Animation Timeline on Dipidy

wow.

Damn, it's been almost 5 days... I have been doing stuff, but just wasn't satisfied enough with it to show anyone. But i know that incubating work like this for too long is bad. Pixar has made it a point for artists to routinely show their work in its incomplete form for early criticism, feedback, and a sense of progress. Pixar's President, Ed Catmul, says this way when you're done, you're done. It sounds obvious, but when you incubate an idea for 2 weeks to get it perfect enough to present, there's still going to be something wrong with it. So you're not really done.

Anyway, here's a rough animation of the second scene (the first one being the pan of the city for setting)



I did two more. Here's scene 3:




Here's 4. This one was a pain. This one was frustrating. I had to do it over more than once.



So, i went back to the Animator's Survival Kit and looked up a walk from behind. I traced over his "boring" normal walk and threw a rough version of my character on top of it. After some tinkering, this is the second version of that walk:



So, i should really post my storyboard reel up here... I'm really really unhappy with that: very rough, no sound, no dialogue, no real music... it's also 200mb and in need of compression.

Fresh Air

Andy refered Kaiba, a 12 piece anime by Masaaki Yuasa of MadHouse, to me last week.

It's minimalist style quickly breaks into an extraordinarily surreal world which truly transcends convention. I know, I know, convention can never really be transcended. And conformity does show here with its share of stereotypical anime characters and animation. But I've always secretly believed in the use of convention as a kind of lure that draws you close and sucks your brain dry! This anime uses the ground to jump off into space with. After finishing it, I realize that the simplicity of its style becomes enormously complex and moving with just a little bit of emotional investment. There is lots to talk about, but I specifically found the creative style inspiring. It blows my mind how they choose to capture situations like people dying or an explosions through style and animation.

I know I haven't really described anything, but I don't really want to. You've gotta discover the wealth for yourself.

Speech

Neva Again by Vordul Mega



This took about 5-7 hours and four attempts. I tried doing it straight ahead by imitating the mouth movements and drawing random mouth shapes, recording myself and copying it frame by frame, looking at The Animator's Survival Kit for reference (I also watched the Making of A Nightmare Before Christmas), and finally tried to spell out the words being said frame by frame.

Here's what I learned:

Dialogue for animation is dominated by vowels. If you wanted to simplify it you could use six or eight basic mouth shapes: (1)A, (2)E/S, (3)I, (4)O, (5)U/Sh, (6)M, (7)P/B (8)F (i did that on the fly so i might have missed lots), some in-between mouths, and, of course, some random ones for giggles.

Programs that automatically lip-sync animation like Flash and Toon Boom use a system like this where they try to detect these sounds and use one of these images for it. This, however, almost always looks horrible, unless there is a bit of randomness in there (or you can design your mouth system well). The article I mentioned says Hanna Barbara used a 6 mouth system, which makes a lot of sense when animating a hundred million cartoons, but it does dimish "belivability" if the voice makes the mouth look dubbed.

I always used some random mouths snear or grins, and noticed differences in accents. Some people have a "z" in their words: pops vs. momz, for instance, which makes z an exaggerated s.

Once you've got your mouths, you plan out your dialogue on a exposeure sheet (X-Sheet/Dope sheet), which lists frame by frame how many drawing you will need (up to 100 on a sheet). You will have to listen to your sounds and try to map out which frames they are being said on so you can position your mouths accordingly. Use either the words themselves broken up into syllabals, or the sounds: "popz" would be P-A-M/N-Z, a P mouth shape, an A (which is the key), a closed mouth (M) and a Z. If you wanted to skimp, you could get away with jsut doing a A cushioned by two M's on either side (wiggaddy-wack).

I also noticed a delay effect where the animation works better if you position your mouths a little bit ahead of the moment the vowel is sounded. There's also lots of anticipating and reaction going on there. This song is a perfect example becuase you anticipate keys with the beat. Every time the base hits, your brain makes that the key frame which hits and slowly fades as the next base hits. I almost want the animation to do this two-step thing, going back and forth in a cosine curve. In the Survival Guide, Williams talks about the masters having a built in timing in all their animations with the best example being Road Runner. Everything is beautifully timed meaning there is a frame by frame rhythm and pattern throughout the entire animation. Musicians pick this up and can either run with the built in tempo, or go against the tempo to mess with anticipating and reaction. They're swiss watches, man, or OSX's. Most people will never know how elegantly the code is written. Anyway, so just like every word has a emphasis, so does every sentence. Dialogue, then, has a pattern depending on who's saying it.

All and all, I have a a pet peeve about mouths cuz of anime vs. cartoons, where anime is infamous for skimping on mouth movements. I hate it. Plus, i like angry expressive characters.

Sketching in Class

I did these a week or so ago after reading parts of this online text on sketching for animators. You can find it on my space: Gesture Drawing For Animation by Walt Stanchfield (8.6 mb).

Math Class:

Management class:

Toon Boom Straight Ahead

I wanted to animate something so I did. I shouldn't have spend so much time on it but going all out on this one helps me visualize what is possible for other scenes. All the animation is by hand... by tablet, which is hard to use! I used myself for reference and mouthed out the words in slow motion. Anyway, I'm happy with it (sorta).




As you can see, I hide the amateur animation behind color and a moving camera. That's bad. If this were a class, i'd probably have to demonstrate a clean performance before I color and move it around. Here's a earlier version. I added a bunch of small things to the animation after this: hair, body, background... When i do this again, i'll have planned the scene out better and made sure my animation is solid before i color it

First Toon Boom tests

I'm trying out Toom Boom. The first one is a wrecking ball. I tried doing Andy's Her growing out of a puddle, but it becomes too complicated. So I did a simple pendulum swing instead, then did this wrecking ball.



The next one is more interesting. I made a loop of a bird flapping its wings. Then There's this Motion curve that makes it look like the bird is flying away by scaling it.

knew it

Background research

This is where my "Down" scene takes place: Public School # 6 in Jersey City.


My scene will actually be of a side view.


But i'll study these anyway.

Walk 04

Still learning how to walk. This is my fourth one. The book said to mess around with the breakdowns so I did, but it looks very strange. Then I decided to color it. I wanted to add a moving background, but it was hard (and my hand hurts).

Update [11/21/08]
Doesn't it look like he's walking like that because his feet are sticking to the floor?

Making of features on Youtube

Update [10-15-09]: The youtube account was suspended. =( Here's what I got around to watching

Inspiration

• Paprika
• Grave of the Fireflies
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame ✓
• Monster House ✓
• Antz
• The Jungle Book ✓
• Anastasia ✓
• Mulan ✓
• Sleeping Beauty ✓
• The Incredibles ✓(incredible)
• Lilo & Stich ✓(incredible)
• Hercules ✓
• Aladdin ✓(my brother has the DVD with footage)
• Peter Pan
• Pocahontas ✓ (I don't understand how they can do animation like this)
• Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron
• Chicken Little
• The Prince Of Egypt ✓
• The Road to El Dorado ✓
• Treasure Planet ✓
• Tarzan ✓
• Cinderella
• Sinbad
• Little Mermaid
  
• Nightmare Before Christmas ✓

Learning to Rotoscope

Rotoscoping images is easy but time-consuming. In the article I used to do this, an animater from A Scanner Darkly said he expects to take 5 hours on a complicated image.

Tutorial: mMm-MHmm

2cents:
Do a few (5 hour) test runs. Try to mimick the style of A Scanner Darkly. That should make you very irritated and more experienced, but will allow for your style to show through the medium. Get the techical stuff of learning out the way quickly so you can start doing your own thing.

Pigeons

My intro and outro frames have pigeons, so I'm practicing drawing them.







I'm learning rotoscoping also: pigeon in black and colored.

Update: Took Hux's advice and took away from the background near the pigeon's head.