Second Attempt at Calarts Open Show Animation

This is my second attempt at recreating and learning from the 2008 CalArts Open Show. His was done in After Effects (I couldnt recreate Shatter...) but I did this in Blender. The point is to learn animation in Blender.

I still need to put an ending on this and render a higher quality version. Then I have a small story idea with this circle as a main character.

Here is the original: link

Here is my first attempt: link

Fear and Faith

I never posted my short film from last semester. It's more like what I could do with the time I was given (and my skill level).

Animating the Calarts 2008 Open Show intro in Blender

We finally started animation but we're learning how to use Blender, not how to animate. It's a funny thing because when you think CG and CG animation, you think of Pixar. But those guys literally have 100s people working on one shot and several thousand controls on each character to make it look as believable as it does.

I've been re-watching all the Pixar films in chronological order as soon as I started this class. As we learned more about the CG world more and more of Toy Story 1 and 2 made sense. I started understanding how they did it. But that's where it stops.

I have no clue how they make Mr Incredible's eyebrows look so good, or how they simulated water in that shot where Reme tumbles down the sewers in Ratatouille. It appears there is tremendous amounts of technological rah rah in CG. It is not a child's play thing.

As far as my learning animation goes, I need to keep it simple just to get my hands dirty. The other day, I found this video for the 2008 Calarts Open Show. I thought stealing his idea would be the perfect assignment to get into animation in Blender without doing real character animation.

Here's my first shot (more like 5th.. let's just say it took me all day to get this far):

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some more tests

head moving down 

This is a test of Richard Williams' chapter on in-betweening. He was talking about the differences between straight in-betweening where a middle position is picked versus a more interesting in-between like having a person go to gasp slightly from a straight face into a frown rather than a straight into the frown from a straight face.  Ken Harris, one of the nine old men, would draw in-betweens that would favor one of the two extremes. In this case, my head tilts down, then forward (not the best animation, but...). Instead of moving from point A to B, the in-between gives what is normal a little more character. The idea is to use overlaps in the in-betweens. Have them work for the movement by directing the change in the drawing towards the breakdown positions. We all know we're going to get there, so we might as well throw old it back for as long as possible until we have to do it. Or we can so something else entirely before we get there. 

So this is the test with my character. First I decided on what I wanted my character to do: move his head down in a serious and heavy way. I decided to go with a 24 frame animation to make it easy on myself and picked 9 as the breakdown drawing. Then i did my charts, which you can see if you pause the video right at the beginning. The chart spans my 24 frames and shows the easing into and out of my breakdown position. Finally, I got to animating. I did a straight ahead from #1 - 9 easing into my breakpoint, another from #9-15 easing down towards my ending position, and another from #16-24 with even spacing. I worked on twos at first (every other drawing) and then went back to add in-betweens. I spend a lot of time afterwards cleaning up the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth (half of my Calc class, actually). I still need to do hair, and was thinking of adding frames at the end to make him move forward more.  

Scene 02 - second rough pass

This is my second attempt at scene 02. This scene has 3 layers: one is the background, then the background birds, then the bird animation.

Here's another iteration of this scene. I added a flickering for the background birds (which took longer to do than animating the entire scene), and anticipation in the beginning before the bird arrives. 

Let me know what you think and what I could change. 

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.

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.

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.

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?

Walk test 02

We went to the archie building today to look for the giant lightbox there. It reminded me of PageMaster with all the old scrolls of blueprints that and old books and boxes we had to move off of it. I drew more from The Animator's Survival Kit, and with its magical powers, here is the walk test i did with some cleanup and editing.


Here are some others:
Both of these animations use the same drawings but with different timings. The first one uses a sort of S curve with a quick bang, but a slower recoil. The second animation is evenly spaced at about 7/100 sec each on Fireworks.

Test animation

First test ever.