Week1: Airport Panic

Hey look it's another Week 1! Are you ready for some shot planning? Hope so because that's what you're getting.

So for our first shot this term we've been assigned a pantomime shot. We have to animate some kind of change from one emotion to another, all through body language. Nick stressed to us that we should really be viewing this as an exercise in animating a thought process, not just getting a sad character's body language to look right (though that is also important). The audience should be able to see a "gear change" in the character's head when you watch this shot.

So after lots of brainstorming, I came up with the idea of my character running late for her flight. She runs up to the departure board, clearly panicked and scrambling to make it on time. She looks up at the departure board, searching for her flight, and sees that it's on time, meaning she'll miss it. But then, the flight status updates, and it's delayed. Her panic changes to relief, she's gonna make the flight after all.

And if you're wondering whether this idea was inspired by my trip to Boston, which took me to several different airports on several different flights, you are correct! I'm not a stranger to the feelings of stressed-out air travel. After I nailed down my shot idea, I shot some video reference and pieced together the best bits:

 

Yay awkward acting! Hehe. Once I got my reference together, I thumbnailed out some poses based on my ref, which you can see here:

I do wish we'd had two planning pages instead of one for this assignment, but I was able to get the major storytelling poses up there at least. We were also supposed to create two poses illustrating our two acting beats and turn them in with our reference and planning page. This was extra fun (and useful) because AM gave us new rigs to use this term! I'd like to introduce Stella, who is feeling panicked and relieved in the following pictures, respectively:

While I am gonna miss our old pal Stewie, I really, really like the new rigs. In addition to Stella, we got Stan, a cartoony Hulk type, and Sloan, a dog rig. These three are part of the new set of Tribe rigs, more of which are on the way soon. Exciting!

As far as Nick's notes on my shot, he was very pleased with my video reference. He felt it was a very genuine bit of acting (see, that year of drama in high school tooootally paid off) but he instructed me to leave out the "relieved" bit and just have her miss the flight altogether. Instead of going from "panicked" to "relieved", have her go from "hopeful" as she runs up to the board, thinking she might still make it, to "frustrated" when she realizes she has missed it. My reference was already sort of reading that way to him upon viewing it for the first time anyways. Plus, this will allow me to pull the camera in a little closer on Stella since the viewer no longer needs to read the words on the departure board, they just need to see that it's there.

I think Nick's instructions to simplify are going to help my shot a lot and it's going to be a lot of fun to animate. I was having a hard time getting the relief to read well anyways and I think the premise was maybe a touch too complicated. So, with that, I am going to start blocking my shot in for Week 2. Come back in a few days to check it out! See you then, lovelies.

Week 1! So it begins.

Well hello lovely people. Are you ready to dive back in? I certainly am. Let's get to it!

So for Week 1, it's all about planning. For the first three weeks of this term, we're working on our own personal shot to get used to the way things work this term. I wanted to do something challenging for this shot, so I looked all over YouTube for some cool physical actions I could animate. I found this one parkour-er (?) who dresses up like the main character from Assassin's Creed and runs around jumping off of things, flipping over stuff, and just generally being awesome. So, I decided to animate a flip from one of his videos, which you can see here:

As you can see, I also did a draw-over of my reference, which is my new favorite planning tool after having so much success with it last term! I didn't get as fancy with the color-coding but I hope you don't mind. 

Next, I put together a few pages of planning drawings, largely using my draw-over as a starting point. I wish I could have put more drawings in, but I started to run out of room! 

Mike had a few notes for me to keep in mind going into the shot, mainly to take out the camera movement, to really push the antics and compressions, and to maybe stage a few poses differently (namely the landing pose) so that Stewie's big head doesn't ruin the pose. Overall he said I'm in a good place to move forward, though I picked a very difficult shot. Flips are hard! But I'm excited for the challenge and can't wait to start blocking this thing in!

That's all for this week, folks. Come back next week for some actual animation, whoo! See you soon.

Twofer! Weeks 7 + 8

OKAY SO HI. It's been an insane whirlwind couple of weeks and I am about still coming down from my CTN high so please bear with me!. I've been slacking a bit, I know. But now you get two weeks worth of homework all in one post! Brace yourself.

To ease you in, I'll show you my polished Stewie run (from two weeks ago):

Marlon was quite pleased with this and only had a minor note or two on how I could polish it further. I had a bit of a rough time with shot through the middle part of my workflow (namely Blocking Plus) but I am overall quite happy with the finished product. Not bad for my first run, all things considered. 

In addition to polishing our shot, we also had to plan our next shot in Week 7. For this last shot, Marlon gave us the go ahead to do something a little wacky if we felt like it. So, I ended up deciding on doing a shot with Stewie trying to pull the sword from the stone, but it won't budge (a variation on the popular "trying to open a stuck door" shot). He pulls and pulls, and ends up breaking the handle off the sword. I figured, it'll be a funny little story and a good body mechanics workout.

So I went to town on one of the door handles in my house and cut together the best bits for my video reference.

The weird cuts are there to make it fit within the frame limit, but overall I liked the buildup and the general idea of the poses, but I knew that I was going have to modify/push the poses quite far from the reference. So, since I had time and I knew CTN would take up my upcoming weekend, I did a little pencil test of my blocking to get a head start:

I liked this much more as a base to go off of once I got Maya open and plus it was really fun to do. From this and my video reference, I did some planning sketches. We had a lecture on force in drawing this week, which was really helpful to me in drawing my poses for this shot:

I hope you are still enjoying my chicken-scratch/fifth grader handwriting.

Okay! Onto Week 8! Here is my (rough) blocking from last week. For this shot, we have an additional week and Marlon told us we could use it wherever we wanted. Because of CTN, I chose to use mine this week and spread my blocking out over two weeks since I knew my weekend was going to be jam-packed and I would have only a little time for animating. ANYWHO, here is what I was able to get through before the deadline hit:

This is quite a bit rougher than I would have liked, though I was able to see Marlon at CTN and warn him accordingly and he was very understanding. I've already gotten feedback on this and he is mostly giving me acting notes at this point, which is encouraging since thinking about acting in Class Two is a bit ahead of the game.

Whoo! Okay that concludes this double header post. CTN is going to get a post of its very own so be on the lookout for that soon! It's gonna be a GOOD ONE.

Week 1 - Turning It Around

Hello lovely readers and welcome to Class Two - Psychology of Body Mechanics! We're off and running here in week one, with our first assignment already underway.

The way this term is set up, we'll be working on more complicated shots for four weeks at a time, so by the end of the class we'll have three complete shots. For each shot, we have a list of physical actions to choose from, ranging from simple to more complex in terms of body mechanics. But first, I have an updated workspace photo for your eyeballs:

I moved into a new house during the break week and finally got a new desk in addition to my drafting one. So now I have a L shaped setup with my drafting desk on my left and I am loving it so far! And of course, my second monitor is still the light of my life. Animators of the world, dual monitors are a must, I'm telling you. You'll wonder how you ever got anything done without one.

Okay now WHO'S READY FOR SOME AWKWARD VIDEO REFERENCE? Good because you're about to see some. For my first shot this term, the action I chose was to have Ballie do an about face. I quickly found out that there is a lot going on in what seems like such a simple action. Part of our homework this week was to shoot video reference of ourselves doing the action, or else find some reference of someone doing the action. Since one of our proposed options was a roundhouse kick, I'm guessing a lot of people ran to YouTube to see what they could find but since I chose a very doable action, I decided to just shoot it myself on my phone.

After turning around for the camera about a half dozen times, I decided on this take. I liked the rhythm and casual-ness of the timing and I think the foot placement is more interesting than anything I could have come up with out of my head.

For the other half of our homework, we had to submit 2-3 pages of planning sketches to help us when we start blocking our shots in next week. This part was actually really fun. Marlon shared with us that when he does planning thumbnails, he usually starts by tracing key poses from his video reference in Photoshop, and then refining the drawings from there. I really liked this method as a starting point and used it for my thumbnails here. After tracing off my reference, I redid the drawings to match Ballie's proportions a bit better and pushed the poses a bit more. 

Please forgive my little kid handwriting. During my move last week, I found a bunch of school work from elementary school and my handwriting has seriously not improved since I was twelve. Maybe I really should have been a doctor, huh?

Since I had a bit of extra time this week I also did a pencil test of my shot as well. I wanted to check how my timing felt and I like to practice my 2D skills whenever I get the chance. 

The timing of it feels a little mushy to me now watching this back but I think it may be partly because in some spots I needed really tight inbetweens and I didn't quite pull it off correctly. 2D is something I really want to get better at while I'm at AM so I'm going to try and do pencil tests along with my planning whenever I can.

Well, that's it for Week One! I'll be back next week with my first pass at blocking my shot in so stick around!

Week 11! Almost there!

Okay, I know that it's technically Week 12 right now and I'm late in posting this week but I won't tell anyone if you won't, okay? Okay.

Our main assignment this week was to finish up our personality walk and add, for the very first time, a perspective camera angle! Hooray! Here is what I came up with for my 3/4 perspective view of my lazy walk with our friend Ballie. 

And, for our very last posing assignment, we had to communicate "balance". This one, like the strength assignment, was easier in some ways because balance is communicated almost completely through body language anyways, so Stu not having a face wasn't such a hindrance. Plus, it was fun to think up balance-y situations and draw them. Like these!

If it wasn't for So You Think You Can Dance being on right now (go Eliana!), I don't think I would have thought to  use dance photos as reference for these drawings. The dance drawings, along with the other balancing act ones came out pretty well, I think. After picking out some favorites, I posed Stu accordingly:

I think this actually may be my favorite batch of poses of the term. Stu's big melon hardly even got in the way! After some peer feedback, I decided to go with D:

My mentor was quite pleased with this pose and with my walk. I'm happy to have ended this term's work on a good note. All I have left to do is put together my progress reel compiling all of my work from Class One. I'll post that up tomorrow so keep your eyes peeled!

The Most Exhausting Week Yet

Lovelies! Hello, hello. So glad to have you here with us during Week 10. It is a doozy, so buckle up. I'll ease you in with a revision of my vanilla walk from last week:

My only note for this was to fix his slight lurch as he moves forward across the screen and delay his up and down translation just a touch. Other than that my mentor was pleased! Okay on to the good stuff now.

This week we got our very first shot at a character walk, which was both exciting and overwhelming. For the first time this term, we were pretty much given free reign. Our only stipulation was to do a walk with some kind of personality. My first thought was, "that leaves me infinite options HOW AM I GONNA CHOOSE?!" Then I thought about our pose assignment this week, which was to communicate "exhaustion" (more on this later). So, I thought doing an exhausted/lazy walk might be fun. After filming myself slumping around my backyard for reference, here is what I came up with for my blocking pass:

Ballie, such a lazy bum. Now onto the drawings! Like I said, this week's pose is "exhaustion." Here are some sketches of poor tired Stu. I took a nap in the middle of doing these, you know, for research. 

Here are some of my favorites done with our pal, Stu. His head is still enormous and unwieldy, if you were wondering. 

Okay, readers, vote away! Which Stu looks the most exhausted? Please let me know and I'll be back next week with a finished personality walk and another round of drawings!

Concerning Week 9

Hello darlings! For those of you back in school, happy first week. To the rest of you, happy Week 9! This week I had to finish up my walk with Ballie, which meant getting the little guy out of blocking and into splined mode! This has historically been a difficult step for me but as I'm learning more about how to thoroughly block in a scene, it's getting less scary to hit spline in the graph editor and watch the playback. Plus, this walk is fairly straightforward so I could be nice and methodical about it. Here it is!

Turns out that fixing knee pops is quite a chore. So is keeping Ballie's giant feet from intersecting the ground. But all in all, I'm happy with how this came out. Keep your eyes peeled for a revision of it next week!

The other part of our homework this week was do sketches and a Stu pose that communicate "concern". For me, this is the most difficult posing assignment we've had so far, mainly because I think concern is difficult to communicate solely through body language, especially if the viewer is unaware of what circumstances are causing the character to be concerned. With this in mind, I thought I would probably use props and a set for my pose, and I asked my mentor if if would be okay to even use another character in the pose to help it read. He said he was okay with it but urged us not to rely on it and especially not to let a secondary character distract from the main concerned character. And so I did a mix of sketches, some with props, some with other characters, some with just plain ol' concerned Stu:

I actually like how these sketches more than I thought I would when we got the assignment. I tried to vary between different kinds of concern, some mixed with worry, anger, sadness, etc. I picked out my favorite ones and took a shot with Stu:

Surprisingly, I think my favorite of this bunch is F. It's based on drawing 9, which was kind of a throwaway drawing. Inversely, drawing 2 was on of my favorites but I think pose B is too busy. My classmates also liked D and E but I think that F is similar to them and a bit more interesting. Leaning towards F for now, but if you've got love for any of them, please let me know! I have until noon tomorrow to turn this in.

And one last bit for this week, a revised physical strength pose for your viewing pleasure. My mentor asked me to tweak my pose from last week:

Hopefully it now looks more like Stu is lifting up rather than back and away (and his back looks less broken). Welp, that's all for me this week! Next week I'll be blocking in my personality walk (SO excited for this) and there'll be more poses for you to vote on! In the meantime, have a lovely week and go Giants!

Walking in a Straight Line is Harder Than You Think

Well hello! Week 8 is upon us, readers, and it is the most exciting one yet! We got to block in our very first walk cycle, huzzah! One Leg grew another leg and turned in Ballie, thankfully, or it would have been a really tough walk cycle (well, jump cycle). AND we have another Stu pose this week so I will need your votes to help me pick once again. But first! My revision from last week:

My mentor had a few notes about Tailor, mostly concerning his small hop from frames 47-51 and his flip around frame 36. As for One Leg, he was pleased that he made it into my shot and just had a few notes on tweaking his jump. All in all, I think this is my favorite shot I've done so far as it was definitely the most fun to work on.

ALRIGHT WALK CYCLE TIME. Our lecture this week was fantastic. We got a full blown walk cycle demo from AM's CEO Bobby Beck and tons of great info on walks. Now, unlike some of my classmates, this isn't my first go at this. I've done walks in the past so I know that they are WAY harder than you think they're going to be (I did a quadruped walk cycle while I interned at DreamWorks and it took me freaking forever to get it even halfway decent).

Our assignment this week was to do a vanilla walk with Ballie, meaning just a plain ol' no personality walk that gets him from one side of the screen to the other. As walks go, this is on the easy side since you get to be fairly systematic with it. Plus, there are tons of resources out there that map out exactly how to do a vanilla walk. And Ballie is essentially just a pair of hips with two legs so there's no need to worry about arm swings or overlapping spine/neck/head motion or anything like that. Here it is:

Now keep in mind this is still in the blocking stage, as per our assignment this week. So, since there's only a pose on every third frame, it looks a little choppy but hopefully you still get a solid idea of what the walk is going to look like when it's done. 

Okay, onto the fun part. Our pose this week is supposed to communicate "physical strength". In a sense, this was an easier assignment because it's not an emotion like the past ones have been, so Stu's lack of a face didn't pose as much of a problem. On the other hand, Stu's distinct lack of muscles made it hard to communicate strength without some kind of prop. In my sketches, I did some exploring, doing some poses with props, some without, some with superhuman strength, some poses out of comics books, some from photos, and some out of my head. Here is what came out:

I also decided to add in the silhouettes with this week's poses, because I think it's even more important to have a strong (heh) silhouette and line of action for this particular assignment, again, because it's not an emotional pose and it needs to read right off the bat (and as you can see from number 9, I'm still feeling the gymnastics love even though the Olympics have ended). 

Something I dwelt on a lot while doing these was whether or not it helped the pose if Stu was struggling to push/lift whatever prop he had. In some cases it seems like that would take away from the pose immediately reading as "strength" by making Stu seem weak and unable to move the object, but in others it seems to help the overall reading of the pose. Since I'm still unsure, I'll let you decide! Here are the Stu poses I came up with after getting a bit of feedback from my classmates:

You know the drill by now, right? Which Stu or sketch looks the strongest? Vote away!

And don't forget to come back next week when I'll have a finalized walk cycle and another round of poses for you to vote on! 

Devastation and Stuff

Hello lovely readers! This week I need your help again! Part of our homework is to find a pose that communicates "devastation" (bit of a bummer after drawing a bunch of excited guys last time) and since all you lovelies were so helpful last time, I'm asking for another round of votes! Here are the sketches I did so you can see where I started from:

I thought devastation would be relatively easy to portray, but I think some of my drawings just came off as "tired"or "suddenly dizzy". Heh. After getting some feedback from my peers, I posed a handful of them with Stu, as seen here:

Stu's enormous head and tiny legs proved to be a challenge for me again (I did attempt to pose drawing 7 but it proved impossible with Stu's head). Even if I scale the arms enough so that Stu can wrap his arms all the way around his head, it still looked weird. Anyways, I would love to hear your thoughts! Which Stu looks the most devastated, A-F? Or do you like one of the drawings better? Sound off in the comments and check back at the end of this week, when I'll post a revision of my two bouncing balls from last week as well as my obstacle course assignment from this week! Much less depressing!

EDIT: Okay I did one more, we'll call this Pose G. I went back drawing 7 and tried to make it happen and I'm actually rather happy with what came out. Feel free to vote for this one if you like it best!

EXCITEMENT!

Here I am halfway through Week 3 and I need your help, dear readers! Part of my homework this week is to draw some poses that convey "excitement" and then choose my favorite one to pose Stu, our AM rig, with (and keep in mind he doesn't have a face so this is strictly a posing/body language exercise). Here are the sketches I did:

I did a few obviously excited poses and with others I tried to do more subdued types of excitement, always try to keep in mind why people get excited. Is it a reaction to something they've been told? Are they excited about some upcoming event? Are they good at containing their excitement? Not sure how many different kinds of excitement came through but I did have fun doing the drawings.

After some feedback from my classmates, I picked four of the poses and translated them to Stu, trying (hopefully not in vain) to capture the essence of the drawings in his pose. The tough thing is that Stu has a gigantic head and a really long body, which I didn't really pay attention to in my drawings. That made it tough to pose his arms in the air without his arms going inside his head, and his feet are proportionally much larger than I drew them, so I missed out on some of the nicer silhouetting I drew with the feet/legs. But, I am happy with how they came out and would love to hear from you as to which one you think best conveys excitement.

Of course, if you like one of the drawings better than these four, please let me know in the comments! I've got until Sunday so I can definitely put in a few more poses before I settle on a final one. And tomorrow, it's on to the bouncing ball!

Homework!

So, I'm nearing the end of my second week of school and that means that my very first homework assignment is just about due! Our assignment was to do some life drawings (you want to me to leave the house? Whaaaaat?) and then pick our favorite of the poses we drew. Then, we were supposed to pose our character rig according that pose, making sure the image is as readable and appealing as possible. Anywho, here is a handful of the drawings I did:

As you can see, I went to the driving range at one point, but my favorite ended being the sprinting pose, number 7 (this may or may not have something to do with the Olympic Trials going on right now and the fact that my patriotism rages out of control during the Olympics). So after many iterations, tweaks, and long discussions with myself about whether to keep the hands as fists or have them be straight or how tilted down his head should be, here is what came out:

I am actually quite happy with how this came out considering I attempted posing the rig with a few other sketches before finally settling on this one. It's not officially due until noon tomorrow so I may tweak it a bit more before then, but all in all I am happy with it!

And next week we get to start animating for realsies! Back to the bouncing ball, where it all begins.