Week 5: Moar Layout! And Also Some Planning!

I know we're already well into Week 6 but I had to take a few days to get over the Niners Superbowl loss. I've decided to just focus on the fact that Spring Training is starting and the Giants will soon be back on my television. 

So for Week 5, we had to do shoot reference, do planning sketches, and do rough character placement for our shots in the sequence. I had a biiiit of extra work since I have three shots instead of two like most of my class, but it wasn't too bad and my extra close up of Stewie's hand is actually a lot of fun.

My three shots are fairly straightforward. The first being where Stewie is climbing up the cliff face, the second is the close of his hand slipping, and the third is him dangling from the cliff and looking down. I cobbled together some video reference from clips I found on YouTube so that I could start drawing. For the dangling shot, one of my classmates kindly shot reference for me, thanks Michael! Take a look!

I am very glad I was able to find good reference because there is no way I would have be able to shoot any of this myself. I can't even do a pull-up. Zero upper body strength over here.

So, once I got my reference together, I got to drawing. I knew I wanted to exaggerate the poses a lot for this and make it as dynamic as possible. Actual rock climbing is really slow and controlled, but I wanted to give Stewie a little more energy, even a bit of recklessness, and I tried to convey that in my drawings. Here, have some thumbnails:

So now it was time to dive into Maya. Another of my classmates made an awesome Tarzan mod and spear for Stewie, so that is what will be used in our sequence (thanks Brock!). I can't even really call this blocking since it is still so, so rough, but the general ideas and groundwork is there for my three shots:

Mike had a few minor notes, including some small camera changes and having Stewie's hand enter frame in my second shot, but his main note, really for all of us, was to be specific about the way that Stewie moves. If he's like Tarzan, he should have a very unique style of movement and locomotion that we all need to agree on and really communicate in each of our shots. So, as I start blocking, there is a lot of work to be done, but I'm excited to get to it! See you next week with some blocking, readers!

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 4 is a Doooooozy

It was a busy, busy week this week readers. We had so much to do! Polish our first shot, shoot reference for our next shot, and do planning drawings! Plus I went out of town this weekend to watch Cal take a very unfortunate butt whooping from Stanford. :( But, at least we're getting Missy Franklin on our swim team next year. All in all, I had lots to do. First off, let's look at my turnaround with Ballie, which is all polished for you!

Pretty happy with how this turned out. I my biggest hurdle with this shot was it feeling too soft initially. Even from Week 1 Marlon told me to watch out for floaty-ness in my work, since some of Class One work felt a bit floaty as well. I toyed with the timing of this shot a lot and I think the experimentation I've been able to do with it over the past few weeks has really helped train my eye to recognize better timing/spacing. I think the feeling of weight has improved a lot, even just since my blocking plus pass. 

And now, it's time for more reference video! For our next shot, we are getting a new rig! His name is Stewie and he is pretty much just a fancier version of our old pal Stu, and thankfully his head is not quite as large and he has eyes! Yay! For the list of actions we could pick to animate, we had a lot of cool options, but I decided to go with "a run with a change of direction." I've had a lot of trouble doing runs whenever I've tried them in the past so I thought this would be a good challenge.  On my day off this week I borrowed my dad's tripod, set it up in my backyard and ran around like a crazy person. 

After doing about thirty takes of myself running around, sometimes from off camera, sometimes away from camera, sometimes toward it (I got soooo sweaty), I ended up piecing two of my favorite takes together (that's why there's that weird cut in the middle). I liked the takes where I ran into frame but I also like the little skid thing I did on the turnaround from another take. Thankfull, my mentor gave us the okay to piece together reference last week during the Q&A and I like how it came out.

Also, you may be wondering why I was running with my arms behind my back. Our Stewie rig for this shot doesn't have any arms, so I figured I shouldn't use my arms so my reference was as accurate as possible. Fun fact: running with no arms is really hard. Turns out swinging your arms is a tremendous help to gaining forward momentum and balancing as you change direction. Seriously. Go outside and try to do it without falling over.

So, since I had my reference all ready to go, it was time to do my planning drawings. I always liked how our mentors could draw directly over our reference and after a bit of googling, I found out that I could do the very same thing in photoshop! I got really excited and went to town on my reference:

I apologize that this is so annoying to watch this in real time (and on youtube you unfortunately can't scrub through it frame by frame). Also my color key is basically impossible to read, but black drawings are contact positions, green is up and down extremes, red is passing positions, orange is line of action/weight notes, and white is shoulder rotation extremes. I'm so excited that I figured out how to do this and if my shot turns out well, I think I'm going to add this in as a permanent part of my workflow!

Okay, now onto the drawings. From my drawn-over reference, I was able to lift all the appropriate poses for the run pretty easily and separate them into color coded keys, as you'll see in pages two and three. I pushed the poses a bit where I could, but looking at it now I know that I'm going to need to exaggerate them even more when I get into Maya. Something that I noticed while working on my last shot is that I had to speed my timing up quite a bit to get the weight to feel the same as in my reference. For whatever reason, the timing from live action doesn't directly translate into animation and if you lift the timing from your reference, things will usually feel too slow. I did some rough adjustments with the frame numbers I've timed out here on the first page. 

That's all I've got for this week, darlings! I'm going to start blocking soon so that will be posted up in a few days. See you then!

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!