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!

Creative Animation Film Overview

Today I am presenting my personal opinions about seven short animation movies. Some are very recent and some are from animation pioneers.

 

Dots (1940)

Norman McLaren

I had never seen this movie before. After seeing it i felt dots. And some splashes here and there.

Then i went to find out how such good work had been done at that time. After reading about Norman's work, I can say he was trully an inovator for his time. He actually made the sounds in the movie by scratching the audio track. This is where, for me, he stands out. The apearence of electronic sounds defined as music date from early 20th century, and it became more popular due to technological progress during WWII. But conciliating animation with music was something new, and he excelled at it.

The way he relates the sound and the image with such harmony, is just amazing. At the time this movie was done the resources to do such a thing were very limited and he's work was based in experimentation. That makes him, along with various other artists, developer of a trend.

From my point of view, I cannot just determine were his work would belong to, or were I could expect to find this type of work. Probably on cinemas would be the place where the film fits the best, since at this time animation short films were a sensation. For me, besides being a genious inside the animation frame, he is a researcher, a developer and a true artist.

 

Fantasmagorie (1908)

Emile Cohl

An even earlier production that the previous one. This one is just brilliant. The story is somewhat random, but with a logical sequence of funny events, with each hapening relating to the previous.

I am also very impressed by the way he literaly interacts with his animation, transmiting a 3 dimensional feeling. To top this off he goes even further. 

When I saw the movie, I though he made this on a chalkboard, then I read about Emile just to find out this was done out of 700 drawings with minor variations in each, and all of them printed in negative, creating the illusion of a chalkboard. The only thing it comes to my mind is that this is "pre-historical" video effects.

"This was definelty a cinema hit", was my first thought. Backed up with knowledge of who Emile Cohl is, I now know that this man is the creator of the first fully animated movie ever!

Cafe Serre (2009)

Vincent E Sousa, Bertrand Avril, Yann de Préval, Denis Bouyer

A more recent movie, where graphics excell. But this movie has a lot more into it. In my opinion, one of the big inspiration themes for animation is humor. And this one is a very good example of it.

The plot is funny, the creator managed to maintain a defined style throughout the movie and the sound effects complement a very good short story. And the representation of the idea that people have about the american police and donnuts, with a sip of irony towards the thiefs luck and the police man inocence is really funny.

This movie could most definetly be televised, probably with youth as a main target group. It has a great moral message, told in a funny ans simple way, and this is the place where i can see the movie fulfil it's potential to a maximum.

Pocoyo (2007)

David Cantolla, Luis Gallego and Guillermo García Carsi

This is a great example of story telling through the animation of the characters. I love the "cartoonish" way the animator managed to transmit the feelings that the characters live throughout this little adventure, and the way he delivers the message to a very specific target group: children.

I had seen these series before, although not this specifical one, exactly in a situation where the target group was present, and i can only say that the impact it had was most definetly, or from what i interpret it being, the one intended by the creators of the series: to educate children in problem resolution in a benefitial way for them and their friends. I do not risk to say correct because it depends a lot on the culture of the target group.

There is no better place to show this one, other than a TV program vocationed to children of young age.

Ryan (2004)

Chris Landreth and Ryan Larkin

About this movie I have to start by saying that Crish had a very good story to tell. And he told it in the best possible way. A tribute documentary to one very impressive animator that marked an era, is, to say the very least, a very though chalenge.

Everything in this film, fits within the story. The style of the animation, the scenarios, lightning of the scenes, the way he mixes his animation with the old fotages, how he inserts all those people that have had influence in Ryan's life into animated characters with a hint of reality is amazing.

And the emotional part of the story is very well represented: there is a visual reference for every feeling that the characters have, on the moment they have it, and is so well complemented by the fluid animation of all the characters in the story. I can trully say, that details make all the difference in this story. 

And the biggest one here is that the image is a clear computer image, but he gives it a particularity: it has details as if they were painted by hand on the image, that I belive is a reference to the way Ryan created his animation.

Cyber Evolution (2007)

Zennor Alexander

Well, this one really makes up to it's tittle almost through it's whole story, however I don't know if at the end the idea of the story gets a bit lost. Apart from that, I think the movie is interesting, simple message, good looking animations and effects.

I feel that this short movie could be a trailer for something...maybe a computer game. Not because it's fantasy, but because of the feeling I got after watching it.

Toyota/ APT Prod. (2006)

Gimpville

A very nice comercial animation wise, with graphics in context with the message of the comercial. The illumination of the scene is also very nice, although i belive the shadows could have been a bit lighter. However, I find something very ironic, but bear in mind this is a personal opinion.

Talking about protecting the environment and showing a tree growing in the middle of the road, with cars passing by in the middle of a concrete city, is somehow very wrong. I think the tree could be replaced by some other animation, maybe some statistics passing by a comercial electronic banner or a TV, that could also transmit the idea of making an effort to care about the environment.

In conclusion, and although none of these movies relate directly to anything I have created,  I can identify myself and the style of things I do and intent to do in the future on a common element they all have: be able to produce something that achieves the best way possible the objective and theme of my stories and to be able to give it a personal touch, that little (sometimes huge) something every artist shares with others through his work.

Good day!

"My way here" - The beggining of a Reflective Journal.

Good day!

With the start of my second year at Noroff, in 3D Film Production, i face a new chalenge: start being more reflective and critic about the work i do. And one step towards that goal is to start a Reflective Journal. This is the beggining of my own.

My previous year in Noroff, in 3D Design and Animation, made me learn a lot about myself and the way i see 3D in general. I can say with most certainty that what i learned during that period made me realise that i wanted to choose a path that would lead me towards film production. Properly animating a character, creating a story plot, deciding the cenario and environment, all of this was a great learning experience which helped me a great deal on the decision to continue towards not only a more specific subject, but aswell as a complementary education on what i have learned so far.

One of my drawings.

I like to draw and paint. It has allways been a part of my free time ocupations, which doesn´t necessarilly means that i am good at it, but what i can say from experience is that the more you do it, the better you get at it. Nowadays it has become a secondary hobbie, one that relates mostly to my 3D productions. It is a very good sensation to be able to draw something and turn that drawing into something more real. This is the main influence for my work. I just love to create things, and nowadays i love it even more because being able to take a drawing and turning it into a 3D picture or for that matter animation movie is just amazing.

Marek Denko image.

To complement my taste for creation, i also love animation films. Among all i have watched i can refer to a couple of them that i think are really good: 9, Wall-E . But to be honest i am not influenced by any particular artist or company. I like to discover new artists all the time, because there are many different ones out there and all of them are relevant to the influences i have. One exemple of this is Marek Denko, which for me is a big artist in terms of illumination. I consider him very good at it and as many others is a small part of my influences, and one of those artists that i try to learn from. Heck i am even influenced by Risto Halme, which is a Environmental artist friend of mine and is not even that well know.

To conclude this idea, is difficult to acknowledge which or what artists or companies have an influence on your work. They may not even be related to what you do, but inspire you in different ways.

To produce most of my work i use 3D Studio Max, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Sony Vegas. I have tried different softwares, such as Mudbox, Maya among others.

With the start of my second year i want to learn how to relate 3D objects and film. I belive they complement each other very well and, in my way of seeing things, it opens up alot of new doors for one to experiment and grow as an artist.

I will definetly have a lot more to write about in the months to come, so keep an eye out!


Pedro Furet.