar one hr on sunday morning before animating again which george knows i find very hard, but so far despite the many hick ups its been fun animating this character, and hopefully when i get less hrs at work in the future i wont have my evening broken up with dominos work so will be able to do some character aniamtion on the side as it is fun. Anyways enough jabber, for the first week i we had to do a scene layout, acting the scene out in live action and character poses. I started by acting out many many different variations of what actions i could possibly act out while letting the sound file play on repeat this helped me get into the mood and get a feel for the character i was going to act and animate out. The main difficulty was overdramatising the actions which was kinda funny but felt a little wierd as i would never do that in real life, but in the end as you see i thought this concept up which was a crazed whipcream addicted house pototo rocking back and forth on his bed telling of his drama and i decided that would be ideal.

experimental animation

For my experimental, i started off by choosing my sound which was the ruta d sound clip as i like native music and in particular american tribes of all varieties they are very nice to stylize and easily recognisable. I decided to theme my animation around a totum pole and fireplace with a few characters. I collected a few research images to do drawings of to give me ideas for my character which are below. I then did a rough storyboard to plan out the timing of the animation with a roughly formed dope sheet. i made my characters so only the key body parts that needed to be animated where. they didnt have any colour as i decided i wanted to have a basic look to them with shadow using the light i had and drawing a slight shadow on them.

for the above character the drummer his legs are attached to the drums and cant move his top half of his body can move slightly and the head has full rotation and the arms can move up and down in the motion of tapping allowing the character to play the drums with out his arms wandering while im animating him.

for the above character the piper, his top half of his body ive allowed for rocking back and forth movement to the music, the lower half of his body is all one connected to the log he is sitting on as i felt it wasnt necessary to have any of the bottom half of him animated. his arms are in 2 parts allowing for retraction and extention of the arms holding the flute out to the totum pole and bring back to his lips to play and the head moves with the top part of the body as he has long hair which i didnt want to seperate from the body.
For the hand parts i literally drew round mine and placed them in a position so that i could pull the leaves back like it was my hands doing it with the thumb between the leave as they go back maybe.These are some of the parts for the totum pole pre cutting out and rigging.

To rig my characters i took dereks advice and used cotton string and masking tape to hold the moveable parts to each other and the non moveable parts. I did this for all 3 of my characters the 2 indian men and the totum pole but the hands and the leaves i moved independantly. Below is a few images of the way i made the rig for the totum pole which is the same way as for the other two characters.

additional thoughts on reading

From the 2 videos below you can see from the acting to the animation there is quite a bit of difference and exageration in the animating. I now realise that i probably needed more exageration in my acting to make things easier in animation. And from the seminar today im able to see this and take note for future reference

more videos

videos