Specialist Study 2- Part 11 Animation and Final Thoughts

Below is the animation which I was able to complete within the few days I had left before my deadline. When I was starting to animate I had planned to animate half of it, but the fact that I wanted to produce something and hand something in for my deadline, I focused on the quality of it. In then end this animation lasts around 11 seconds, which is kind of weird now that I think about it, as it was something that I had completed in two days, whereas before when I was doing the 11 second competition, it took me forever. That's not to say that this animation below is perfect.

Death of Julius Caesar from Andy mo on Vimeo.

I will reveal the video in a few days after i handed my work in, so check back in the next following days.

I am happy with what I had accomplished in just the handful of days I had left, though I wish I could improve it especially the eye and tightening of the voice.

I have come to the conclusion however, that everyone has a different workflow and that there is no right or wrong way of approaching the animation. The only thing is that whether or not if you applied yourself to the work and push the movements and if you added the animation principles.

I will however just polish the other animation to the best of my ability but I shall not re-do from the beginning to the end. I just have to take in from what I learn and move on. So I hope you enjoyed reading the process of this work. I look forward to one day becoming an animator.

Specialist Study 2- Part 10 Painful Decision

So with the lighting and Ncloth all put together I then began polishing up my animation. With most of it done I had time to spare to render the work so far. The reason being was because Michael Morgan, an animator was going to give a talk to us. This would be a great chance to get feedback on my work.

Feedback time

As much as I got some constructive criticism back from Mike, I felt that the feedback he given me was true and that I had to think more about the way I animate. Some of the things he said was that a lot of the performance of my character was cliche and that it didn't give or have the principles that should've been there. 

My tutor however and my classmates so the much improvement in my work, but I felt that though they were being supportive and believed what they said, it didn't matter as much as I got feedback from an experienced animator perspective.

I then had to choose whether to continue with finishing up my animation and make the best I can or....to start again but do a smaller portion of the monologue. My teacher was quite persuasive and convinced me to do a small portion of it.

I then began re-acting the scene and took the advice Mike gave me.

Re-acting the scen

Different workflow 

More focused on the impulsive actions

I then remembered of a video on youtube which I had watched a year ago or so and looked on how another animator worked on a project. This was really useful and I found this to be an eye opener, and told myself to try and use this.

So with Mike's feedback and watching the above video, I then began re- animating the animation

I have mixed feelings when I was animating again as it meant throwing away hours of work away, but when I strived on, I noticed a big difference to how the character moved and the quality of work I was making. 

Re-animating 

Specialist Study 2- Part 9 Lighting and Ncloth

With the animation close to be completed, I then needed help on lighting my scene. I then asked the lower years L5s to help me on this. I asked them to experiment as much as possible on the lighting and the colour of the background and to use three point lighting.

The results which they showed me was quite interesting and I really liked the fact that one of the L5s was focused on the variables of the lighting i.e making the light more softer and the background colours.

L5 - Tony's work

 The other L5s was then experimenting more on the colours of the lights where it was more experimental and went to cover a broad range. This was useful, as I was then able to see what worked or not.

L5 Brad's Work

After seeing the result of the lighting work which they produced, I was then keen on them lighting up the scene and I could then save it as the masterfile. We got some really good results and I was really happy with how it looked so far. The bonus was that the lighting below, had a very theatre vibe towards it therefore solving the colour scheme problem which I had been dreading to figure out from the previous weeks.

Final Light render

Now that I had animated more or less all of the character so far, I thought that it would be best to finally approach the Ncloth. I was in for a long painful process. The ncloth simply wouldn't work. I had to then figure out as to why it wasn't working, why that the previous month I had worked on the Ncloth it worked and that it wasn't working now. I then reviewed many of the tutorials again and looked through my notes again and again. 

It works!

I was more or less going to break down as to why it wasn't working. Never the less, I continued pushing myself forward and think of a solution to make the Ncloth work. I then finally had a breakthrough after the two days I was working on. This however meant that I had to reduce some of the timing of the animation which was kind of bad news, but it worked. 

Specialist Study 2- Part 8 Animating and Feedbacks

I then began animating the blocked pass for my animation. I would mainly be focusing on the big movements of the animation, but also the timing as this would be key to the whole performance.  I referred back to the illusion of life now and again but also acted out a lot of the movements and thought about as to how the body moves.

Animator's Survival Kit

 The below images are scenes from the blocked passes which I had worked on where I had then showed to my classmates and tutor.

Blocked out animation

When I showed my blocked out pass of my animation to my classmates and tutor, I was worried about it, as I wasn't sure about whether or not if my camera angles looked alright and that I would have to go back to the storyboard. Something which I was more or less tired of going back to. 

Fortunately, the camera angles were fine and this was more or less the go ahead for me to continue on animating my character. I would would focus and review a lot of the movements each time and made sure that the in-betweens looked correct, manually moving them and not let the computer to automatically do it for me, as I had mistakenly done so in the past animations which I had done. 

Splined Rendered

The above two images were more or less the splines rendered out of my animation. I then, asked my classmates again as well as my tutor on what the animation looked so far. This was where I was heavily critiqued, mainly due to the fact that my character had a slight camp/ feminine poses. At the time I thought that this was good as this showed the exaggeration movements. This kind of backfired as it was overdone. 

I was flicking through the illusion of life when I came across this page, which showed Micky mouse praying to god. This was something which animation characters used to do back in the days. I then thought that I could use this similar technique later on. 

The Illusion of Life

 From the feedback of the splined out animation, I then watched a few clips of Spartacus the Tv series. I reviewed the way the main character acted and found it quite restrictive but also seemed to move only when necessary.

Spartacus Tv Series

Acted it out the more masculine poses and reviewed as to where I went wrong and re-animated the scene.

Acted it out

Below is the result of the research and live reference which I had shot.

Applied the more masculine poses

Specialist Study 2- Part 7 Re-acting and further research

So with the Ncloth sorted out, I then began re-acting the new audio which I was told to animate instead. Only this time, I would be acting out with the idea of picking up a cloth in the scene.

I didn't focus on shooting multiple angles this time, as I just wanted to get the performance right and from there I would figure out the strongest key poses and I would then think of an appropriate camera angle.

I had tried acting a couple of times before and though sometimes I had spoke the dialogue, I was told to instead mime the actions as some of the movements wasn't well translated and all over the place. 

During filming and finding the strongest poses for my character animation, I had recently been watching a couple of films every week and some were good some wasn't up to scratch. But the main thing was the fact that I was able to figure out some of the camera angles which I wanted for my animation. 

I kind of loved this film " Dark skies" to be honest, I know that it wasn't the greatest film out there, but it was very entertaining. Particularly with this type of film, where it's kind of a horror, thriller genre the camera really holds onto the character for a few more seconds so that we as an audience can feel the tension of the shots.

Dark Skies

 Side effects wasn't the best film I had seen, even though the reviews had been praising it quite a lot. I think the reason why it wasn't such a great film was the fact that I had watched a few Tv series that had a similar storyline to it and I just felt that the film didn't bring anything original.

The only good bit was when the film was focused on the character below where it had certain camera angles which made it feel as this character wasn't in the right mind.

Side Effects

 A film which I had finally crossed off for my films to see "Memento". Great film and I really felt that the camera angles which they used was perfectly executed throughout the film.

Memento

Editing Video Logs (Vlogs)

As much as all of the films that I had watched I think the most helpful thing to me in figuring out the camera angles, was when I was shooting my video logs for the last few months of Uni. So, when I edit all of the videos together I have a sense or feel of how long I should focus on the shot, or whether or not if this is absolutely necessary, does it show the life of uni that I want or is it too much. Just the fact that this was a practical hands on approach really made me understand about camera angles even more. 

Specialist Study 2- Part 6 Ncloth

I had to open my mouth from when I was showing my animatic. My tutor then told me to animate something which I thought I could get away with and something that I never done so before. I was told to animate the cloth for the character for when he picks up the robe.

Ncloth, no?

This was something I had encountered before, but I had used another software at the time, when I was messing around with it last year. But, to animate a cloth with a character, that's another thing. I then was lucky enough to have been given a few Ncloth tutorials by my tutor. This helped a-lot and I was then able to learn in theory about how the Ncloth system works.

I then took everything which I had learnt from the ncloth tutorials and applied as much as I could to the scene of my character. The image below shows a block, which would act as a passive collider and that would allow the nlcoth to stay on it. The block would then be the child of the nurb curves of the wrist which would act as the parent. So in theory, wherever the n nurbs wrist move, the block will move with it, as so will the ncloth. Therefore the ncloth will be animated through the ndynamics.

Even though the ncloth hasn't fallen off yet, as the arm was going up and down, there was another problem. The block will be visible and will be shaped out from the ncloth, when really it should be a hand shape. I'm not that great at modelling so I then thought, why not make the whole body as a passive collider. My PC should be able to handle the calculations....

It did, but for some odd reason the ncloth would not fall down onto the rest of the body. 

Confused on what I was seeing on screen I then rotated the character to see whether or not if I would get the same results (problem), turns out it's still there. I then later figured out that the N Nurbs which controls the animation for the character, is to blame, as it's also turned into a passive collider. 

I then thought about deleting these N Nurbs controls, but I then later found out that this would cause the following image below to occur. 

I'll figure it out

So with many tests with the Ncloth, I had just decided for the meantime to use the block method for now and that I would figure something out on this problem.

Specialist Study 2- Part 5 Acting and Animatic Feedback

I then began acting out to the dialogue from which I had recorded from one of my friend. This was a very time consuming process as I had to think about the way the character performance will be captured but also conveyed to the kind of shots which I will choose later on.

Having something there was a good way for me to interact to the audio

I tried many different angles and kept giving the full performance out of the character as much as possible. The idea that this audio was almost 3 minutes is quite daunting and possibly the reason as to why I found a lot of trouble trying to find the appropriate camera angles. 

Acting it out over and over again

I felt that the above two images was when I more or less nailed the performance and the one which felt very natural. 

This took a while and I reviewed the videos which I had recorded myself acting out. I tried to get pause the video now and again to try and find the strongest key poses which would then be used for my animation. 

I then thought to myself that I should begin blocking out a few scenes from the live video reference which I had done so far. The reason being was that I felt that I wasn't making any progress with my work and that I had been working for too long on the camera angles when I should get the performance right. 

Really like this angle

I had about only got twenty seconds worth of blocked out poses and just rendered them out. The main thing was to get feedback from my tutor and class mates on the work so far, so that I knew whether or not if I was on the right track. 

I then was told that I should stop using the audio which I had recorded from my friend as the tone of the voice wasn't theatrical enough and therefore didn't feel as though the character was there. This is quite unfortunate as I had asked my friend to act out in that particular way. However, this meant that I would use the original audio from the monologue instead. This meant that my animation would be halved, good news for me

Specialist Study 2- Part 4 Further camera angles research

I haven't really kept up blogging here for a while now, as I had decided that it was a really big distraction with my work, plus I never really found the time. Anyway, I have some bad news in terms with this overall project and it was something of a big shock/ descision which I had to make. But, I'll explain all of that as I progress over the next few blogs.

So from the previous post, I was talking about the camera angles which I was looking at. I needed to see from film, and tv shows on how they manage to keep focus on the character but at he same time, continue to always move the story forward.

I again looked further into the camera angles such as the ones below.

This show above is from the Prometheus film, I guess much more of an extra trailer before the film had came out during the time. The camera angle here shows from a very low angle, which really shows that this character has power, knowledge and something to be revered. 

An eyelevel shot, which keeps the audience on a balanced view. 

This shot from the film "Matilda" has a very  high angle, which reflects from an adult view where it then shows how weak the girl looks, how vulnerable she really is due to her age. 

This particular shot is tilted giving a more intense shot towards the audience, something which feels surreal and out of this world. I won't be using this shot. 

The point of view shot above from the Kings Speech, gives the audience the chance to see from the person/ character perspective and we then get a slight of idea of how they feel. In this case, the character is overwhelmed with the task of talking to the people.