New term, new project, new timescales!

The beginning of a new term starts again, and with brings more work than ever before, but it's all exciting stuff. Today we start a 3 day intensive collaboration with the MA Professional Writing students, where we need to produce an animatic which should be in colour, and as professionally presented as possible with music and sound where needed. This will be for the National Union of Fairies, Sprites, Elves and Druids (NUFSED) (which its existence, I suppose, does seem questionable) These films are to be shown online and aimed at a range of different audiences, and in between 90 seconds and 2 minutes in length produced in groups of about 8.

Getting into our assigned groups, we had been given a genre in which to work with, and choosing any fairytale, or Aesops fable we need to re-write it to fit to the brief and the genre. We were given the genre 'information' to work with, and I think most peoples thoughts on this in our group, was the 1950's style of informative films released mainly in America about per diam events such as, 'The Dangerous Stranger' and 'Boys Beware,' to easily convey that information film feel. After deciding on this perspective for the animatic we split off into pairs and began to think about the possible situations from a fable or fairytale, we could produce an informative film to. We then relayed all our ideas such as a tag line like, 'Snow White was sedated for her own protection,' and titles like, 'How to maintain your Gingerbread house,' - (the evil woman from Hansel and Gretal), 'Guide to the perfect roast,' - (secret ingredient children) and 'How to age gracefully' - (taking a look at all the fairytale evil women, and how to spot sadistic tendencies in you) We then gave our professional writers themes to work on, that was popular among the group; the forest and people walking through it and the tag lines like the Snow White one.

After a few hours we all came together to see what the writers had produced, and to show them the ideas of what style we wanted our animatic would look like. This is the part where our director and producer took over to talk to the writers about their scripts, with any problems it posed to the animation whether or not there were too many scenes, it was too long, whether scenes were technically feasible, and the amount of characters that were possible to use for our timescale. Our writers came up with a rather lengthy script based on the tag line of Snow White being sedated for her own good, with lots of scenes and of course the seven dwarves. This script is a before and after situation, before Snow White was lovely, pretty and charming, and after she's the rebellious teenager, sneaking out to house parties, drinking lots of alcohol and taking many different drugs. The queen had to put a stop to this bad behaviour somehow and the only way of doing so was to sedate her and put her to rest. Given such a short timescale to work on this project, this idea wasn't the most executable with many scenarios, which would have called for many people, many backgrounds and many different limb movements.

The next script, however, was much more feasible to produce with an informative film, 'Welcome to the "Enchanted Forest" experience.' This follows four main creatures you're most likely to come across while walking through the enchanted forest: fairies, a wolf, the axeman and the elves. The fairies will only steal your babies if you leave them unattended and crying; the wolf may try to eat you but he has rubber teeth; the axeman is there to rescue you if a real wolf appears; and the elves will only attack you if you carry a copy of the Lord of the Rings. This is the idea we went with and started to think of our scenes, backgrounds, people, props and anything else that would need to be created to produce this script into the animatic.

I think today has been a new experience, and learning curve for what it's like to work in the industry, for example there has to be close contact between the script writers and animation director in order to produce a script that is possible to create within our time limit and style. For example the first script was too ambitious as it needed many characters and scenes and writers who are not familiar with the animation production and as to how much can be produced with certain timescales, need to be told what limits there are where on certain aspects such as character. However I do think that the animation director and producer, even though at an early stage, have risen to the challenges of getting a great vision for the animatic in collaboration with the writers well.

It's the final countdown ...

Final countdown indeed, and there's been a lot to do this week. Firstly i finalised most of the core animation of the body, after the first test playblast of lipsyncing (below) i then added in the picking up of the 'whip cream can' and also the throwing away of it in dismay. Considering the video below is the first playblasted lipsyncing, i was rather surprised at how well it turned out and overall i'm quite proud of how easily how i picked up creating the right mouth movements and how good they looked.

Having said this though, i think the mouth movements need to be refined ever so slightly because he does look a bit mouth-choppy. Below is a short test of the character clutching the whip cream can which is looking pretty good, and with a bit more work will look better.

And put it together and what have you got? Hm good question, because i'm having trouble with it, so, i'm going to upload the two shots i've used for the mpeg4 file and a couple of images of what it looks like rendered.

I've learnt a lot about animation and the animation process in this project, and most importantly, don't try and keep improving it on the hand in day, especially if it was hardly changed and was good enough 2 days ago! So what have i learnt?

Well the essentials of a good, well-grounded animation works when you have some live action footage of yourself acting, so you have something to refer back to, and where in your animation you can see an area that needs an injection of a bit more realism, so you know which body bits to translate and/or rotate to get that right body posture and to get the emotions and feelings across.
After you have the filmed footage, it helped me when i had storyboarded out thumbnail sketches of the key poses from the live action footage, so that when it came to maya, i knew exactly what the key poses are and roughly where i needed them.
Another helpful factor is the dope sheet, although maya could hold the sound file and you could lipsync straight off by scrolling through the timeline. But by mapping out the mouth movements needed onto a dope sheet, i could then cross reference with maya to make sure the right mouth movements matched up with the phenomes on the right frame.

With this animation i feel this time my strongest point is the facial animation in terms of what i've achieved over the amout of time i had for it. I especially like the way the eyes move and blink, and how the eyebrows are positioned, which gives real character and emotion and you can easily tell this is a saddened face. I like the extreme poses of this character, which i think works very well for a sad and somewhat manic character at times, i know i would be with nine cans of whip cream! The timing also works well with this animation but at a place or two i do think it needs a bit more of an exaggerated overlap, but all in all i feel it's a believeable character.

Pose, Keyframe, Keyframe, Pose, yes i'm working In-Depth.

Okay we're starting to near a close on an epic, well not quite an epic, a couple of minutes of that good status, but it's a good work in progress on the initial playblast i uploaded last week. I've worked a small amount on the anticipation of the sitting down, he definitely needed a head turn to see where the chair is behind him. The movement of him sitting down, is a bit more snappier now, but i do think it this area needs a bit more work to bring it up to a good standard. There does also seem to be a bit too much (our) left (his right) hand movement at the dialogue point of "yesterday i ate", in fact just looking at it again now, i think i do need to refine his left hand movement as soon as he starts to speak again. So before i even start on the sound planning on a dope sheet for the lipsync, i'm going to tweak and finalise all body movements before starting on the lipsyncing.

Okay, okay you can do thumbnails ...

Week two on our new new project, well it's halfway old now, and this week i've roughed out the animation by firstly drawing out the key poses from the filmed acting, and presenting it in a storyboard kind of way. And then talk about doing a job twice, i then took the main key poses and turned it into an animatic, don't ask why i did it, maybe it was because i wanted to know in-depth as to what i was going to be animating.

The above are a few key moments that will occur in the animation and below is the blockthrough for the animation. I've got quite a lot going on for 11 seconds but i think it's working quite well with what i've got. A few things that do need work, is when the character goes to sit down, there's no anticipation, and the actual movement of him going to sit, is really still quite wooden and linear. But with a lot of work, i think it has the potential to become a good animation.

What's that ... a, a, sound file that tastes like whip cream?!

Right, so we get the "big brief" and a sound file that emanates whipped cream, hmm. There's a little competition strolling around in a little-ish walk cycle across the internet, and every month a new sound file is released to let budding animators, enthusiats, and professionals as well, i'm sure, to enter into this competition with what they've created over the set month. This time it was our, you may call it a challenge, actually thinking about it, it does seem a challenge, lipsync *moans* *sobs* lip...sync. But yes our brief is to animate to this sound file and if it's good we may even want to enter the competition.

This week i needed to get down my ideas on film, to act out the dialogue *sobs* "I'm living in a cocoon of horror," *sobs* " "Yesterday i ate nine cans of areosol whip cream" Now there's the initial thought, okay so what actually can you do with this, how much acting can i really do for it? It's eleven seconds long, so it would look kinda odd if i put in too many extreme poses and too much movement, so after much deliberation, many, many takes of acting and slight annoyance from the 'actee' i finally settled for this:

I also needed to rough out a scene plan for my environment, which will be similar to the current environment as in the acting above. But i'll probably change my mind as soon as i've done animating.