Story changes

Firstly I should mention that I got into ExpoTees! I'm so excited to be able to take part in that and show my work to industry in May.

Secondly, yesterday I sent off my application for a 12-week summer animation internship at Pixar Animation Studios. I have no idea how likely it is that I will get in, especially given that I am in a different country, but I put my all into every part of the application. Regardless of what happens, it was a great learning experience as I had never written a cover letter before (I learned a lot from Google), and had never made a demo reel (or written a demo reel breakdown to go with it). I hope they will see my enthusiasm - fingers crossed!

I mentioned in my last post that I got some valuable feedback from Ed Hooks on the storyline of my animation. I have spent the two weeks since then implementing some ideas to improve it. It seemed a little scary to be changing aspects of the story so far into the project, but I felt like I couldn't just ignore the flaws now that I knew how I could (mostly) fix them! I quickly drew up some very rough animatic panels to see if the new scenes fit, and asked friends and family what they thought. Since they all thought it was much better - and so did I! - I decided to go ahead with the changes.

Previously the aim of the student character, Phoebe, had been hazy. While we could see she was supposed to be working to complete some work, it wasn't a very defined goal. She also didn't have much conflict - partly because of the vagueness of the goal. I have now made the central idea of the piece that she is trying to finish for a deadline that is at midnight that night, with shots of a clock throughout the day to emphasise that time is passing and tension is building. I have made her look less cheerful while she is working out her poses and walk cycles. The main change is that the scene of her waiting on her bed - relaxed - for a render has now been replaced with her waiting at her desk, incredibly tense and impatient, with the time ticking on towards midnight. I have also changed the ending; watch and see...

If you had seen the previous versions, I think you'll agree that this carries much more weight! It allows for more empathy from the audience, which is crucial.

I obviously still have a fair bit of work to do on the scenes that are still not in linear, and then I am going to have to prioritise which scenes I want to polish up as I probably won't have time to make every one perfect. With the time I have left I have decided that my product hand-in is going to be in playblast form, meaning I can do all the fancy rendering and compositing in May, after the group project is finished and before ExpoTees.

Caitlin :)

Breakdowns are (pretty much) complete

While I still have not tackled the shots involving lip sync (due to needing to splice my audio clips up into usable segments) and the housemate character, I think the bulk of the breakdowns are done. For some shots where the character, Phoebe, is not moving very much, this does not involve much or any change from the blocking stage. The walk is in progress at a linear stage at the moment (as blocking walks does not really work), but due to the nature of the shot a useful playblast is not yet available.

I am at a point now where I think things need to start moving from stepped animation to linear, but I know this is a difficult, time-consuming and often just depressing step - because it requires the animation to get worse before it gets better - so I want to review everything before I jump in. So, as I did when the blocking was done, I have compiled the latest versions of all my playblasts into one video file so that I can see more easily which shots are weaker/less developed.

As I have been working I have also been making notes of things I have figured out, remembered or read that I can include in my report - for example, only realising last week that I could switch Bonnie's arms to IK so her hands wouldn't slide around the desk when she moved... I have also been reading some of Keith Lango's animation tutorials to help me remember to keep an eye on how my arcs and poses are looking.

Caitlin :)

Today's progress - the happy celebration dance

I have largely been avoiding tackling the dance shot in my animation (the celebratory dance that comes late at night after successfully finishing an animation) since I first blocked it out because I always seemed to end up leaving it until too late in the day when I couldn't concentrate on something so complex. But today I seized the morning, and with good results! Her dance was looking too choreographed, so I went back to my original reference footage, in which I had been dancing spontaneously, for inspiration. Based on what I saw I edited the poses for Phoebe's first two dance moves. It completely changed it for the better, making her look a lot more relaxed and a fair bit less scary... I then went on to finish doing the breakdowns.

This is the result - before and after:

She suddenly looks so much more human in the latest version - I think because she looks less poised. I am now excited for how this shot will look when finished instead of dreading doing it. :D

I am otherwise powering diligently through the numerous shots, heading towards a stage when I can receive more detailed feedback and start fine-tuning. I plan to show my work to some of the speakers at Animex so I can get feedback from them, too.

Caitlin :)

Blocking is complete

The first of five stages of my animation is now complete (bar her dancing shot - I still need to add in a few groovy moves)! Hooray! I am now well underway with the second stage - breakdowns - which is a more exciting stage because the more keyframes there are the better it looks!

There are obviously some props missing, but never fear - I will remember to add them at least before the final render!

I'm really excited to be moving into the more detailed stages of animation; it becomes a lot more fun when you see the movement becoming more fluid and really coming to life. It always amazes me how much of a difference just a few more keyframes makes!

I have made a video using some shots that I have been adding breakdowns to, playing the initial blocked versions first, as an example of this:

I aim to have another video ready for the first half of next week that shows the full piece through again with updated playblasts.

Caitlin :)

More animation blocking

After a much-needed Christmas break at home I am now back at uni - and that means diving straight back into my work!

Just before Christmas I blocked out another five shots of The Life of a Student Animator. The first two are the 'monotonous clicking' shots that I use to break up the pacing of the piece - and to show how quiet an animator's daily life can be! - with the second one having Phoebe (the student character in my piece) more fidgety than the first as it's later on in the day. The next shot shows her eating her lunch/procrastinating. Finally the last two shots show her viewing her work and then celebrating about what she sees.

I'm really happy with how these shots are turning out so far and I look forward to seeing them smoothed out and completed! The only thing I'm not sure about at the moment is the expression she pulls when she's trying to chew her sandwich (currently invisible) faster; at the moment Phoebe looks worried, when really I think she would be more likely just to look annoyed or determined.

Something I like when blocking is that even in a relatively short space of time you can see a lot of progress and improvements in your work as you go, between playblasts. Something that I thought wasn't working to begin with was one of Phoebe's celebration poses. Below is the initial way I had posed her in an earlier playblast:

There was something about it that just wasn't strong enough, so I worked to give her a more defined line of action by pointing her head and right arm in the same direction to follow the curve of her body:

I love these two images as they show what a huge difference a small amount of work and thought will make to how believable and impacting a character piece is.

I have been checking boxes off my shotlist as I go, and I also added a column to keep track of which shots are in which Maya files, as some things are easier to keep in the same scene (such as the two 'monotonous clicking' shots).

(Click image to enlarge. You can see the actual spreadsheet here, which I will continue to update as I animate.)

Since there are now only 10 more weeks to work on this project (Animex week leaves very little time to work) I am today going to lay out a more detailed schedule for myself to make sure I'm completing as many shots a week as necessary to finish comfortably in time.

Caitlin :)

Animation has begun!

Production on The Life of a Student Animator has now officially begun! I'm a bit behind, but animation started yesterday. It took me some time to push myself to begin (starting is always the hardest part), but once I got into it I really enjoyed it. I blocked out three shots yesterday:

(She is laughing because she is playing with a character rig, deforming it.)

Of course, with a new stage of the project came a new organisational list to keep me on track! I took my old shotlist and added columns that would allow me to check off each stage of animation for each shot (since each shot goes through several passes of work before it is finished). The aim is to turn all those pale blue boxes red. Once that happens, I'm into post-production! (The grey boxes are gaps - because I want my shot numbers to stay the same - or stages that don't apply to some shots.)

(Click image to enlarge. You can see the actual spreadsheet here, which I will be updating continually as I animate.)

What I have realised, looking at this handy table, is that I have a lot of boxes to check and not much time to do so! But with the shots varying so greatly in length and complexity I will simply have to wait and see how I get on before I can further evaluate my workload and schedule. At least for now, step-blocking (putting in the main keyframes and setting the tangents in the graph editor to 'stepped') does not take very long, so I should be able to block out the majority of the film quite quickly.

Since starting animation I have learned what an interesting piece this is to work on, as it is a continuous process; as I consolidate my ideas, I begin animating them, and as I animate them I pay attention to myself as I do so and then put what I notice back into the animation. Even as I was animating my character, Phoebe, laughing at the deforming rig on her screen, I was doing exactly the same thing to her!

(Tee hee…)

So I'm going to continue to stay aware of the way I work so that my animation can be as believable as possible.

Caitlin :)