Last furlong.......

With two weeks left before deadlines request me to submit the second and final half of my degree's work, all the effort is going into supporting the final film 'Claws for Concern' which is closer to its intended finishing goal in comparison to my other involvement in 'The Bird.' Not much has been posted recently as organisation of shots still to be coloured was Claws' priority and once everything was in order, it was a case of sprinting as fast as possible to get shots finished and signed off for final post-production corrections.
Thankfully 'Claws' has now been completely coloured and once additional facial details have been included on the faces of characters it will hopefully be ready for submission.

Below are a few of the shots I've coloured. A painstaking process of drawing around the bear frame by frame to fill in colour as outlines are being left off so we therefore cannot just simply fill in between the outlines with the well-known paint bucket tool. Luckily this is where brain-power can be conserved or should I say, filtered into the singing voice as music is your only salvation from the encroaching feeling as boredom begins to set in!

 

 

 

 

Also been creating a mini logo ident for my pet-portrait page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Third Year- First showreel

Here is my first showreel of third year, bringing together elements from 'The Bird,' 'Claws for Concern' and 'Snowless,' Snowless being my little animated short I'm currently working on for Christmas.

Final character designs and expressions

Working further on the outside animation, 'Snowless,' character designs are finally completed including a sheet of expressions both might pull in the final film.
One difference in the boy's design is his eyes are now two-toned and his profile view is more rounded to fit in more with his front view, something which I felt wasn't quite working beforehand.
The dog was originally written off as done however after finishing the basic screen- directions and shot breakdowns the other day I felt the old design wasn't going to cope with the expressions the dog would need to make in the animation, so his build has been slightly altered to make him a bit rounder and his ears are longer and more rabbit like so more emotion can be expressed.

The Bird

Got asked to complete a turnaround sheet for the mother in 'The Bird' the other day. All the initial design work was there, it was just a case of cleaning up the line-work and colouring her in her various poses.

New year, new work

As 2015 drop kicks 2014 into the setting sun and the new year's glorious self rises up, I have a new project ushered in by my university days drawing to a close and that eventual realisation that 'real' work is charging towards me like a knight in a jousting tournament. Nowhere to go but forward, grit my teeth and hope the joust hits its mark.

With my family owning a small hardware shop in my home village, my mother has asked me to create a short animation to be displayed in the window this winter. (already having to think about Christmas!) The obvious subject of this animation is of course hardware and needs to come with the typical wintery theme.
Original ethereal ideas just included a boy and his dog but then as our lovely Great British winter weather battered around outside, throwing rain at the window and wind in my face I realised this is our British winter, rain and wind, no snow (but on the rare occasion). British kids can't get the same enjoyment of winter as other kids in the world do because where in Scotland or Switzerland schools out due to a frozen duvet enveloping the landscape and so children can trade classrooms for snowballs, Britain gives children the misery of sitting inside watching the sky issue judgement.
And so this is my story, or I should say every British child's dream when winter approaches.....

Working Title: Snowless

Brief synopsis: A young boy dreams of building a snowman, but when winter weather brings only thunderous skies and lashing rain he decides to build his dream out of hardware.

Initial designs were just a Friday night doodle and when digitised became cute and cuddly illustrations. However I realised once they had been drawn that perhaps they were best to remain as illustrations. This is down to how they would move and I felt that the boy in particular wasn't well enough designed for him to move effectively. I think looking at how this design compares to my improved one, there is definite problems with outline thickness and character make-up. The line work is too thick so the character wouldn't necessarily look appealing when animated and his form I feel is too simplistic to get a sense his body could stretch and bend easily.

Initial doodles

 

 

First design concept

 

 

First designs- lines too thick and I couldn't imagine him moving.

 

 

Initial dog- The dog was fine for shape, just the outline needed thinning out.

 

 

Before I realised the boy wasn't going to cut it for style, I did a run test of the dog to see if his body shape would work moving.

 

 

And happily I think I've got him moving the way I imagined him too. All it requires is the finer details but seeing as this was just a test, it wasn't necessary at this stage. One tweak I might make is speeding up the run so he can get from one side of the screen to the other in a shorter time.

 

Going back to the boy, I looked for inspiration that might give me a better style to aim for. The main one being Ame from 'Wolf Children.'

 

 

Although anime is for anyone who knows me, a predictable path for me to look down as I completely adore the genre, I see a lot of traits that other styles don't embrace. Children come across as beings that have bigger heads and large eyes because they are growing into those proportions that accommodate those features. And this is exactly what anime reflects and why Ame is one of the best examples I've looked at for reference.  

 

Others include Pride/ Selim Bradley from 'Fullmetal Alchemist' for the baby-fat face

 

 

And Hikari from 'Nagi No Asukara' for the stick-out cheeks and small button nose.

 

 

Putting all these references together I came up with the current new and improved design which allows me to believe it has the potential of moving. This design may alter in the future, like making the eyes slighter bigger or altering the shape of the cheeks/chin but for now it's where I feel it should be.

 

 

 

 

 

Ducking and Diving

Aside from the third year films I'm working on I've also been animating a small piece of character movement to improve my anticipation, overlap and making my animations smoother.
In the past I've found some of my line work jitters because I don't clean my key frames up enough so when I come to put the in-betweens in I don't know where the true line is.
This time I have gone through the process of mapping out the rough key frames and tidying them up then putting rough in-betweens in and cleaning them up.

This short piece of movement actually originated from an anime I had been watching called 'Hyouka,' and I felt interested to know what this movement would look like if I animated it in 25fps instead of the Japanese 8fps which 'Hyouka' follows. The only aspects I took from the clip were the basic shapes for the key frames (rough keys from the video above). I then fleshed out the keys myself and added the rest of the movement without looking at the original. Going back and comparing my finished piece to the original now is astonishing in terms of how limited the Japanese movement is and the lack of anticipation and overlap compared to mine. It goes to show that if the Japanese had the budget, fluid movement such as this could be achieved.



Original clip

 

 

 

 

Comparison

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

Clawing into animation

More tests, this time taking a shot from the animatic and testing the movement of the bear in relation to his surroundings, in this case, his house.
The style wasn't quite pinned down when this sequence was created so I tested scribbly shadows instead of  more perfect 'Disneyesque' shading.
It's now been decided to do the line-work in TV paint and the colour in photoshop in order to get the sketchy feel the director wanted so any tests after this will most likely only show line-work.

Picture taken from animatic

One is with the outline, the other without so I could see how the scribbles affected the shape of the bear and whether going without an outline would make it difficult to see arms etc.

 

Dapper meerkats and spiffing giraffes

An update on The Bird project called for character designs of a meerkat, giraffe and hippo to be dressed in human clothing to portray a sort of dream sequence Tilly goes through as she day-dreams about returning home to Africa.
So far only the meerkat and giraffe have designs as I wait to hear back about the design for the mother to be approved, as she will be the hippo so I require the design of her dress.

Unfortunately after meeting with the team, the director suddenly realised the meerkat is in fact supposed to be the maid in the story so the lovely dapper gentleman of a meerkat needed to have his gender switched to female. Procedure went according to plan.

There was also a discussion in the weekly about altering the movement of the zebra herd slightly as they all moved the same which felt noticeable to the others. Obviously the issue was how to alter the movement seeing as live action footage depicted zebra's galloping together in the same way anyway so I opted to move legs in the cycle slightly for a few of them and change the way the head moves to depict the illusion they were all done differently. However factoring in how long the sequence is visible for in relation to the animatic isn't very long, roughly 3 or 4 seconds with a camera zoom so spending too much time on this sequence is better spent in the more detailed character scenes.

Hooves, Trunks and Claws

I've been working further into 'The Bird' by developing an elephant walk for another of the African scenes alongside altering some of the animation on the zebra as there wasn't enough variation in each zebra for the viewer to not notice they were similar.
Below are the results of the zebra, I've not done much to the actual movement as all zebras move the same in terms of gait, so I've altered the head movement of a few and changed stripe design.

I found the elephants easier to animate, probably because they don't exhibit the same flurry of legs the zebra does and they move at a slower rate. Below are two cycles, one of an adult elephant, another is a baby with the baby completing a cycle faster than the adult because there's the obvious factoring in weight and size in comparison.

And then for Claws for Concern I coloured the bear to see how he would fit into the background and after the weekly feedback session I was asked to remove the outlines completely as the background itself doesn't have any outline work so the other experiment is to see if no outline can work. TV paint didn't totally remove the outline however from what was achieved with a faint outline it didn't look too bad as the issue was removing the outline would cause the arm and legs to become lost within the body.

Before I removed the outline from the entire animation, I did a test image, one was completely removed, the other I swapped outline colour so a dark grey outline accompanied the light grey body and the light grey outline went with the dark grey shadows. I felt toning the black outline down might look less detracting and bold but it didn't make much difference.

The shadows were also redone in the test below as it was mentioned in the feedback session I didn't quite get the lighting correct in terms of where the bear was in the background.

Claws For Concern

Also began working on 'Claws For Concern' by doing small animation tests for the bear. This bear walks on fours and twos so below I've done a walk test of the bear standing up walking, with an all fours test coming soon.
I did begin a run cycle on all fours but it looks slightly too mechanical when looking at the head, possibly needs a bit more movement to look more natural.

Zebra are 'a' running

Finished a small herd of galloping zebra with just two variations of stripe design, just so it doesn't look like an obvious copy and paste job.
Eyes are empty at the moment just because I'm waiting for the background so I can see where the light is coming from in relation to where the reflection is going to go in the eyes.

Also renewed the original zebra designs I posted after altering the shape to suit the animation. This version is slightly stockier in keeping with the real life version of the animal.

Finally....

Horses are hard.........zebras are probably one of the WORST and most challenging animals to animate. Since the previous post, I went back and redid the zebra following some live action footage as close as possible before tweaking the legs and back to suit the requirements of the film. It's turned out so much better than any of the previous tests and gallops a lot smoother.

The reason I say zebras are one of the worst animals for animation is the one thing horses don't have, which is stripes. What sucks away time isn't the fact you have to draw on the stripes of ten frames of zebra, that's easy, it's what the movement looks like when you've put all the stripes on and this is the difference between stripes that look like they move with the zebra and stripes that literally look like they have a mind of their own. A lot of R & D for me has been in this section, trying to work out how to make the stripes move with the zebra without making it look like a jittering mess of lines. I tried drawing stripes on one frame then copying and pasting the same stripes onto the other nine frames and just moving them into the places they'd be in relation to the position of the zebra but this looked like the stripes weren't connected to the zebra and didn't reflect muscle movement in the way I wanted to. I also tried keeping the stripes static to minimise any eye confusion but had the same effect. The option I had left was drawing the stripes manually by following the movement of the zebra and disregarding stripe shape, allowing them to change between frames. Although there was some improvement, the irregular shapes caused too much jitter which would put people off looking at the zebra for too long. So for the finished product below, I had to compromise between the two, limiting the stripes movement and keeping them at a similar shape, but allowing them to change. This I did by copying and pasting like I did in trial 1 but tracing over the stripes for each frame when they were in the correct place to make it a bit more natural than mechanical.

Next job is making a herd, and for most studios, it's a simple duplication and offsetting the cycles which I've done below but on playing it back, I may vary stripe shapes on a few zebra just so it looks less like a copy and paste job

Fleshing out

Now that the initial skeletal structure has been mapped out and approved, I've then proceeded to add the muscles, mane, tail and ears. Although the skeleton looked fine I did have to tweak the legs slightly on some frames as I discovered joints were too short in proportion to the figure. Unlike my first animation test, I've animated the ears flopping back and forth in accordance with the gallop motion to put a bit more character into the animal. One note to point out is the head looks slightly too mechanical, as in to say, it doesn't look like the head was re-drawn twelve times for the twelve frames which is what makes a 2D animation look more natural. This is because the head was copied and pasted twelve times and just rotated into the correct position each time. This is deliberate, not accidental because I've found in the past my horse heads increase and decrease in size as it cycles through an animation. It's just a basic guide so when I go to put the final line work over the top, I'm following the same size head each time and won't have to go back and re-size frames later on.
Next up: stripe mechanics.

Roughing it out

After discussions with project leaders, the movement has gone back to the drawing board as they desired a more zebra movement than horse movement. The difficulty presents itself when you wish to understand a zebra's movement in more depth but cannot obtain this information clearly from footage that's from a handheld camera and with no one having really done a proper zebra cycle before, it's hard to know exactly how they gallop. Even looking at The Lion King, the zebras don't really move like zebras but have more of a horse's gallop and even look more like horses.

Zebras from The Lion King

I studied live footage further and have attempted to replicate the same movement in the rough gallop cycle below. I've noticed zebras seem to almost bounce their hind legs instead of each hind leg moving independently. By this I mean once both legs are in suspension behind the back end, they seem to come together and move forward together before one leg takes the lead again.

 

Below is live footage I used to study the gallop.

Refining the gallop cycle

Using Flash this time (instead of Toon Boom) I re-did the gallop cycle by observing Spirit's gallop closer and looking to see what made the animation smooth yet fast. I noticed his head moved less compared to my zebra similarly with his back end which seems to extend and contract less than mine. Legs however, moved in a similar fashion so I can see the problem stems from the head and hind.

In this newer version I took the cycle rate from 12 to 10 pictures. The gallop is slightly faster in the updated version but this is because the original had more of a pause as the zebra is in the moment of suspension (all four feet off the ground). I think there's still more refining to be done, due to the back being too short but because my main focus for this was seeing how to make the head and hind move less, I'm not too worried about anatomical correctness.
I'm hoping the next test will be the final one however unlike a horse where their colour is consistent, a zebra has stripes so I think I'll need to look at what I'm going to call "stripe mechanics." This is because the stripes need to move in accordance with muscle movement and stripes will naturally extend and contract in relation to whether the muscle is in the extension or contraction phase. Again I'll have to deal with fixing jerky movement from the stripes as the first test did present some jitter. For now though the focus is on achieving the correct gallop.

 

Zebra Inspiration clips

 

 

 

Some might think animating an animal like this is easy as it's just a case of putting legs in the right place and the body will follow however I can say, and have the defence from the animation team at DreamWorks that created Spirit that horses are one of the most difficult animals to animate. If one leg or even a shoulder is placed slightly wrong in a frame, the whole movement is compromised. This can be seen in my test above that having the back slightly too short makes the horse look more like a dog. 

 

 

Initial designs- zebra

Because I'm a horse addict and I've been given free reign (or rein, no pun intended), I've opted to make the zebra more horse-like just for my own preference and I understand horse anatomy 100 times better than a zebra. Both aren't much different in terms of anatomical structure and I want the stampede to look more graceful and flowing, like a river which for zebra, who are slightly stockier, would look more like a river of mud.

I've been taking a lot of inspiration from Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and a little from the The Lion King (the little screen time zebra's get) in order to understand cycle speed according to frame rate. Obviously horses all gallop/run at different rates, some cycling through a gallop faster than others, so I have to make the decision on how fast the cycle should be.

Spirit from Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

 

On observing Spirit further, there are two horses that have differing gaits that gain more screen time than the secondary horses, Spirit and Rain. Spirit's gallop is exceptionally more wild and fast to reflect his wild nature, so he completes a full cycle faster than Rain (below)who has a more graceful, slower gallop and takes a few more frames to complete a cycle.

 

Rain from Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

The obvious difference is Spirit is male and Rain is female so a more graceful gallop for a female horse is understandable. What it comes down to is the speed needs to reflect the tone of the scene and the character, being Tilly, who is a wild child. My initial thoughts were towards a more flowing gallop and for that I thought of Rain but if I want to show that wild attitude, a gallop more like Spirit's might be best.

 

Zebra stampede scene

 

What helps in this decision is a similar scene is conveyed in Spirit where he races the eagle, beginning at a slower gallop before quickening his pace to overtake the eagle's shadow.

 

 

 

Below are my initial zebra designs as well as further development of one of the designs followed by an initial run cycle.

 

 

 

 

The cycle has been created on ones and although it depicts all the wildness and high speed attitude, I feel the movement could be more fluid. My initial reaction is there's too many frames so areas that have smaller movement are jerky however taking frames out means I'm making the movements with more impact (i.e. faster) more jerky. (Below is the movement done on twos)

 

 

I began this cycle looking at the Spirit run cycle and then drawing my own movement in relation to this.

 

Spirit gallop cycle

My cycle

 

However this proved to be not enough frames for fluid movement so I had to add more.

 

 

 

More work needs to be done to correct this issue.