Tread Lightly

It's been a good long while since I last posted so I'm gonna try and catch myself up here.  I've got several posts to make so I'll start off with the oldest one I have to make.

First off, to catch everyone up, I've now moved from Florida to San Jose, California for a job working with Apple - finally a job within the industry even if it's only slightly related to what I want to do.  But the point is, no more working in household moving or in the deli.  The double shifts, and multiple jobs were really stretching me thin and making it hard for me to produce quality animation.  But now that I've got the immediate job situation taken care of, I don't need to worry about other things and can really focus on my art.  I also took a good long break after making the jump out here to recover from the burnout I was feeling and now after a little warm-up I feel ready to jump back into the fire.

So for this particular assignment, the first of my facial animations in Workshop 4, I chose dialogue from Breaking Bad, one of my favorite shows on television, and selected a particularly cold and tense piece when Walt threatens Hank.  "If you don't know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly."  The biggest thing I was focusing on here was telling a story with a little time as I could.

My instructor Bill Tessier, was quite helpful in getting me to develop a visual story surrounding the character.  While I did go a little cliche with the gangster bit, I tried to elaborate in the background further who he was.  The problem here was that, we don't know who he was, and given that we don't know the before or after, I had to try to hint at who he was so that as an audience we would care.  I accomplished this through proper staging.

I used three primary props to help the audience know who this character was: the personal picture, the art by David, and the newspaper article.  All three work together to tell the story.  We are introduced to the character Vinny with him holding and longingly looking at a picture.  The picture is of a mother and child hugging each other, and here we can assume that they are his family.  The painting by David displays and woman with young children at her feet standing between two warriors, stopping them from fighting.  Hanging over the head of Vinny (both metaphorically and literally) is the newspaper clipping which  has the the headline "Mother and Child Slain in Suspected Mob Murders".  With all these pieces, we can assume that Vinny is in someway associated with the Mob, and that the picture he holds is of his slain family.  The painting also shows that the woman and child were the only things preventing an outright war between two enemies.  This all helps build tension and give reason to Vinny's dialogue.

The animation itself was not too particularly difficult for the most part.  I had not yet as of this time figured out how to efficiently constrain an object and did struggle some on the release (though thanks to Nick Arbeiter have now solved my issues there).  I did have significant problems with the elbows and spent a long time trying to get them to feel natural and as though they were supporting weight.

The hands felt quite basic to me as well while working, I intend to do a hand study soon to better understand the subtleties involved.  My facial animation was also quite basic in my opinion and could stand to use a little more natural eye-movements.

All in all, I'm reasonably happy with this piece, but I do think I could have performed better had I not been so busy.

Character Design

So I was asked to create a Blog about Character Design for the studio Austin Visuals, and I thought I'd also post it here.

When it comes to designing characters for film, television, and every conceivable type of story – we always need to start from the same beginning.  We have to ask ourselves who is this character that we are trying to create?  What do they stand for, where have they been, and where are they going?

            A character’s story is immensely important, so much so that story and design go hand-in-hand.  As designers, we must realize that every decision we make serves a purpose; every detail needs to convey an insight into whom it is that we’re designing.  While in the real world, it’s quite possible that you just roll out of bed, groggily stumble over to the dresser and pick out whatever happens to be on top of your clothes pile – this is never the case in animation (and if it is, well then that is already telling us something about the character).

            A neat pressed, professional suit, a ratty band t-shirt with holes – the clothes on our characters can wordlessly tell an audience essentials to the story that needn’t be told in wasted dialogue.  In a short story I’ve written, one of my characters wears an eclectic mix of cowboy and Native-American garments, and this sets up the audience to understand he is from a mix of two distinct cultures.  And this is even more obvious when contrasting against other characters.
            But character design is never as simple as just clothing design.  In animation we are not limited to the real world, thusly we are free to explore all manner of shapes and sizes, and characters that would never exist in the real world.  A few examples I would like to allude to come from some of the giants of the animation industry and to begin with I want to start with DreamWorks Animation.

Now as a preface, I do not work for DWA (yet, here’s hoping to someday) and outside of a few light conversations with their animators I can’t really say if I’m even accurate here – but my interpretations as audience member should prove a point.  In Kung-Fu Panda, we’re greeted by Po the Panda.  A character completely out of place with the rest of the town.  He is fat, soft, clumsy and too big for his adoptive father’s noodle store.  Immediately, all dialogue aside, we know that Po does not belong here.  His design serves as an antithesis to the standard martial arts masters that we as an audience have become familiar with over the years.  Even his color pattern of black and white serves as an allusion to yin and yang (literally referenced in Kung Fu Panda 2).  Yet his ‘soft’ design also allows us to see into his personality, a soft and loving person.

Another wonderful example in my opinion from DreamWorks, is Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon.  Even the name of the character itself is a thought out design.  We actually see that Toothless does indeed have teeth, but they are often sheathed away in his gums.  But why?  Well I believe this particular design plays on how an audience perceives danger.  To be without teeth conveys being either a baby, or so old that you’ve lost your teeth.  You’re no longer a danger.  And as this is the first “friendly” dragon we’ve come across, that Hiccup has to befriend, we as an audience need to know that he isn’t an inherent danger.  His designs in movement are even based off of cats and puppies, animals that we as humans are hardwired to find adorable and non-threatening.

Speaking of dogs, let’s look at another lovable character, this time from Pixar.  In the movie Up, we’re introduced to the talking dog Dug.  He is one of many dogs in the film that can talk, and yet one of the only ones we don’t find threatening.  This can be attributed to his design.  Pixar wisely chose a yellow lab (maybe a golden retriever?) as the model for Dug, and they gave him a slightly tubby model, well rounded features, large soft eyes – how could anyone not love him, especially as he talks like a naïve child in pursuit of his bird.  Yet the other dogs are all menacing and angry, their designs are of dog breeds we have come to know as aggressive – Dobermans, Rottweiler, Bulldogs, and Pit bulls.  This simple design change lets the audience know that they are the bad guys.  Up also presents us with Carl, the old man who is a square when it comes to having fun and is literally designed to look like a square, his whole world is a simple box, contained, nothing adventurous, and we can see this quite squarely, in his square design.

Pixar has another great example of character design, and that’s in Merida from Brave.  Her fiery, crazy hair serves to further her character’s attitudes, showing that her demeanor can’t be tamed, and in one scene she even breaks out of the seams of her dress, literally breaking her design to show her will won’t be contained.

Character design stretches far beyond mere physical appearance, encompassing sound and movement as well.  When we design our characters, we must always keep asking ourselves, ‘why do they appear to the audience the way they do?’  An unexpected contrast can create humor in situations (the Ugly Step Sister in Shrek is a wonderful example) or present any number of scenarios.  As the designer, it’s up to you to make it mean something.

            But before I leave you, we should also consider one last thing.  Stereotypes.  These are dangerous territories to step into.  They can be your best friends, easily setting up the audience to understand something, or they can be an ugly cop-out that leaves the audience dissatisfied.  It’s easy to create a villain who is tall, thin, and bony (Jafar, Scar, Pitch, Rasputin, Hades, etc.) but it takes a little extra imagination to create something that deviates from that, and often that deviation can create a much better character.  Voldemort from Harry Potter has a snake-like nose in the films, something that touches on his loss of humanity; and Wormtongue from the Lord of the Rings has no eyebrows, another small change that immediately creates unease in the audience without a single word being uttered.  At worst, stereotypes can be highly offensive to the audience, as anyone who has seen Star Wars Episode 1 can attest to (talking about you Jar-Jar and Watto). 

So if we can, as designers, we want to steer as far away from stereotypes as possible, and create imaginative characters, whose designs push the bounds of reality, telling as much a story about who they are and where they’re from as the stories that they themselves are in.

An Oldie

This particular piece has been sitting around a while and I just never got around to posting it for various reasons.  It was part of the AetherEdge project, so I was waiting on renders and the possibility of it fully premiering, unfortunately, it seems things have gotten a little derailed in the project so I decided now was as good a time as ever to go ahead show my work.

The shot itself shows The Gardner just after he busts through a wall, and begins to show itself to Floyd.  When I got the shot,  some of the first things I thought about were intimidation and cockiness.  I wanted this to serve as a short break in action to serve the anticipation of the fight about to ensue.  When setting up the staging of the camera and the shot as a whole, I was pretty much just given that it was a long wide shot.  With this in mind, I decided that this animation was going to have the feel of an old western, quick-draw duel.  I really liked the long shots accomplished in the final duel of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and tried to establish a shot that would evoke the tension and feel that that movie gave off.

With the Gardner,  I realized I had to approach this character quite differently than I would with most other characters I have in the past.  For starters,  there are not really any real world references I could go off of.  The Animation lead, Andy Pace, had already given out a style guide and a few references for walking, however this was particularly a static shot just showing his immense size.  So I decided to go and look up what the character reminded me most of, a Sumo Wrestler.  I really go the idea that the leg lift/stomp would be able to sell the anticipation I was looking for and would fit the character design quite well.  Once I had initial reference, I then went and shot my own reference, which quite frankly looks a little ridiculous but served wonderfully.

At first, Andy wasn't real sure how it would look and was quite skeptical, but once I showed him my first pass, he was excited to see how it would finish out and gave me the go ahead to proceed.  The Gardner to this date is one of the more fun characters I've had to animate.

When I began work with Floyd, I started with the same general approach.  Because he was a biped, I knew he would be much more "normal" so to speak.  So I wanted to give him a fighting stance and one that would complement the magnitude of the Gardner.  The animation went quite well, with Floyd coming off as confident, cautious, and tense.

This was the shot as it appeared for the purposes of AetherEdge, however when I decided to post this for my own reel, the Director for AetherEdge suggested that I build my own camera set up to better show off my animation, so I decided to change it up and try and sell the intimidation factor even further by putting the camera below Floyd with a strong upshot and panning the camera across the action of the animation.

I Lie To Myself

I've finally finished this piece, and it's been a long time coming.  I began this piece back in December, but haven't been able to devote anywhere near as much consecutive hours as I would have liked.  But finally, after many months, it's complete.

Back in December, I was wanting to work on a lipsynch before I really got into my Workshop 4 class for iAnimate which goes over lipsynchs and facial animation.  I thought I would treat this as a nice warm up to work out a few kinks so that I could focus better once I really got into the workshop.

The piece of dialogue I chose is from 30 Rock, and I found it ironically relevant to myself, being at the beginning of my animation career, constantly throwing out resumes and applications and slugging through not so appealing jobs to get by in the mean time.  The piece also stood out to me as having a strong change of mood, with a sharp comedic effect.  With this in mind, I set about my work in quite high spirits.

Without the guidance of a mentor, I began the best I could and that was with the knowledge I already had in body mechanics.  The characters I selected for this were simple blobs (I chose to do this so that more focus would be in the face as opposed to anywhere else) and the acting given to me from 30 Rock was so great to me that I decided to transcribe that (Kenneth's awkwardness really is quite great).  Unfortunately, facial animation is whole other beast from body mechanics and while I had the body moving quite well by focusing on the contacts and passing poses, it didn't quite transcribe as well in the face.  It was overloaded and required a lot of fine tuning, too much fine tuning for the stage of the animation that I was at.

With that being said however, it really went off without a hitch.  I didn't have any major hiccups or pops, and everything went pretty smoothly.  My biggest problems were in getting it to be appealing as possible, and to read as clearly as possible.

After reaching my polish stage, I decided to look up some tutorials on facial animation and lipsynch to see if there was anything I could use to further what I already had.  And of course there was, I wish I had looked at it before I began, it would have saved me quite a bit of time.  My biggest problem is that I progressed with straight-ahead animation through the lipsynch, trying to match each pose as he hit each syllable and mouth shape.  what I found that I should have done however was to block in the mouth with open/close and wide/narrow shapes and then from there further refine.  I also later came to realize, that every action in the face (like with the body) affects the other parts, because they are all connected.  I had an odd sense of disconnect for a while, because when my character would blink, nothing else would move, once I started to move the brows and scrunch the cheeks, I could see the life come into my characters.

The other area I learned a lot in was that as opposed to the body, the face tends to hold it's forms with emotions quite statically for significant amounts of time.  An entire piece may only have two or maybe three different "faces" depending on the emotional progress of the character.  I had my face constantly moving, and it created a floating effect, something that just wasn't quite right.  Once I calmed the face down, the emotions read clearer and became much more effective.  I also towards the end began to push my exaggeration.  Exaggeration is another area I have struggled on in the past, but here I let go of my reservations and just pushed my open mouths wider, squinted my eyes more, and just really tried to hit the extremes harder and I can say it's a wonderful difference to see.

I'm quite happy with my piece,  I'm not as satisfied with the antennae and secondary action there, the rig isn't built to easily animate those, but that really doesn't excuse my general inexperience with items such as that.  My next go around with lip synch will be better, I learned a lot from this piece, and about my workflow, and am quite excited to begin my 4th workshop with iAnimate next week.

Action Animation

My final assignment for Workshop 3 of iAnimate has closed, and with that I shall be presenting my final animation of the semester.  This assignment was for an action sequence, with multiple camera shots and varied extreme acting.  Unfortunately, I was not able to shoot reference for this assignment, as much as I would like to, so I had to resort to going to Youtube and finding various clips of parkour, free-running, and other stunt videos, linking them all together to form a cohesive sequence.

My first reference video wasn't accepted, because it was too repetitive, which looking back I'll admit it certainly was - the guy just kept leaping from object to object.  So back to the drawing boards I went, and came back with a much more interesting piece with flips and a roll.

I decided to approach this animation a little different than usual, whereas I typically plan out where each contact and passing pose will be in accordance to the frame before I enter the computer, it wasn't going to work that well this time.  Because I had multiple cameras, and a pretty complex scene, I had to build the set first, animate the camera, and set storytelling poses.  This was very much a back and forth process, and as such I animated in a much more straight-ahead approach as opposed to planned pose-to-pose method.  This resulted in a pretty quick blocking pass, but it was missing several contact and passing poses, however, a second blocking pass fixed that and I was able to spend a good deal of time working out the timing and pushing the extremes of the poses.  At this stage I was quite happy with where I was, as was my instructor.

I'm now really starting to get a natural feel for body mechanics, and knowing when a character is in balance or doing something that they shouldn't be able to.  Manuel suggested that I add character to my animation before I moved on to polishing my animation, so I decided to create an idea that my character was meditating at the beginning, to add contrast to the sudden explosion of energy.

When I began polishing, I decided to try a new technique that I had been suggested.  I broke down my animation into much smaller pieces, moments.  These moments could be 30-50 frames in length, something like standing up or a single jump, but when broken down into such small pieces, I could really focus on just what was going on at that point in time, and not get caught up in what had happened or what was going to happen.  All in all, this lead to a much easier polishing pass, with far fewer headaches than I've ever experienced.  The animation was smoother throughout, and there were fewer issues within the Graph Editor to fix.  I still need to practice this method a lot more before I have it down fully, but it really seems to be the way to go.

The only area I truly had issues on, was the front roll.  I had to redo the roll twice.  I was aware that it is one of the more difficult actions to produce, due to rig capabilities, but it is also just a move that many people aren't aware of how it is physically performed, and we have a stereotypical idea implanted in our heads that gets in the way of how it actually happened.  It took me a while to get past that view, and to implement what actually happens.  It also did not help that I chose a horrible rig to do this particular animation with.  I did not realize when I began that this particular rig was designed to be more of a subtle acting character, rather than an action character.  But with that being said, it was still possible, and it just presented more practice for me.

I decided to light my scene, to make for a more pleasing effect.   While it's not perfect, I am not a lighter and it accomplished what I desired, so I'm good with that for now.

All in all I'm pleased with my work, and my progress that I made in this semester, though I am still slightly disappointed in that I did not reach quite a height in any of my animations that I had hoped.  With time permitting in the future, I intend to go back and redo the assignments with completely new ideas and animations, after all - they were fun and challenging.

Environment Study

With my focus on animation having been my primary practice as of recent, I felt that I was starting to slack in other areas of my work.  I was inspired by my friend Trey Buogniorno's recent post with the work he was doing of interior and exterior perspective drawings.  While ultimately, I don't plan on pursuing a direction that will utilize these skills extensively, I thought I should keep myself up to par.  I have recently got a new opportunity for a commercial, which I can't discuss any further at the moment, but I'm excited to jump into it and it's requiring me to create storyboards, so I feel this practice is well justified.

I decided to go the Orange Park mall here in Florida and do a few rough sketches.  I didn't have very much time to work with so I only got 3 sketches completed before I had to go.  I tried to limit myself in time frame, because I have a bad habit of slowing down and spending too much time on one particular piece.

The first piece was an exterior I did just outside of the entrance to the movie theater.  I think I captured most of the important structure and defining traits.  However, I do feel that I muddled some of the background too much and it's not as easy to see what's going on back there.  I also feel that I horizontally squashed the entire composition.

The second piece was an interior shot I did look out from near the center of a grand atrium.  I feel I did a better job here of not squashing everything horizontally, however my work got sloppy near the chairs and tables.  It started to feel like I was cramming things in and taking away from the rest of the drawing.

The third was another interior shot I did looking down a hallway from a smaller atrium.  I feel I got the perspective best on this one,  I decided to simplify some of my work and try and use straight lines as much as I could with curves accenting only where need be.  My depth is lost somewhat on the sides, so I'm still obviously squashing some, but I felt happiest with this one.

All in all, my work is alright in my mind, with plenty of room for improvement.  I need to gain more confidence when it comes to placing objects within my scenes and I need to do a better job of pre-planning when I am going to be laying in lots of smaller objects such as chairs and tables.  These were mostly big open spaces, but I can already see I'd be having many issues in a smaller, more cramped space such as a diner.

LumberJack

Hello, so my second assignment for workshop 4 has come and gone and I must say I'm pretty pleased with this one.  The objective was for a push/pull, heavy lift animation.  I've seen many animations that simply have someone pick up a heavy box and struggle and stumble around a bit, they drop the object, it breaks, yada yada yada.  I thought that was rather boring and cliche so I tried to work a little bit more creativity into my piece.

I decided upon the idea of having a lumberjack attempting to chop down a tree, and having the axe blade get stuck in the tree so that he would not be able to pull out the axe.  In this way I could incorporate several different "heavy" ideas and create a little more comedy than I figured I would get from just an ordinary heavy lift.  I went out and shot some reference and was pretty happy with my results. I took around 8 takes, and then edited the best pieces together.

Now the reference had a few issues here and there that I would have to work around once I got into the computer.  To begin with, no one really likes it when you take an actual axe to their tree unless you really want it taken down (they didn't).  So I had to do my best to fake the impact.  Additionally, I do not actually own an axe, I do own a large gardening hoe, but that actually was quite light.  And because I could not actually get an axe stuck in a tree, my finally comedic moment of the fall was a little forced.

These issues however were not too big of a problem.  I preplanned much better than I have on previous animations and considered these issues early on.  Once I had my blocking in place I was feeling pretty good, but I decided to slow down further than I usually do and instead finessed my blocking adding only a few extra keyframes where absolutely necessary.  

Slowing down certainly paid off.  My instructor Manuel really wanted me to speed up my animation all throughout - the fact that my acting was forced actually slowed down how the action would have really taken place.  As well, he wanted me to really emphasis the weight of the axe.  This primarily was done by having a drag to the axe along the ground as opposed to a straight carry and by accentuating the degree to which he would lean back while pulling at the axe whilst it was stuck.

The fall back also changed dramatically from the reference into a jump with a nice hard impact.  I really liked the change made here as I felt that it really added further to the comedic effect that I was looking for.

My main issues were in the IK/FK switching (as usual) though this time I felt I accomplished it a lot better.  I didn't have a very good prop rig for the axe, though I now have figured out how to better rig props for two handed control.  This led to some awkward movement when he looks up the tree and leans back on the axe handle for support.  While I think I got it taken care of in the end, I still believe that this is the weakest part of this particular animation.  

In hindsight, I would have liked to have changed how he walks in, rather than dragging the axe behind him, I feel I maybe should have had him carry the axe over his shoulder, in this way I could have avoided the switching issues as well as creating a more dynamic looking pose.

Sneak Animation

Wow, so it's been a while since I've posted, but it's been a hectic couple of months and I'm just now getting back to posting.  Luckily I have managed to keep myself busy and continue my work.

In January, I began workshop 3 at iAnimate, advanced body mechanics.  My first assignment was a character walk/sneak.  I could do anything I wanted, but my mind was a little stuck on the sneak, so I decided to go with a cartoony animation in which my character would attempt to steal a cookie from a jar.  I thought about going with a child, but I thought it was a little cliche, so I went with an adult character.  The reference shooting went quite well and was excited to start the animation.  My instructor was very pleased with the level of acting I had incorporated into my performance.

This animation actually ended up causing a lot of unforeseen problems for me.  A lot of which stemmed from poor pre-planning, which I have now gone and modified into my workflow for future work.  I had decided to work the whole animation in hand IK mode, which really it didn't need to be except for at two points and with a working IK/FK switch I should have just gone that route.  The animation also evolved significantly as I went, which led to it being quite different from the reference in the end.

I also had a wonky looking walk throughout most, which with the help of my instructor I eventually figured out was due to the fact that tend to keep the feet and hips wide, almost cowboyish, which does not lend itself well to a natural looking walk.  It's something that I'm working on and I'm getting it out of my work quickly thankfully.

I also ran into a few problems due to conflicting advice on part of my instructor, where he'd really insist one particular action, and then the next week decide I should go in a totally different direction, only to go back to the original idea the next week.  While this is quite frustrating, I have to just realize that this is the nature of the job, working at studio the director may ask for many different ideas on a day to day basis, and it's my job to deliver as efficiently as possible.

My efficiency is another thing that threw me off on this animation, and it's something that I'm happy to say I'm now improving on dramatically (though that's for later post).  I have had the habit of putting too many in-betweens and non-essential poses in my blocking stage and then rushing to spline before I'm truly ready.  In this case of this animation, I did just that and spent a good majority of my time just attempting to smooth out and fix small things, which, had I taken my time in the beginning would have saved me hours of frustration at the end (and probably a better result all in all).

At the end however, I am pleased to say that it all came together to produce a nice animation piece.  I decided to give it some lighting and simple textures to give more story and atmosphere and I'm pretty proud of it.