Serendipity (When Destiny has a Sense of Humor)

Well, Class 1 hast ended. Our final assignment was to upload a compilation of our assignments for school back-up purposes. So, here's everything - including a preliminary revision of the character walk. Turns out there was a LOT wrong with it!



I still have some adjustments to make, but it's gettin' there - slow but sure.

The local art store was having a storewide sale on everything this week, so I managed to pick up a copy of The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams (he was the director of animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit), which is oft referred to as the "other" animation Bible. (The first "bible" was The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston - two of Disney's Nine Old Men - which I've also been reading.) At least in my humble opinion, both of these books qualify as the "bible," with Illusion being the Old Testament (lots of interesting stories, but with a lot of fluff and tedium), and Survival Kit being the New Testament (solid application of specific information and how it all works.)

What's interesting, though, is in reading Survival Kit I've been finding all sorts of stuff that I've been slowly figuring out on my own. i.e. - remember the walk analysis from many weeks ago (see post "6 Weeks Later" under the heading "Class 104")? Well, turns out the observation of the wider steps in men than women is actually illustrated on pages 105-106 of The Animator's Survival Kit, specifically citing the "equipment" as the cause of the wider stance. HA! Just yet another of those serendipitous moments that makes this whole Animation thing seem like exactly what I should be doing!

So, we were advised to relax and take a much deserved week off from animation. But after a couple days not touching Maya, I said... Screw this! And spent the weekend finishing up an alternate Tailor animation that I had started several weeks ago, but never finished. I also decided to try it in a perspective view, so I could play with another angle of rotation on his tail. So...



Yup - snuck the pendulum in there, too. That little brown nub that he's looking at is supposed to be an acorn. My modeling skills in Maya aren't exactly that good yet, as you can tell. :-)

This week I'm also going to work on a new walk - not sure what it'll be yet, but I want to get as much practice under my belt as possible. Also this week, I went through my lecture notes from the quarter, highlighting important parts and such, and I said to myself, "Self.... There's a lot of pages here." So, out of curiosity, I counted them. On the twelve lectures from the twelve weeks of AM Class 1, I took 114 pages of notes. Yup, that's right - 114 pages. That's longer than the last screenplay I wrote! The notes from this first class filled a 3-subject notebook, cover-to-cover.

Needless to say, I bought more notebooks today. ;-)

A Case of the Sneaks

Those dark clouds gathering at the horizon must mean it's nearly the apocalypse. Either that, or we've gotten to the last Class 1 assignment.

Yup, kids, this is it. The last one. There's one more week of Class 1 left, but the final final assignment is just to upload a compilation progress reel of all we've done this class, which doesn't really count as a full-blown assignment. Sure, there'll be one last revision of what we did this week, but for all intents and purposes, this is the last:



At this point, I'm happy with it. I'm sure my mentor will find loads of problems, but regardless, I took care of just about every issue I could find. (Taking the night off Thursday just to work on it helped. If only I could do that every week!)

I also have a hopefully final revision to the Vanilla walk:


We also had one last pose for Stu. This one is "Balance." While most of my classmates had these beautiful, acrobatic stances, I, being completely unable to balance, came up with this stuff:
Think "Kama Sutra For Dummies." #'s 3&4 are what I call "If the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel got drunk on the communion wine." I picked #7 - I liked how goofy it looked. With Stu, it came out like this:
Kinda like an un-coordinated dance step.

Also, I've been working on another addition to my "People waiting at airports and doctor's offices" series, and I just finished it today. Here's Paranoid Schizophrenic Guy.
This guy was waiting to be analyzed by my Neurologist. (Though, I don't know why he would see a Neurologist instead of a Psychologist, but I digress...) Sure, he seems nice. But he was committed for two years in a mental institution. Think Jack Nicholson in "Cuckoo's Nest" without the cheery disposition. Always beware the quiet ones. ;-)

Well, that's it for me. It's off to bed. I must wake up early tonight for a kickass rock-n-roll show. The Handsome Furs are playing in LA tonight. If you don't know who they are (which you probably don't), allow me to introduce you. Be warned, for those with Popular Music / Clear Channel Radio tastes, it may be a bit of a challenge to listen to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiSuq0TVp7Q

Ode to Moonlighting

Well, kids - here we are. Only two more weeks left in Animation Mentor Class 1, which means if you thought the stuff done so far was hard, you ain't seen nothin' yet, baby! We're barely to the Sherpa camp on this Mount Everest climb toward Animation heaven. There are still plenty of sheer cliffs, glaciers with crevasses and puma's, and IMAX filmmakers to overcome. And let me tell ya, it's gonna be a freakin' BLAST!

This week, we embarked on a Character Walk. While I was certainly tempted to dig into the volumes of Monty Python, I decided to go with something a little more familiar. Being a child of the 80's, I grew up on such mainstays as MacGyver, The A-Team, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and Family Ties (I really desperately wanted to be Alex P. Keaton when I was five - before I realized he was a Republican. :-) But the really good shows were the ones that came on after 9:00pm, which was, unfortunately, my bedtime. However, on a fairly regular basis, the following would happen:

(Once again, this is just the Blocking pass this week.)



Yup. That's me, sneaking out of bed to watch Moonlighting. The same thing would happen when Night Court and Cagney and Lacey aired. And more often than not, I'd have to scurry away as quickly and as quietly as possible when a parent got up to get a drink of water or something, and got caught about once a month.

I'm not completely happy with the quick-tiptoe steps yet. I kinda want to make them a bit bouncier, but I might be able to fix that this week while we refine the assignments.

I also have a revision of last week's Vanilla walk:


The big problem with this one was actually that the body was completely off-center last week. So logically, he would've fallen backwards in real life. DOH! Needless to say, I'm watching out for that now.

Also, just when you thought you had enough of Tailor:



This one has some more changes to the tail, including a longer settling at the end. And there will be more, I assure you. I started working on a new shot with tailor a few weeks ago, just for fun, that I'll finish up during our weeklong break between the end of Class 1 and the start of Class 2 in October.

This week also featured a new pose for Stu. Our emotion: Exhaustion. Which, of course, we are all familiar with now! So, here's my Exhaustion sketches for the week:
As always, click for a larger view. As you can see, I've started attempting to draw more in perspective. I'm still having a tough time with it, but I'll keep practicing. As you can probably tell, even without the circle, #4 is my favorite. That kinda Pinocchio look intrigued me. So, that's what I used for Stu:
The lighting was a helluva lot creepier in an earlier version, but I thought that it kinda detracted.

I also did a revision to the Concern pose from last week:
There's nothing more shocking than a huge sore that moves from week-to-week. ;-)

So with that, I sleep for the next twelve hours. And then we start refining, and watch our world crumble before our eyes.

Swing Those Hips

Another week of joy and twitterpating at Animation Mentor. And our task this week? Clean up our Vanilla Walk and make it smooth and natural. One may think that, since this is animation in a computer, you just hit the "Smooth" button and everything works great, right? HA! Hahahahahaha! Oh, that's a good one!

The answer is a resounding HELL NO. Refining a walk is HARD. And I mean really freakin' HARD. And judging by interviews with working animators that we saw, it may well be the absolute most difficult thing in animation. Period. It took a couple days to refine my walk so that the legs and feet an hips were moving in a natural fashion, and then a couple more days just to fix the knees. That's right, kids. DAYS just on knees. You see, the legs in a CG character want to bend in a way that's easy for a computer to calculate, which, unfortunately, is NOT the way real knees work. So, no automatic motion curves will work. About half of the knee movement I had to animate by hand, frame-by-frame. What results is this:



And even this still has problems that I need to fix. Namely, too much stretchiness in the legs. Plus whatever else my mentor finds incorrect. I also wound up almost completely changing the forward motion of the legs a mere six hours before the assignment was due, thanks to the help of a fellow student pointing out a glaring error in the movement.

As well, I also made my (hopefully) Final Final revisions to the Tailor animation, this time adding some more overlapping action to the tail.



We also had another Stu pose this week - depicting "Concern." And it is certainly not easy to depict the emotion Concern in a character with no face. Here's my planning sketches (the circled one is the pose I picked to replicate in the computer. And as always, click for a larger view.):
#4 came straight out of bad childhood memories. And here's the resulting pose with our good friend Stu:
Yup, that's what I often wake up to. And judging by family history, I have a good 6-8 more years (at least) of that to look forward to.

RED Letter Day

In a non-animation-related bit of news, Friday marked a huge step forward in the realm of digital cinema. The first 25 RED One cameras were released to the public Friday. If you're not familiar with RED - this is a camera that will change everything, and its release marks the very death-knell of 35mm film.

The RED is capable of capturing digital video images at greater than 4k resolution (4520×2540 pixels, which is greater than the highest-resolution scans of 35mm film available.) It uses a digital sensor that has a light sensitivity and latitude range that equals or surpasses 35mm film, can record any frame rate from 1-100 frames per second, can be mounted with nearly any 35mm and 16mm lenses that currently exist, records these images to a revolutionary lossless video codec, records directly to hard drives or compact flash cards, yields a quality of image, straight out of the box, that many DP's have declared equals or exceeds the quality of film, and all this in a camera that costs less than a new car.

Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) shot a 12-minute WWI short film on prototype versions of the camera back in March, which looks absolutely incredible, and Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean's Eleven) is currently shooting his two Che Guevera films (starring Benicio Del Toro) back-to-back exclusively on RED cameras.

But hey, the proof is in the pudding. To view the coming onslaught of footage from these cameras, look no further than RED's official online forums at http://www.reduser.net/

The REDolution is here, my friends. And it's a beautiful time to be making movies. Incidentally, anybody have $17,500 I can borrow? ;-)