3rd year project final post

Showreel Production

When it came to putting my showreel together piece by piece I had to tackle the problem of what would go where. My original idea was to cut up the aliens scene and switch back and forth between that and all of the random animation scenes. The main issue with this was that the aliens scene was the only one with sound and more importantly dialogue. So all of the other scenes will need to be acompanied by music, but before I even got round to tackling the problem of sound I put everything together to see how it read to the audience. Immediatley it was obvious that ordering the clips in this way really killed the narrative and pacing of the aliens scene. Even I found it hard to follow what was happening in the aliens scene and I had been working on it for the past month or so.

I decided instead to just have all of the random animations on first with music and then fade out and come back in with the aliens scene. I chose a slow piano and drum track by artist Deadmau5 to accompany my animations during the showreel.

For the degree show I hope to be able to get a few details fixed in each of my animations especially the rappel animation. the lack of rope and harness really can draw the eye away from the movement and make the audience lose focus. I will look into simulating a physical rope in the scene and im sure I will be able to find a few tutorials about this online. I will also look into animating alot of the small details in my work a little further such as the hands and faces of each of the characters.

 

Missing rope

Here are each of the Individual animations from my showreel excluding the aliens animation due to size restrictions. the aliens animation can be viewed at this URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr8wx7R29RA

3rd year submission production

Aliens character Animation

 For the final part of my 3rd year submission I put my current work on hold and began working on something completely new. It was recommended to me that I include a character acting scene involving speech and emotion to show a deeper understanding of character animation.

I decided to grab a sound clip from a movie or TV show and animate my own interpretation of how the characters acted in the scene. The 11 second club is a great example of this kind or work and I quickly decided on a scene from one of my favourite movies, James Cameron's "Aliens". I ripped the sound directly from the movie during the scene involving the drop ship crash and the characters realising they are stuck on planet lv-426.

I placed five characters (Norman Rig) in a simple scene and began blocking out basic poses for each each of them reacting to the dialogue in the scene. I then began working on the entire scene from a wide angle keeping all the characters in shot for the duration. This was so I could show the scene from any angle but it greatly increased my workload and also the stationary camera made it quite boring to watch. My tutors told me to begin thinking about setting up cameras and only capture the action necessary to help sell the scene.

Aliens opening scene

 Adding cameras to the scene really helped with the pacing and also allowed me to have closeups of the facial expressions of the characters bringing more emotion to the scene. It only took a moment but having these cameras brought the scene to life.
  
Bringing it all together 

After I had brought the Aliens scene up to pace with the rest of my work I began trying to tie everything together with a simple aesthetic that would tie all the separate scenes together in single show-reel. Since all of my work is just about the animation i wouldn't be putting any emphasis on textures or scenery to distract the audience. I settled on very simple scenery all in grey and brightly coloured characters to give a strong contrast on what is important. I kept the dinosaur from the Dino rig animation a very light grey as making it a bright colour like the Norman rigs did not look right with its mouth and teeth.

Dino rig

Kick up's

Rappel
 

Step up

 Skating

I will face one major problem when it comes to piecing my show reel together with the fact that the only scene with sound is the Aliens scene. All of the others are completely silent and will need to be accompanied by music. I was hoping to keep switching back and forth between each random scene and the Aliens scene to mix things up a bit but switching back and forth from music to speech will be very off putting. I will have to discuss this with my tutors to see we can come up with a possible solution.

3rd Year Assessment Animatics + Playblasts

The following videos are clips to be included in my final show reel. Each has an animatic followed by a playblast.



Dino Rig jump and call




Rappel




Kickups




Skating




Step




Cat Jump

Sting animation

ok erm i think this is where i write my blog. Never wrote a blog before so bare with me, its prob gonna turn out too formal.

to begin the project me and jack looked at his animatic. we used its simple design to come up with the basis of the layout for the project. After placing the animatic template into Adobe Flash i began to draw over jacks initial idea to give it a cleaner more vector looking style.

Animatic
Flash

Whilst i was creating the interior of the tram Jack began to design the buildings that would move by as the tram was in motion

Using photoshop he came up with this simple design that i would once again place into flash and use to create a sleek vector copy
Photoshop
Flash

Up next was the characters. we decided on choosing 2 characters each to design and animate. i chose the business man and the main character since there would be more animation involved and i was the most experienced with using Flash.

i created the characters simply by drawing stick figures and building upon them. This meant that i could easily animate the characters and position them in any pose i could think of.

here are the two characters i came up with.



Animating these characters was rather easy since they were silhouettes. Once and arm or a leg merged with another part of the body i no longer needed to draw it. This added greatly the efficiency of my work. Even rather complex animations such as the business man getting on the seat or the main character riving in pain became quite simple to draw. Although this does mean that some actions could be lost in the bodies of the characters. To avoid this i would hope to have highlights drawn on the characters as if the sunset from outside is providing just enough light to make out the shape of their limbs. Maybe this could be attained before the final show.

the final touches that i added to the project were slight facial animations on my characters to give them a but more emotion (especially the main character). u may notice that the business man gives the fat woman a hacky look when she nudges into him while sitting down. or the looks he gives the main character when he farts in the end.


one thing that i would really hope to have completed by the end of year show would be moving shadows from the sunset shining through the tram window. I started creating some shadows for the business man but it soon began to eat up what time i had left, so it was left out of the hand in work.



Robert Allman