11second club - ooooo

11 seconds

Scene Layout Actor

So we have been given the task of competing in the 11 second club , the clip was quite challenging I found. It was even more challenging when I came to act it out, I think I'm ready for Hollywood now.....

As its for an animation I was trying to overact to get some exaggeration into it, I think I overdid it. It feels a little bit busy but I'm going to have 2 of the key poses in it that are worked towards and the rest are more subtle and acted out through the hands as they can be very expressive. It is quite an emotional (winey) clip. I'm really looking foward to competing hence doing this months clip. I'm going to work it on him being in the doctors so there will be 2 characters in the scene however the other will just be listening.


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Week 2

This weeks upload my aim was to get out the timing with key poses in so that I wouldn't have to spend ages moving frames about after as I have done in previous projects. The timing is working well but obviously there is no in between really to give out the acceleration and to stop him from looking robotic. This weeks aim is to get his body movement almost finalised so I can spend the final week on facial animation.

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Week 3

This week I started to pull the animation together a bit more, he still has an air of robotics about him. His hands are still not moving and need to be added in and the movement I am still unsure about. I wish I had actually had him moving instead of sitting down now or at least interacting with the camera a bit more.

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Week 4s Work - Video with twitch ( see if you can spot it )

So I've added all the other things in that I thought needed to be added, hands are more interactive but still not completely there. I also tried to add some more movement to the general body as he seemed so dead. The lip sync I had a lot of trouble with as I didn't make character sets and did things like keying the whole face, making it impossible to add facial animation after without loads of effort so I had to go through it way to many times. Though this project has taken me a long time I have really really learned to love character animation even if I'm still very average at it. I know next time though that I would be able to work at it a lot quicker and have the idea of working it through much better now.

This scene below has an added twitch as I was trying to add character to the guy, however by the time I decided to establish a character to the guy it was to late. In future I would try and establish it earlier instead of being undecided. This is the smoothest animation I have done and my timing has improved, however he still doesn't seem like a character. I was feeling quite good after I finished this until I looked at some of the 11 second club entries again and thought of what I should have done. The main thing is I have learnt so much from this, I have also found out more about Maya. I would really like to keep up the 11 second club maybe every 2 months as I have found out it really interests me....

The starting posistion really annoys me now!

Experimental Project

After listening to all the sound files for our Experimental project I have decided to go with " Mally". I figured that if I was going to be working with something for the best part of a month I would go with the one that I liked the most. I also find that it gets my thinking whenever I listen to it which I love. I have identified a few points from the piece to help me get started:

• Sounds organic - it flows
• Starts slow and speeds up
• Reminds me of woodlands, the sea crashing on the shore etc at the beginning - then makes me think of a city and someone stuck in the middle of the rush.

I want the animation to grow into the piece at the start, I had a quick attempt with the sand just to get the feel for the medium, I was striving for a siloutte effect something I will have to look into. I found this on youtube which was very interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MDc24K_guI&feature=PlayListp=E5BBC5DFF38DA5AC


Heres a quick attempt by myself:



Continuing with the experinental project I came across this really sweet animation produced by a random student on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2iDQtE0MFQ

She uses both sand and dirt as a medium to create an awesome silhouette effect. I also loved that it was using a lot of nature, I went outside to try this out myself and then I started thinking of just using loads of parts from the ground. This way I could incorporate some colour and make it more organic, as ever I'm not quite thinking of the animation but of the concept to what it would look like. I'm thinking now of creating a mini scene like a colourful woodlands or something maybe in a 3D environment from parts from the ground. I just played with some stuff I grabbed from outside to just get a feel for it, obviously its all a mess and there is no real sense but it was fun! With the soundtrack I'm going to want to build it up and it will be no were near the speed of this nor the intensity but I got some general ideas out..


Experimental continues....

Before I get on with my project I am going to spend some time looking and Andrew Goldsworthys work as a base for some inspiration. He has done the most amazing sculptures from objects from the outside, I love the colours and the concepts after Derek showing me his work. I really want to base the animation on some of his pieces but animated to the music, this is probably going to be really difficult though but I would love it if what I have in my head I can get out into an colorful organic animation that maintains the feel of the music.


12 Nov - Further Experimenting

Today I went out on the hunt in the park to find material to use for this project with Andy Goldsworthy in mind. I was on the look out for colours that caught my eye and a large variety so I could animate with them. I wanted to look at simulating some of the colour concepts that I had seen in Goldsworthys work and have a play at animating with them.

1. This is from Goldsworthy except his is lot more polished and smoother looking than mine, basically with this I want the circle in the middle to grow in time to the music and the whole thing to rotate and move. 4 - I was playing and as ever I wanted to do the wave breaking in a silhouette, if I combined this with 1 so that this was inside of it after it had moved.
2. I was looking for something similar to the above picture of one of the pieces I had looked at, I found these which I liked even more with the 3 changing colours, however the camera doesn't pick up the richness of them and makes everything seem really bright so I need to play with the camera settings/ lighting. However I love the negative space you can create with these and the flowing of the same colour from leaf to leaf. I want these to be included in my final experimental.
3. If I can find loads of different hues of the colours then I can have this flowing as an animation and then evolving into 1.
I want to make sure the entire thing links up and isn't just a cut to cut .

Here's another quick play, there is no timing its all very fast just to get all the ideas out.

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So I have 3 days to do this experimental, I thought I would just focus on the animation and nail it in this time. However I really didn't think enough. I went out and about this morning to find leaves etc with some colour variation, only to realise it is in fact winter. There is only variations on greens and browns. Brilliant. So its now time to make the best of a bad situation. I've mapped out what I want to occur in the animation to the music, hopefully the studio will be free enough this week to do it here. As ever great time planning....

3D Emotion Change

Before I went into the emotion change I tried acting it out, I'm supposed to be watching the football or something and suddenly they score, my acting however is awful. As shows:




I then went on to animate this trying to over exaggerate this and pretty much make it a lot better than my shocking attempt however key poses did help.


After finishing my 3D attempt at emotion change in Maya I feel like I have got worse. I have learnt a lot about Maya this week but the performance was really really average. I was gutted with the timing of the jump and the way it floated, I also really wanted to get more anticipation into the anxiety part more twitchy actions and the like. The part where I went wrong was getting the timing right, I'm not sure of the best way to efficiently change the timing of the animation to add gaps etc in 3D. The only way I get it to work is if I take all the parts separately and move them in the graph editor accordingly as otherwise something is always left behind even though I could swear they are all under one Character set. This is something I will have to learn for this next project which I am really looking forward to. Watching the pieces on the 11 second club are really inspiring if not daunting. Most of the winning pieces are from animators with years of experience but it's pretty sweet to have a set brief almost like it was set by a client for a film. I have read a few of the interviews from the winners and I'm going to go about this one starting of with a basic 2D block out animation to really get the idea of what I want from the character and then try and make it work in 3D fluidly.