Animex week 2014

It's the end of the fifth and last day of the Animex festival here in Teesside, and it's been a jam-packed week! I'm so tired from all that learning!

For those who don't know, Animex is an annual event held at Teesside University, though it's open to everyone. It's centred around animation/film, games and comics, and you can buy a ticket to attend any or all of those event categories. Industry professionals from all over come in to do talks about films/games/comics they've been working on and things they have learned in the industry. There are also networking events where you can talk to the speakers and ask questions or get feedback.

I went to Animex Game, which covered Monday and Tuesday, Animex Talk (the animation and film part), which covered Thursday and Friday, and a masterclass by Ed Hooks for the whole of Wednesday on 'acting for animators'. So it has been pretty full-on for me, being in all day every day! I have come away feeling so inspired, though, and it was good (if not a bit scary in a way) to get away from my work for a week.

I also took advantage of, and thoroughly enjoyed, the two networking evenings, which I didn't do the last two years because I stood around being timid and question-less. My confidence has grown a lot since then, and there were questions I genuinely wanted answered, which helped a great deal:

• Austin Wintory, a brilliant games score composer, helped me with a method for coming up with appropriate music for my project. He said to find different pieces of music, of different moods, styles and speeds, and just shove them in with an edit of my film to see what effect they have - effectively a sound moodboard. Once I have figured out what styles fit where, I can then go about creating my own (original) music that matches that style or mood.
• Dan Lund of Walt Disney Animation Studios answered my question on how they keep everything so consistent across a film like Frozen when they have so many people working on it. They have a 'style guide', which was something I'd never heard of, which is a document of pictures and notes that show what characters move in certain ways, including which mouth shapes you should not use for specific characters, and what points in the film call for harsh shapes or soft shapes, etc.
• Ed Hooks, an acting teacher, I largely corresponded with over email. I sent him the latest cut of my animation for feedback on the flow and story and he gave me some good pointers, highlighting where there were discrepancies and what could be made much stronger and more compelling. I will write about these things as I come to address them, but first I have to plan and work out what I can change realistically in the time I have left.
• Liam Russell from Framestore described to me what kind of animation work there is in the visual effects industry, as I said I didn't necessarily want to limit myself to feature animation. As I expected, they mostly use creature work, and depending on the job there may be some character work involved (but not very likely). He said that really I just need to make a decision on where I want to be because that will affect what I produce to put on my showreel and the way I work.
• Shelley Page from DreamWorks and Victoria Long from Double Negative answered my question about how interested they were in 'creative CVs': it isn't worth spending time doing as the showreel should do the talking, and if anything is going to be done to one's CV it should definitely not be full of bright, painful colours or be white text on black so it won't scan properly!

I have a lot to mull over now, especially regarding where I can make my project miles better before I delve into the last stage of animation and commit completely to what I have.

Phew!

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 :)

Extreme timetabling!

Just a quick post to show the schedule I'm going to be following for the next five weeks. My production plan calls for the all animation to be completed by Animex (10th Feb) so that I have time before the deadline on the 21st March to do all the lighting, rendering, music production, foley, editing, and anything else that might need doing.

I've divided up my weeks into time for three things: this character animation project - The Life of a Student Animator; my group project with my team Inky Squid; and personal time/commitments. I have split each day into morning, afternoon, evening and night (i.e. late evening - I do plan on sleeping!) and assigned certain shot numbers and stages to each of those times of day. The idea is to complete at least those shots at those times - that way I know I'll finish in time - and if I run ahead then I can start on the next set of shots to reduce my workload later on. Sundays I have tried to leave free so that I can have at least some rest, haha, but otherwise they can be a day when any work that took longer than expected can be completed.

This is obviously quite full-on, but it isn't for long. I want to get this individual project out of the way as much as possible at this stage, because it means that the character animation I'm doing for the group project can then take up more time in February as the deadline for that is later.

So with that, I'd better start doing what this timetable tells me to!

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 :)