ianimate ws5 assign 02 story ideas

originally written in 2013 but didn't post. a good reflection of my process into a dialogue shot at the very early stage:

ws5 journal assign 02
01/11/13 10:24
spent yesterday going through audio clips and landed on what i think is going to be the choice.

the general idea is a car salesman trying to make a hard sell on a lemon. i realise you can take out the opening audio and he doesn't need to be talking about a car. a thought i have is he could nervously touch the car and something falls off it causing him to quickly put it back checking to see if the customer saw.

i feel like i need to be more specific about the scenario and the character. was thinking along the lines of Jerry Lundergard from fargo for character: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gwc4UizUc

and a scenario like this monty python skit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9igQ18GIqvc

 did some sketching and did the who what where when.  got to remember to follow ed hooks' action objective obstacle, really helps distill what you are trying to say.
i went a bit away from the salesman idea and started sketching a scientist with a james bond type character inspecting his new issue car. what struck me was how adding the 2nd character as  slightly menacing helped with the dynamic of the scene and  to connect with the genuine interactions of these characters.

also note the clear difference in body language and how that instantly sets up the characters and context.
so i went back to the car yard with this new idea of introducing character number 2. the main issue i was having was giving car salesman stakes. why was he so nervous? what worked about prev sketch was the nature of the pose of jb character in contrast to scientist. he is leaning casually on the car but his body is thrusting towards the scientist giving a sense of veiled threat- which is in keeping with a jb type character. it is in this pose alone that introduces the stakes, the audience already sees the threat all we need to do is reinforce it.
at this stage i am bringing in a character that is either a safety inspector or an overly shrewd customer.

the comedy in this i feel is the fact that the threatening character in question is much shorter than salesman.
when going into further development remember to keep the following clear:
head, shoulders, arms, fingers of salesmen in clear silo
head and neck of customer/ safety officer in silo
hood ornament in silo

jupiter run cycle

Playing with the Jupiter rig

Three Flip Studios

breaking the joint

in animation, the breaking of a jointed limb is key to showing force travel through the limb.
when an object such as an arm moves through space, the limbs attached below will drag behind until the primary limb has either slowed down, stopped or changed direction. when this occurs, the lower limb will keep moving due to the momentum built up by the primary limb. as the limb swings past the centre line of the primary limb the joint has been broken.

going to the life action ref, you notice the drag occuring in the 2ndary limb (blue) by the straightening out of the arm. Although the movement is slight, this straightening out is what gives the arm its flexibiltiy and ability to generate force through it. as the arm reaches its extreme fwd movement it slows down and the secondary limb to catches up with it. the movement is slight and appears stiff when it is copied.

studying the swing of a human arm you will notice that there is not the xtreme joint breaking as depicted in animations. but its is still important to examine real life movement and see where the oppurtunity for joint breaking can occur.

take that breakdown drawing of the arm mid swing, what if we drag that secondary limb so it passes the upper arms cog, thus "breaking" the joint.

 when we jump to the extreme forward position we feel  the force more clearly being exerted through the arm.

the arm swing now feels more loose and flexible.

surprise take

shot some ref to get poses i liked

                             thumbnailed the action. the final pose took me a few go's to get right.

took thumbs and posed out keys. captured and timed in flipbook

redrew keys and added some breakdowns

the rope pull

Planning:

video reference

Before jumping in to any animation, i usually plan it out beforehand. It is important to understand the body mechanics of an action. Therefore it is often best to act it out and/or gather reference.

In this case i couldn’t find the kind of reference i wanted on YouTube, so i filmed the action out myself:

 Analyzing the reference

From here i studied the motion and extracted the key moments of the footage. It is important to train your eye to understand what these key moments are. I look for things such as: point of direction change in body, extreme high and low points of the hips and when the foot contacts the ground.

Now i have this information i will start to thumbnail these poses and make notes. when i thumbnail, i start by drawing the line of action  of each pose, then draw the hips, torso, head, legs and arms in that order. This helps me to understand the forces at work.

I then adjust the drawings and make notes, i will have this next to me while i animate so i can refer back to it while i am working on a pose. I also make little notes on the timing using timing charts.

Layout:

Once i am fairly confident with the specifics of the action, i then create a layout of the animation. The purpose of this is to map out the parameters of the movement through the shot. Here i am thinking about how each pose will flow in to the next. This will sit at the bottom of my pile of paper as i draw in my key poses.

Animation:

Laying in the keys.

Using the layout as guide, i sketched in my key poses on the light table. I drew these in the same way i tumbnailed, doing a straight ahead pass on the l.o.a then hips, torso etc.

 Flipping the poses back and forth allowed me to see the poses working together and i could see where i needed to adjust. Note the more extreme pose drawn at 37.

I also drew timing charts on keys: 10, 19 and 27. I changed the timing later in the computer but they were a good starting point.

Breaking it down:

Now it’s time to break the poses down. These secondary poses help to define the movement. The breakdown serves 3 basic functions: favouring, arcs and overlap. I refer to the notes made in my thumbnails as well my timing charts for their placement.

Flipbook.

Now i have all the keys and breakdowns done, i shoot the animation and bring it into flipbook and apply the timing

For the most part timing works ok but i shuffle the frames around a bit to tweak timing. then i redraw the keys and bd's in flipbook and do a pass of inbetweens to flesh out the movement some more.

Stagger effect.

Now that i have the ease worked out to show the tension on the rope, it's time to shuffle the frames around in flipbook to convey more effort is being put into pulling on the rope. The way to achieve this is to take all the frames after the point the rope goes taught and interleave the frames. The method in this case is to jump ahead two frames then back one. I do this until i have reached the final frame.

 I draw in a drop shadow and background to give it a bit of context and have also gave the character a bit of antic before moving backwards. I still need to spend more time refine the inbetweens and cleaning up the animation but it will do for now.

flour sack animation

great flour sack animation by Ron Zorman. to me it's a reminder how strong posing can take you so far to success with animation.

http://vimeo.com/40129870

girl spin

"I've Been Animated"

cleaned up headturn

head turn

Managed not to languish over this one t00 much. really going for a quick process: understand the action, draw the keys, anticipation, break it down and inbetween. i found doing the keys, antic and breakdowns really rough and quick helpful. Then I cleaned those drawings up a bit thinking about the arcs created by the individual features.

3d practice

I have spent the last couple of months learning 3d software and trying to establish some sort of work flow. I have drawn mainly upon 2 sources, those are Keith Lango and Jason Ryan. I am currently jumping back and forth between the two styles and trying to work out what best suits me.

I have decided to work on a scene as an attempt to apply the knowledge I have been trying to fill in my head with. The first thing I am trying to do is establish the story telling poses of the scene. This was achieved through a combination of thumbnailing and video reference.

Once the main poses were figured out, I timed them out in flipbook.

2d blocking

For the most part I was happy with the flow of the movement and things seemed timed out pretty well. From here I decided to apply some of Keith's process and create the key poses in maya using the stacked method. Here you don't try to time out the scene you just focus on the keys and create them one after the other in the timeline. To flesh out the action I included some breakdowns and eases.

The next step was to time these poses out. I exported these individual frames using monkey shuffle into monkey jam. Now I could plan the timing of the 3d stuff quickly. For the most part I used the timing from the 2d blocking.

3d blocking

The next stage is clean up. I am finding this stage difficult to get my head around. Once the piece is splined out it loses its energy and turns into a mess. I need to control the flow of movement by defining the holds and the easing in and out.

animating with stick figures

I have found some great tutorials on animating using only stick figures. This lets you focus on the movement rather than character proportion and consistency.

thinking about easter

shaver

I came about this animation sketching different characters off the top of my head. I liked the look of this depressed guy staring hopelessly into the mirror while shaving. I decided to expand this idea with a couple more drawings. The three drawings became keyframes.

boom!

running surfer

decided to bring back my surfer character to life this time with better character design and the use of flash and flipbook. need to improve workflow but i am quite happy with result.

duck walk

I have found the mornings exercises of copying Donald duck very helpful when it came time to animate. I think having the proportions drilled into my brain through repetition has helped the animation process because it is not at the forefront of my thinking. I understand the proportions therefore I can focus on the other elements that go into this animation.

I implemented a system for constructing Donald on every frame. It began with the line of action. Then the basic forms of the character: the head, the upper torso, lower torso, the neck legs then feet; all in that order. Once these were established, I went through and made these forms more solid and thought about perspective as well as the forces involved. Thinking about forces helped me determine which lines were straight and which were curved.

The purpose of this exercise was to see if I could animate simple shapes and keep the proportions consistent. I also wished to display an understanding of the forces at work behind a walk cycle. On the whole, I think it has been successful, although, I found that I was lacking when it came to the neck and head. This has been something plaguing my work since day one and needs addressing.

bosko animation

This is an animation from the exercise on the john k blog. I am happy to say that I was quite comfortable with the character's construction, months of drawing porky are paying off. I found that i knew where all parts of the character were at all times.

Having said that, there are still kinks in need of ironing out. The head does a weird wobbly thing that is the result of bad inbetweening and my line work needs to be more deliberate so my drawings don't look so messy.

back to the drawing board.

boy run