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.