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.