Tim Burtons Alice in Wonderland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFqjA2aOe_I&feature=related



 To begin with I think Tim Burtons interpretation of Alice in Wonderland is a visual treat!, okay the plotline didn't have the same potential, but you can't deny the visual mastery created from the mind of Mr Burton, (credit goes to the visual design team too of course, who make the ideas a reality). The animators had quite a challenge of bringing the personalities, animal locomotion and body mechanics of  creatures and characters to life. One character in particular which I thought the characters did a marvellous job with was the Cheshire Cat, this character had alot of layers, in his appearance he looks deceiving, eerie, possibly frightening and to never show his true, thoughts or feelings (maybe he didn't have any?)


Chieshire Cat - Voiced by Stephen Fry
The large round face and eyes give the character that stong appeal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=lLBQO1cwGe0&NR=1


Animation


I love the follow through and secondary animation of the body mechanics as the character floats around the other characters, Ryan Page has done a really good job of creating fluid motion through the characters performance and gave the character a sense of weightlessness.

I think the most challanging job animating this character is the very fine line between giving the character this "wieghtlessness" and showing through the animation the fact that the characters physical body is still a solid object .

Sketches: my cartoons

 I've uploaded some more sketches, but I thought i be a little different this time. I choose a type of insect and decided to see how many variations I could design, I'd been sketching and made these back when I had time just after the Christmas holidays.

I thought the best way to blog these sketechs was to tie them in with the principle of line of action. Line of action as John k describes it is a artistic concept, its can be applied to animation to make poses and actions alot more interesting visually. With line of action, we can exsaggerate and bend the form, directing the viewer to a point of interest or push the pose of character to make it more appealing. In my sketches I try to use the same principle to create a more appealing pose. Strong shiluettes, line of action and flowlines can be the key to a good pose.

 

(sketches 2011)

A page from Preston Blair featured on the site: http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-5-line-of.html



Improvements

Presenter

Offset the right arm at frame 396 so the character doesn't look to much like a marionette.

This week’s session involved a few tutorials from Keith Lango on methods of practise when animating. I was quite surprised when he mentioned an obvious mistake I usually make when looking over animated scenes. I usually tend to do a full render of the animation to correct one mistake I’ve made and wasting lots of time I could be spending on animating characters.  As animators, we have to be very time sensitive, tight schedules and deadlines are one of the main aspects of the industry we will be facing when we graduate as character animators. We could save a lot of time by a technique, or perhaps more of a habit to get into when looking over an animated pass, instead of rendering out the whole scene for the sake of one mistake, render the scene but make a list of all the faults in the timing, animation, rig, and make a note of the frame number. That way I can save time cutting out the render times of the animation. I’ve already begun using this techniques making lists for my mistakes in animation and listed some below.

Here are my notes for animation improvements typed up:

Song and dance – Lady is a Tramp

Off set right hand – frame 282

Delete right up vector key frame frame 437

Frame 300 – 321 adjust head rotation

Run though right and animation pass for sequence – drop paper at frame 300

frame 270 the arm "clicks" from the constraint to hip

no no no hand animate fingure frame 300

throws paper next to her frame 232

Presenter – the Cook

Move fr­­ame 200 forward 10 frames to increase timing of the leaning pose

Attach constraint to beaker object at frame 320 animate from frame 320 – 500

Offset the timing at frame 345 for more anticipation

Include more emphasis on the arm stretch of frame 200 using squash and stretch to exaggeration the form

Lip Sync – Believe me

Add 50 frames to the beginning sequence of the animation for suspense and anticipation of the character.

Adjust the mouth shape at frame 75 “keep telling” shorten the mouth shape for the “ep” sound.

include a blink sequence at frame 300-305 that's 300-303 blink down

 302 - 305 blink up

Major improvements:

Work on my timing, use off sets, extra key frames and arcs to improve the flow of my animation. 

Sketches

Figured I needed more practise with life drawing, I seem to create these really stylised figures, I like to create the pose using dynamic lines to describe the form, sort of a idea I picked up from reading the book dynamic life drawing for animators. I think my drawing skills definitely could could use some brushing up.   

Lip sync new background

Okay so after the feedback session I've gone ahead and made some improvements to the lip sync. For starters I've added more pronunciation in the beginning of the sentence "You keep telling yourself....", before it seemed a little slow and didn't catch all the words, now it looks more in sync with "you" and "keep" having separate mouth shapes. I also included changes in the lighting and the background to make the scene more interesting, such as blinds and the detectives shadow.

I added the a character behind the camera to make the scene more believeable, the spot llight creates the shadow fo a mysterious figure on the wall. This technique has been used in a few of the film noir films when two characters are involved in a scene. The blinds give the scene more of a dark sinister atmosphere and set the scene.

 I don't think the shadow works as effectively with the animation, it seems to take away the  audiences attention from the character, also it seems to disengage the audience with the character who was looking directly at them in the last shot. I'll have to make note of this as well as the other errrors .

Lady is a tramp - Arcs

In my previous animations I don't feel as if I considered arcs enough as a principle of animation, when I reflect on the bouncing ball, walk cycle and pendulum, the animation needed much more attention to the animation principles and polish. I really need to work on my timing, in betweens and much more anticipation. A lot of my animations lacked life, movement and the right timing, I want to improve with these next animations to achieve a better grade.

So I have got myself into a habit of reviewing my animations using small screen dumps, I can workout any major timing issues or draw the arc in the sequence to help me see how the character is moving.  Apart from this I'm using the "ghost" view in softimage.

I've made a quick screen grab and drawn out the hand fall from frame 155-168

note the right hand is slightly offset just so the action is symmetrical. 

I've used the refence I collected from the greenscreen to produce the same arcs on the rig as the arcs Rachael made when she performed actions involving swinging her arms. here is an example of the visual references I've been using  to animate the movement of the arm swings.

29 ways to stay creative - a reflective session

http://vimeo.com/24302498

 helpful techniques to stay creative, my favourite was number 15: practice, the more you do something, better you become at it. The same applies with animation, the more walk cycles you create the faster and more effective you will be the next time around, you learn the key poses (Contract, pass over, highpoint).

perhaps I should try coffee too?

Lady is a tramp - blocking

I watched another one of Kieth's tutorials on character animation, a key point he made in the recent tutorial is not to be afraid to to cut unnecessary key frames in your animation which is what I've done to this sequence in order to achieve the right results. I've taken out the shoulder shimmy and some of the movements which seem to make the character twitch and do unnatural movements in the animation, . I've also changed some of the key poses in the animation sequence to tone down the character slightly but still give her that "trampy-ness". I'm not sure if I should include more dance steps but I still need to do the hand pass and teak alot of the timing and the arcs before the animation is complete.

I think the staging is quite effective, but perhaps the camera should zoom in from wide shot to a close up on the character when she is singing in the last verses of the song to emphases the characters personality and literally show the audience the song is about her. The object was included in this render but she is carrying a piece of paper with her lines still to show is still kind of her first time even though she is inexperienced.

I'm glad I decided to leave the male character out, or have him off screen just to draw all the attention to the female character as she has quite a big personality, she also has more lines in the audio track and a louder voice which helped with creating the poses for her.

I feel as though I should be doing more with the staging of the camera, in alot of the feedback seesions my colleges have used camera tricks, cut to sequences, panning and zooming to make the animation sequence alot stronger. Theres a few ideas I want to try out on this scene, but I dont want to lose too much of the screen time to camera angles which don't show certain gestures that are important in the animation sequence for the audience to understand.

La Luna

The next short comming up from pixar. The story is inspiried by  Italo Calvino an Italian journalist about building a ladder to the moon, "The Distance of the Moon" I found the jounal entry here have a read: 


http://allaboutjeff.wordpress.com/2009/05/03/the-distance-of-the-moon-by-italo-calvino/


 "La Luna" is about a young boy with his bickering Papa and Grandpa, out at sea in an old wooden boat  unaware that they are about to embark on an exciting lunar adventure.



 I think the artist has used line art in the design quite effectively, the big round eyes, round head round shoes all contribute to effectively showing the emotions of the character.  The design generally has a messy but clean technique, I think it gives the art work more uniqueness for the novelty of it being traditionally created by ink, watercolours on paper as it would be harder to reproduce.  

blocking & inbetweens

Thought I'd best do an update before lesson today, I've blocked out the character poses and started the inbetweens, I've added more poses at the beginning but am going to need alot more inbetweens to smooth out the animation.

Lip sync - believe

Okay, so I’ve made a few changes to the sequence starting with the camera, from the feedback session a suggestion was made to move the camera so she’s facing the screen, therefore I decided to make the scene more personal, and have an extreme close up on the face, I lose some of the screen space but the impact is so much stronger when played back.  I’ve also added an extra pose a the end. Fame 200 – 230 feels a little floatly and looks too much like theatrical performance rather than acting, (I think I may have to tone it down a little more, unless of course he character is performing in musical theatre) so I’ve removed the pose and stretched the timing of the previous pose making the character appear to be in thought.

Sketches and poses

Here are a few poses I've drawn from the past few days, I wanted to get into the habit of sketching a pose down fast and effectively capturing the linke of actions in each pose. I was alos interested in what poses the human body could perform and how I could use these poses to enhance my psoe to pose ideas when animating, so i looked at

Unusual circus poses found on pose manicacs and videos from the famous Cirque Du Soliel

Stretches whilst at my Zumba class in the gym.

Shooting reference for lip sync

I've produced a few short video reference for my lip sync animation, I needed more ideas of what she could do, in terms of actions and performance and I thought live footage would be the best reference. So with my handy Iphone, I recorded myself over and over and over, trying out the same poses with mixed emotions.

Inspiring animation

I Lived On The Moon - Award Winning Animation by Yannick Puig

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6aDiOeOEUI&feature=fvwp&NR=1

i found an inspiring awarding winning animated short from my local favourite animation website: Aniboom.This was last years winner and the animation is just fantastic, the character have solid form and appeal and the animation just proves the possibles if you have the right imagination.

The legs from 1:50 in the clip must have been the worst to animate, getting the wieghting right in the walk cycle must have been a tough challenge, espcially at the highpoint to to contact where the turnip like character catches itself in the cycle. but I believe the animators have pulled it off quite well.

lady is a tramp

I've been collecting a few ideas together of the movenments and actions of the character, shes a jazz singer after all so shes going to have to sway. I found alot reference videos from the previous duet's Tony bennet has been in including Tony Bennett & Natalie Cole,Frank Sinatra & Ella Fitzgerald, both were live performances which i think works better for sketching poses and planning the timing of the animation. I watched the video to the song too for "lady is a tramp", Lady gaga had alot interesting poses but as the video was pre recorded end edited so the poses didn't seem as "natural" as the movement and actions from live performances.

Theres a fair few hand gestures invovled, including tapping, clicking, nodding heads and a general "bounce" occuring in the full body.  Secondary action of the arms swing front to back as Ella rotating her body to the mo but the movements are still quite small. Taps, claps and movement are all in sync with the beat of the music.

The cook: animatic

I've drawn out the sequence and cut a few poses out to create the animatic of the the cook, I couldn't really decide on a suitable ending, I at first i thought he could just fiddle with the beaker a little, or perhaps the hand blender could get jammed in the beaker casuing the niose which is what the second last image illustrates. But then I thought that the idea was a little to dull for an animation and would leave the audience uninterested in the animation. I have to renember that although this was ment to show my animation skills, aniamting a presenter I would also have to be slightly interesting to watch. So I added an extra ending to the sequence were our main character the chief has the beaker in his hand and th ehand blender is moving out of conrol, hes also a little unsure of what to so but tries to maintain the sutuation while live on TV.

Another idea i had was that the chief put the hand blender on the table and started stiring a meal i the bowl, as hes stiring and talking to the audience the hand blender begins to move knocking the objects on the table. But I think the idea may distract the audiences attention, on the otherhand, the handblender spiraling out of control could a an action for the cheif to react to, acting out his emotions in strong poses.

Not much time left til the deadline so I shall have to get a move on with the animation.

feedback session

Today we had the feedback seesion and I showed the initial blocking of "Lady is a Tramp". Some of the key points were the idea and the amont of poses in the scene I disscussed my idea the scene being in a audition for a jazz musical, but the idea didn't come across as strongly in the animation as I'd hoped, i think I did too much for idea as Penny mentioned and I should just focus on the character delivering a performance.

So I've simplied the idea slightly, now the character is still the same person, has the same character attitude, quirks and personality but is a Jazz singer performing in a local Jazz bar.

Jerry Lewis - the Errand boy

Classic example of slapstick comedy acted out by Jerry from the Hollywood golden age, I think this is a great example of how timing, movement, facial expressions and actions can work in synchrony with music

More Life Drawing

Life drawings from life drawing session at university, female model nude. I think I'm starting to improve on capturing the outline of the figure precisely, skin is an outer layer over the muscles and bodes and should reflect that in the drawings. I need to work on my shading a little more to highlight the muscles on the body.

Quick sketch, P.O.V sketch from the labs in the phoenix building.

British cooking programs: Ready Seady Cook!

For the presenter task, I want to try something a little different, I'd already animated two female characters in the previous assigments of AP2 So I wanted this character had to be male. I think I'm more in favour of the advertisement soundtracks " Blender and "buy one", Blender. Both voices are from the  British celebrity chef, television presenter and radio broadcaster Antony Worrall Thompson, who has quite an deep gruff voice. I wanted this need character to be a little older, early 30s for a little divercity to the outcomes of this modules.

 "Blender" soundtrack


I've researched popular british cooking programs (given the characters accent is British of course) I could watch, including a few old  series of BBC 2 Ready Steady Cook,

none of the links are working on blogger site, so I've listed the series I've been watching for research:


 Ready Steady Cook - Sn 15: Ep.114: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006vcgr

Ready, Steady, Cook: Ready Steady Cook - Sn 15: Ep.97: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56jgQFm5ZkI&feature=relmfu

Ready, Steady, Cook: Ready Steady Cook - Sn 15: Ep.84: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jpINsXhnoI&feature=related

Heres a few clips from channel 4oD "Jamie's 30 minute meals"

Jamie's 30 Minute Meals: Grilled Sardine: shttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIhDNi1Oej8

Analysis:

One thing I noticed from watching thiese clips is there is suprisingly alot of cuts to the food or the object of interest, particularly close ups and exstreme close ups of food and objects of interest and zooming in on the chief as hes talking abou the food and cooking techniques. I have to renember to make sure the cameria is telling the audience what to look at and using mid shots, close ups, and wide shots to tell the audience what is happening.

As silly as it sounds I'll also have to be familar with the props involved in my scene so I'n researching hand blenders so





                                        Hand Blender:

Freelance job - Walk cycles and Jumps

Thought it would be good idea to post this.

Recently, well over Christmas holidays I managed to find myself a freelance job!,  I had to design the characters, environment, props for a Iphone game. Originally the design of the game was a rabbit collecting carrots and the client wanted his game redesigned in a cartoon style, he liked my portfolio so I redesigned his character and a few animation cycles drawing influences from my favourite animator & cartoonist Genndy Tartakovsky & Stephen Silver.

We discussed his ideas, the intentions for the game and so on, the result? setting completely changed to an Arabian theme and so after a few designs the concept was changed to a little Arabic boy collecting salads.

Here are a few of the animation cycles I made for the game:

(Jump Cycle - jump to double jump)

(First Jump)

(Mid air Jump)

"highpoint"         "Contact/pass pos"           "highpoint"

(Run Cycle)

For the character I had to design the poses for the run & jump cycle, I only had a small frame count (6) so I had to pick out the key poses for the run cycle and jump to work; "Walking is simply the method of falling and catching ourselves as gravity pulls us down". I renembered this theory I learnt from one of the previous walk cycle lectures with Penny and I took three poses "Highpoint" "Contact" and "Pass pos" and created a stylised run cycle and I'd referenced the Animators Survival Kit too on run cycles. I did most of the design work in Illustrator, all in all it was worth the exsprience and to be paid too was quite a bonus!

Camera angle 2 - lip sync

shooting reference ~ Lady is a tramp

 Whilst recording in the green screen studio we experimented with different interpretations of the audio track "The Lady is a Tramp", but keeping the same persona of the duet, we performed the characters in different turns and I was able to collect a broad range of gestures and actions the characters could perform. Emily had a more of comedic performance, eyes rolling, hands swinging around general loose persona. Rachael in contrast had a more confident stronger approach which gave quite a bit of diversity to the chracter of the tramp. I attempted to deliver some of the body macanics for the performance shoulder shimmy, hip bounce, swaying, taps. Unfortunatly I had very little energy and did a rather bad performance, certaintly room for improvement with my acting skills.

I do believe Scott did the best performance for the man, his nervousness was very convincing. I think the man has become less improtant now that I've seen the idea acted out, the character became more of a prop but using this character was great help as a acting tool. The animation is to animate a performance the main focus, the performer of the animation is the tramp.

Managed to collect a range of gesutres an facial exspressions from practice inthe greenscreen studio.

Overall it was a very fun session, I hadn't had my tea before so I was a little weak, next time I will have too make sure I'm fully prepared physically and mentally.

3D Animation Masterclass: Acting Tutorial Highlights

I found this a little while ago worth watching, its a master class tutorial, Kyle Balda's 3D Animation Masterclass: Dialog Acting Tutorial, it in the June 2009 issue of 3D World Magazine. I really like his approach to animation, blocking down the first pass of the characters from the base and just moving the character in time to the sync using the base poses from the reference. He makes an interesting point about the eyes and brows these are an essential part of our body language and we communicate as humans our emotions through facial exspressions. If you watch the second pass where with just the block poses and the eyes and eyebrows animated, you can already read the characters thoughts and emotions without the lip sync.

 The video also touches on a subject I had considered much - accents! upto now we've been animating characters from western backgrounds, but what if we were to animate an Itailan, French or German character? the mouth shapes would be totally different from a English character speaking English to a say, Russian character speaking english. This is something I'll definitely have to consider more in the profile of the characters I create, even a slight lisp or twang in the audio could contribute to the lip sync.

Tip of the day:

Always have one inbetween mouth shape for every two different mouths shapes

The Mise en scene

I found a very useful website i found whilst doing so research on planning, it talks about the "Mise en scene" and building up a ideas, as animators we have to build the scene ourseleves, so its useful to know some of key components involved

http://www.elementsofcinema.com/directing/mise-en-scene.html

The Lady is a Tramp

Okay for the song and dance component of module I've chosen the Lady gaga and Tony Bennett duet "Lady is a tramp". The song is a jazz piece and has the same tempo as the 1950's Frank Sinatra style music however I already used a similar theme for the lync sync component of the module, so this time I've taken a different approach to the brief. I'd been watching lots of television lately (too much in my opinion) and noticed the amount of reality shows we have such as American Idol X factor Britain got Talent. So as a devepling idea I've created the character "the tramp" auditioning as a jazz duet.




So here we have two young aspiring  traditional jazz singers, A male character, smart, looks the part but shy nervous very skinny and a female character who's alot louder, but looks like a tramp. I'm going to concentrate on the female character as her voice is louder in the soundclip.

Lip sync - mouth shapes

Lip syncing

I've sketched up my own lip sync chart using refernece to preston blair my own lip syncing chart I sketched

Phonemes 24 mouth shapes

6 basic mouth shapes narrow wide open closed

M B P V closed

T S S H N I K half open

Sketches of the mouth shapes for the lip sync task: