Concept Art - About shoes...and hats! As well as axes!!!

Hello!

I have been considering my footwear decision for my gang member, and my conclusion is...the shoes I had previously idealized do not fit him. I mean, after reading about fashion in the 1850's, I came to the conclusion that the type of shoes I had attributed where shoes that would fit a character from the noble social class.

For my working class "thug" I would some "Brogans", that even though they were much more "in fashion" during the civil war, they were previously whore by soldiers and workers,since they were sturdy and trustworthy for a man! They looked like something in these lines:

 

So that's it for shoes. Now about hats...I mean, I really do think that a hat does fit a gang member at the time. First it was very fashion to wear one, second most working class men whore it instead of helmets, since..well, since they really didn't had them. Plus, I love to see my character with it! This one, without the silk stripe, is THE one:

 

 And last, but not least, the last accessory is the axe. I decided to go for a more primitive weapon, since guns were something somewhat exclusive to gang leaders and law enforcement individuals. So this is the axe type, characteristic of the time:

 That's it for now. Be back soon.

Concept Art - References for the gang member

Good morning.

I have been gathering information and visual references for my gang member character concept and his accessories. I found out that, among other things, that shoe fashion in the 1850's was so weird. Men whore quite exquisit shoes as you can see from the following images (yes the first ones are men's shoes).

I decided to go for the following style, as they are more of a regular type of shoes, whore most definitly by the average men at the time:

As for the dressing style it would have to be something related to a normal working class men, simple dirty shirt and pants, with the latter having a red stripe on them. My character will also wear jockstraps, which is a common feature among men fashion at the time.

As fot the accessories I would go for the shoes, definitly either a knife or a sword, maybe even a gun, since the battle at the time had a lot of gun shots going on, but these were probably used by the Police members, however since in America law permited the use of guns among the common civilians and guns were as well distributed by the faction leaders to their supporters, so a gun can also be something a person involved in the conflict would have had. I could use one and it would fit the story. 

However, I am most inclined to not using a gun and instead give my character a weapon that would fit this scenario in a more accurate way: a brick rock, a sword or an axe. This is, in my opinion, a much more fit weapon choice for a common civilian at the time. 

These are the things that run through my mind when I try to visualize a person from 1850's, living in a big city, belonging to the working class. Another thing that is very common fashion among men of the time is mustaches. Maybe I will include one on mine.

There are a couple of things that I should mention. First, when I chose the story to use as a background to my character, I realised that a movie had been done about this specific historical moment in the American society. However, since I have never watched the movie, I do not have a visual image of the happenings, so I am not being influenced by someone else's perspective and ideas of how things should look like, otherwise I would not have chosen this piece of story.

Another thing is why is my character a men instead of a woman. This is simply due to the fact that at the time, women were very opressed, and they had a very specific role in the society, to take care of the house and have children. This is not my opinion of how things should be among men and women, but is just an historical social fact that I am trying to be accurate with. So that's why it will be a male character, since men where the ones taking part in these happenings, as well as in other roles of the society, such as politics, economics, etc.


Now that I have gathered some references it's time to draw and model everything.

I'll be back soon!

Concept Art - Brainstorming for the gang member

Good day!

In the following days I will be developing concept art of a character that fits into a specific story. This story is about a gang member idealized by me, but in relation to a text about a 1960's gang. After some research and a lot of reading about oldschool gangs, I found out that there are plenty of them to choose from, from the Indian mafia to the Japanese Yakuza...a miriad of options.

I have decided to go for a small story about a  predominat Irish gang from the 1850's in New York, more specifically in Manhattan, called "Dead Rabbits".

This gang had it's arch enemy, the "Roach Guards", and they were constantly fighting each other at the Five Points, Manhattan. Althought my story is not about these gang fights between them, it is important to refer it, since they had similiar symbols that identified and diferentiated their gangs: the "Roach Guards" used a blue stripe in their pants, while the "Dead Rabbits" whore a red stripe. There is another symbolic object that the "Dead Rabbits" whore during riots, which is an emblem of a dead rabbit impaled on a spike.

Later on, in 1857, confrontations took place in Manhattan streets between the "Dead Rabbits" and the "Bowery Boys", another Irish gang that tormented the streets at the time. This fight was about political and ideological confrontations, because the "Dead Rabbits" where suporters of the Democrats and their representant in New York, Mayor Fernando Wood, while the "Bowery Boys" supported the Republicans and opposed Wood.

My chosen story is about a small fight between these two gangs, in which the "Dead Rabbits" fought "Bowery Boys", that escalated into a city wide gang war, with several other parties involved, among them the weakened Municipal and Metropolitan Polices. This conflict is know as "Dead Rabbits Riot".

I am now going to develop ideas for a character that would belong to the "Dead Rabbits" and could have participated in this fight, by drawing a character concept, with three accessories referent to this character.

That's all folks! For now.

Concept Art - Posing to a text

 And here it is. My funky guy posed according to this story:

"Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted"

  Now, as you might have noticed, my character is not as feminine as it would be required for this. Nevertheless, he is posing for the story, bending down, while holding his little key to open the misterious door.

 I went and tried some new programs that I have never used before, in this case GIMP, Illustrator and Flash. I have to say that GIMP is a lot like Photoshop, and Illustrator has it's similarities with the former. Flash was something really new, but it was not so hard to get the hang of the basic functionalites. This is what I managed to animate in Flash:

First Style

Second Style

Third Style

Fun stuff to do! Now i'm gonna start on another character art project, this time more serious.

Smell ya later!

Concept Art - Doodely doodling in my sketch book

Good day!

The activity I am presenting is about sketching people around me, without much detail. Doodles! On my sketch book. Well, actually I own several of them since I was 15 years old, sketching has always been something I do on my free time once in while. 

These drawings are based on observation of people poses and not so much on detailed drawing. 

I just want to say a little something about one of the poses I drew that really made me sweat. Running pose! This is something really hard to draw, specially seen from the front. I even decided to make one specific doodle out of it, so that I could improve my first drawing. I think it looks fine, although the legs should be more curved to the inside, so that the weight feeling is more accented.

As part of this activity I was suposed to make a character concept out of the drawings I made. I made one funky "big" guy, unemployed dressing style, the kind of guy that might scratch his b#ls in public...i'm sure he could live in a trailer!

 

So with this done it's time to pose this fella acording to one of three stories that have been given to me to choose from, create three styles for him and animate them. Stay tuned for an update very soon!

Digital acting 1 - Good things and bad things.

Hi all.

I will be commenting on my own animation, covering the topics in pages 256 to 268 from the book "The Animator's Survival Kit". This is a critical post to me (yes, I do speak to myself sometimes).

In my animation, there are several aspects that are in accordance to the methodology explained in the book.

The feeling of weight is almost always present. The character’s body, specially his spine, is always arched according to whether he is pulling the rock upwards of when he is in the potential position to start pulling.

However, I believe that this could have been explored further, and that there are a few poses where this sense of weight gets a bit lost. This can be seen in the poses where he is already holding the rock in the air, and makes an effort to pull it even more upwards. I feel the sensation of weight is not entirely present. Here, maybe a faster pacing could be the key to make this section of the animation even better. 

Otherwise, and without any facial expressions, I believe that I was able to express the feelings of effort, weight and felt emotion on all of the other stages of the animation.

Well this is it for now; I will leave you with another preview of the final animation.

Digital acting 1 - Arguing with myself

After some lectures about character posing and flow lines, I can now take a look at my initial lift animation and understand what I did wrong and right. I will do a sort of self critic analisis of my work.

What I failed to take into account with my animation was fundamentaly related to the character flow, timming and also, to some extent, emotion expression. I know understand the importance of using my poses to emphasise the action, in this case, that my character is about to do. Making his body positions connect with the action is of vital importance.

The first thing I did wrong was the speed of the initial part. It looks like the character is moving in slow motion. This is wrong and after looking at myself in the mirror and acting as my character, I saw that I indeed move slow, but not so slow. There is always some life, some energy into the movement. And this initial pondering pose is not connected with the rest of the animation. It lacked energy, determination! He is pondering but he knows what the task is and how hard it will be, so this pose has to transmit that idea. His body needs to say " Uf, it's heavy but let's do this @*&#".

Now one thing that I belive I was able to pull out is the flow lines in some points of the animation.

For the pondering position, the curve that his body makes leaning forward makes one look at two key factors: his face, and the rock. The arms point to his face, and the body and legs to the rock. According to what I learned this is something that needs to happen to a character, so that the viewer is directed to what I want them to look at.

Another position that I want to point out is the moment when my character is about to go for the rock.The flow lines are supporting where to look at and they also emphasise the action, although I am still not sure whether I should try and transmit this emphasis with an even more curved pose.

Grabbing the rock. He is all over it! I thing this position really makes my point. The rock is the main view point and his body just points at it in different ways, his head, the arms and the legs, they all lead to the rock.

Now for the last part of the animation I think the flow lines work ok but, the movements of the spine should be more acentuated, specially in the part where he pulls the rock a second time, mid way in the lifting process. I used red lines to point out where should the curve of his body be. The blue line represents the arms curve, which is ok, but not the rest of the body does not flow it it.

Overall, I think I have used some strong poses acording to what I have now learned, but there is lack of flow in some of them. Would I be given the chance of re-doing the animation, I would most definelty have used some stronger ones. I would make use of all of the knowledge I have obtained and corrected certain poses. But one of the things I would have lost more time with would be in my sketching process and I would have given a different thought about the key poses and more atentition to the timming of the animation.

It would be simpler and more effective if I had worked more in my pre animation stage, and now I realise that the process of blocking the animation can be a time saver and makes your work easier, just because when you start animating you already have a lot more understanding of how it should look like.

That's all!

Digital acting 1 - "The Axe and the Wolf"

Recently I have been learning more and more about what key poses are, what makes them relevant in the animation process and why do they are key poses. By looking into a short gif image of a little wolf swinging an axe, I was asked to identify the key poses of this small animation.

In my understanding there are three key aspects that point out the sequence of the actions. When the wolf is swinging the axe as if he would be hitting a moving target, since he is facing left with the axe in the air, then turns right and swings the axe down and hits the ground, and then a more subblte one, when the wolf removes the axe from the ground and does a small movement as if he was loosening the axe from the ground to pull it up and have it ready to swing again.

I deconstructed the animation into frames so that I can better observe the key aspects of the movement:

 

For me these would be the key poses. For the swing movement there is one frame where the wolf is holding the axe over his head in the maximum streched position, his body following the movement flow. The next key frame is when the swing movement is done and the axe hits the ground. When the axe hits the ground there is a reaction to the impact and the wolf makes a sublte jump, to simulate the strength of the impact. Here I find two other key frames, the highest and the lowest point of the jump. After this, the wolf removes the axe from the ground but there is a frame that strengthens the idea of the weigth of the axe: a small up and down movement with his upper body emphasised by a full strech of both arms. The final key frames are when the wolf positions the axe above his head, followed by a change of direction and a jump.

I think the selection I made is correct because from these frames mentioned above I can see the extreme positions of the movement the wolf and the axe have. These frames allow me to dettermine the main movement aspects, aswell as the small emphasis movements that the wolf does to transmit the idea of weight of the axe.

The following frames are not in the correct logical order since the first frame is not the extreme point of the swing movement and it should start when the wolf is in the oposite direction to the swing movement. However, in relation to the gif image they are exactly correct, because the Gif starts in a swing frame.

Digital acting 1 - My animation method

Hello!

Today I am going to present my animation method, by animating a rig lifting a very heavy object, in this case a huge rock. 

I decided to have my character look at the rock, wonder about it a little while, to give the idea of thinking about how will he do this task. He will then give it a try in a wrong position to lift something this heavy, and he will fail. Realizing that he was doing it wrong, he will position hilmself correctly to pick up the rock and successfully lift the rock.

Small story, and in my opinion, a good way to tell the potential audience what exactly is going on and why it is happening like it is, and what kind of feelings does the character have without having facial expressions.

Step 1 - There is just no better way to start animating than to make some sketches of the key poses. By doing this I am saving time, aswell as it allows for better and faster visualization and understanding of the essential key poses of the animation. I allways try to draw the character in the poses I imagine him doing  for the objective on the animation. For this particular animation I made a few drawings of all of the poses i belive are essential to start with, as you can see bellow.

 

The important key poses, in my opinion, are when he looks at the rock in antecipation, when he bends down to try and pick it up for the first time, when he tries again in a different position, adjusting his body to better grab the rock and when he is in the highest point of the lifting process.

This time i also used one doll that I found at a friends place, with which I played for a while just to observe and manipulate the basic movements of the body. It doesn't have that much flexibility but it helps for a better understanding of the possible movements when I am animating. Even if it's not the best rig ever, its allways a good start to inspire myself for the drawing process.

 

Step 2 - With the poses in mind I start animating. I used "Max Rig" (from Peter Starostin), because it is very similar to "Finn Rig" (from Sebastian Antonsen), which i have used before, making it very intuitive to use. 

When I move from drawing to animating, I allways preffer to start by doing key poses. I like to start animating in "pose-to-pose" because it is less complicated and gives me more freedom to add "in-betweens" later on after deciding the timming between the key poses. With this in mind, I reduced the number of key steps to 6, and made 6 different key poses, for the process of looking at the rock, wondering how to lift and actually giving it a try. This is the way I inserted an emotional side to the animation.

Step 3 - After posing the rig, I adjusted the keys and gave them some timming, saw how many "in-betweens" I would need to add to create a fluid animation, with the movements being either fast or slow acording to what I needed to achive. 

I would also like to add that after timming the animation and adding "in-betweens", I open up Curve Editor and eliminate unnecessary keys that Max creates, and I also adjust some curves that might need tunning to make some movements more smooth. I do this for different sections of the animation. One also has to be carefull when editing certain curves, because if you try to make them all smooth you can erase certain irregularities that make the animation look "correct".

Before:

                                                                                     

After:     

 

  Step 4 - After doing the above mentioned steps, I started mixing my animation method, using both "pose-to-pose" and "straight-ahead". I like doing this, because at this point the action starts to be a bit faster and the character movements are also related to the rock weight, so it allows me to create a more improvised animation based on the reactions I observe. 

I would like to point out some important factors that I took into account when doing this animation. The fact that I am trying to transmit the sensation of the rock being very heavy, made me pose the character with specific body positions. When trying to lift something this heavy, there are five body parts that achieve certain positions. 

One of tem is the spine, which has two different shapes, it gets curved like an arch, one poitning inwards when the body prepars to pull the rock and another one pointing outwards, when it actually pulls the rock. Another one is the head and the neck which both accompany the body movement by either being poiting downwards, when the character is starting to lift, and by pointing upwards, when the character body is doing the necessary strenght to pull up the rock.

Also the legs play a vital role. They have to bend and have the knees pointing outwards, allowing for the rock to fit between them, and they are also the ones that transmit the pushing upwards feeling that the animation has to have.

And finaly the arms. They bend outwards when picking up the rock and when pulling they strech. In this section of the animation i added a little bit of extra strech to exaggerate the motion and make it more convincing.

At this point the animation comes to a stage where the character successfully lifts the rock,  although with a lot of effort. I made him change his initial wrong aproaching posisition to a correct one, so that with this action he really supports the idea of the rock being very heavy. 

To finalize the animation, and show success on the lifting process, he lifts the rock to the highest possible point, showing a lot of effort doing so. There are also some key poses that transmit the effort feeling:

Notice his position is now different, more straight, with his spine curved inwards, and his head looking up.

When he reaches the maximum point of the lift, he puts his head forward again.

And this is a small preview of how the animation looks like:

In conclusion, I am satisfied with the way it the animation looks like, but I know it is not good yet. I will now learn more on how to make it better.

Thanks for reading!