Winning some, and losing some

With the recent visit of one of the professionals who judged our film pitches in September, he gave the films in production an in depth review because being someone less in contact with the films he could see what aspects of each story needed a do over before we all got further down the pipeline. This is the downside of being closely related to the films we're all working on, the closer you are to the story, the less you can see overall.

Unfortunately this meant the lovely 'Claws for Concern' film I am currently a part of had a butchering session and shots were cut which I had already done key frames for. However shaving a minute or so off the film means there's less to animate and more time can go into the post-production stage which everyone working on the film hopes we can get to.
Now that the animatic has had a complete overhaul and 3D layouts of some scenes have been created to ease the mind-boggling task of attempting to create accurate perspective in 2D, I've been like the fish factory in the film, churning out as many key-framed shots a week as possible so static images can become life on screen.

For 'Claws' in particular I've been able to start and finish a shot in a day/ day and a half bearing in mind these are just the key-frames with in-betweens and clean up still to do. I think our aim is to complete most if not, all the keys before we start in-betweening just in case there are more shots that can still be cut.
Below are the two shots I've completed recently, both of which follow one after the other in the animatic.

Side project

A commission I was tasked to do on the side just before the Christmas holidays ended was create a logo for a strength and conditioning coach that incorporated his initials, T.B.
He wanted something that resembled a figure running, had to be in white and a light blue to fit to his website and it had to obviously relate to his job so within a few days of receiving the commission I drew up some quick doodles of what he might want. Trying to incorporate the capital 'B' into the logo was a difficult task to overcome as the conjoining of the curves meant a human shape couldn't really be achieved without breaking the 'B' and making it unrecognisable as a letter. So I also tried using a lower case 'b' as the curve in this could form the leg.

Colour was an extremely important aspect of the design also, as it could be used to define the lettering within the form so as can be seen above the white in the designs defined the 'B' and the light blue the 'T'. The only design where I didn't incorporate any white, I was going for a more realistic human form where the darker blue helped to bring out the letters within the body.
The design that was chosen was bottom right as the 'T' and 'b' were distinguishable to a degree and it is clear that it's a human form even though more attention is paid to the lettering in this idea. This design also appealed to me the most as the part of the logo that forms the body and back leg accommodates both the vertical line of the 'T' and 'b', joining the two but can still be identified as two separate letters by the split colours.

 

Logo on the website

 

 

 

 

Galloping is harder than it looks...

11 weeks to go before third year productions cease and our year switches off the lights and shuts the studio door so we can open another door that hopefully leads to a happy future........hopefully.

Nothing has changed in my workflow for the Claws for Concern film, still tasked with the monster job of key framing out sequences ready for in-betweens alongside the director and producer although my job has slowed briefly as final layouts are sorted out so the bear is in the correct place for animation in the shots. However just before this, I was given the sequence involving the bear drowning after his boat is capsized after the storm. They wanted a slow motion, bear flailing his arms as he sank feel and without a time constraint, as the animatic was only a rough guide, I could stretch out the time it took for the bear to perform this action.
To begin with I had only placed down the main keys but when they were given the shot I'd done to review, they weren't sure if the arms would work as of course it's hard to know if the action truly works unless the full fluid motion is complete. The second video below is the rough keyed out version that includes some extra keys to get a better sense of the arms flailing and sinking.

Animatic shot

 

 

 

 

 

 

For 'The Bird' I've completed the other mammoth task of making sure the stripes work on the finished gallop cycle and then placing the zebra in the background to see if it all fits together.

 

 



 

 

For this shot the camera zooms in on the herd and tracks it for a short distance before cutting away so my initial thought was to animate the herd moving across the screen and the background remained static with the additional camera zoom added, however I found when the camera gets closer to the animals, the gallop jitters regardless of whether I used a straight line as a guide for the placement of the hooves for not.

 

 

Herd without the camera move

 

 

Herd with camera move

 

 

I also thought making the zebra move instead of the background would be the best way to avoid what may end up looking like zebra trying to gallop on ice and the hooves sliding across the ground when they should be glued in the same position until the zebra lifts a certain leg to bring forward.

So although I originally believed the second option below wasn't going to work, it did actually work when I tested it so now the background moves while the zebra gallops on the spot to give the illusion its covering ground. Included is also the basic camera move but what also made me want to rule out this second option in the first place was the fact there was a camera zoom as well, which I thought might break the illusion of the zebra galloping forward. Trial and Error as they say.

 



 

 

 

 

Claws and Birds

Forgetting to post now productions are hotting up in the final animation department but both films I'm working on have entered the full animation stage with keyframing happening in Claws for Concern and key framing and inbetweening for The Bird.

The Bird has decided to opt for each shot to be completely done by one person so passing key frames and in-betweens on to different people prevents any confusion in what needs to be done to the shot. If one person does an entire section then that person knows what needs doing to the shot.
So no surprise after all the zebra testing I did last semester, I would be tasked to animate the zebra scenes.
Below I tested one of my original zebra in the completed background with an additional camera move so we could see what would work in the scene. It was decided that tracking the zebra in the second move would work better as of course the main character would be sat on top so focus needs to be with her.

So with a new zebra design that fits better with the overall film style I have begun fully animating the gallop. Once again the tricky part in the weeks to come will be the stripes but the tests I have done previously will help me to know what worked and how I can make them work correctly first time round in this final animation.

And for Claws for Concern we are currently going through the whole film key-framing the shots out ready to be animated by second years who wish to help on the project.
In order to get to grips with the new refined bear design, I spent a couple of days drawing him repeatedly so I could avoid inconsistency in my key frames when I came to do them. It was discovered that drawing his eyes slightly out of place affected the whole drawing which is why keying out the shots is limited to being done by a few people that have got the bear design nailed down accurately. Below you can see I wasn't quite getting his head shape properly so the producer marked out where I was going wrong so I could go back and improve.

And low and behold I got there in the end.

So far I've key-framed two shots for them. One required more subtle animation than the other and I found the more subtle movements were more difficult to do just because not a lot of exaggeration is required, and when animation is a lot of the time, about exaggeration of real life actions it's difficult to tone all of that down for a slight head movement. Luckily my crazy obsession with anime helped to overcome that issue as anime has a limited frame rate so quite often there are static shots within the genre that only involve a subtle head tilt or mouth movement but conveys a lot of emotion, so drawing upon what I see every day in what I watch allowed me to put that into practice with the bear. The reference below came from 'Free! Iwatobi Swim Club' and this came in handy when trying to make the bear look miserable and defeated in his day to day life as an animal working among people as this same emotion is reflected within the anime character. I picked up specifically on the slight head tilt to the left and the way the eyes move.