2D Elephant Animation - All prep. work and final outcome

To see my final animation scroll down to the bottom of this blog post.
What follows is the process I went through to get there..

This exercise was to animate a change in emotion to practise our
performance in animation skills. The character would need to have a
scene objective and something would need to happen to obstruct/change
this objective; Leading to a change of emotion in the character.

Over the last couple of weeks I have spent a lot of time on this..
The idea has come directly from experience when I saw a funny situation
whilst working at the Elephant Nature Reserve, Chaing Mai in Thailand
in 2006.

Here is a photo from the actual event that happened. At the time it was
pretty funny..



When I got back from Thailand I made this rough comic documenting the
incident which I have somehow managed to keep up until now.



I started the project by drawing elephants..


I made a very rough scene plan of what would happen:



I used a lot of reference from my trip and sketched many elephants getting used to their shape and form.







Here I looked in The Animation Survival Kit by Richard Williams and took
some essential notes and drawings from the page about animating animals.



I was very pleased (and surprised) that Muybridge had taken 24 frames of an elephant walking! Thanks Muybridge you're a legend!



Here are 12 frames I drew from Muybridges work.



Here is a reference video I made which would dictate the main actions of
what was going to happen. It was pretty funny acting this one out especially
for Marcel who played the essential role of elephant.



From this I was able to put together a really good scene plan for the animation that shows all the main key frames and timing. I also took note of what the characters would be thinking.

An important part of this assignment was to make their thoughts obvious
through their body language and performance. This is because their thoughts dictate their actions. Next to the elephant I wrote down key notes for its movements pre-empting what would happen and describing the
actions/reactions it would take. This page was absoultly essential
when it came down to making the animation.



This shows the shapes that would form my main character..



Here is the first drawing in the animation. I then drew out all the key
frames on my lightbox working directly from my scene plan using the
volumes of the girl instead of the man.



Ultimately I had this in mind as a final look but unfortuantly I didn't get
enough time to make it all look like this:



When it came to animating the elephant, it was quite straightforward and fun using all the basic shapes as seen in my first drawing (2 images up.) The elephant run required a bit of thought and so I did these rough thumbnails taking the main key poses an elephant walking.



So after a fair bit of work here is my first rough animation. It was put
together in time for feedback on Thursday so has quite a handmade quality
to it. At this stage the movement of the elephant was very basic.



On thursday I showed this to the class and got a fairly positive response
and some constructive feedback. I then spent many hours working on a more complete version.

I added a few more important drawings to get more life into the elephant. Keeping feedback from Derek in mind - I spent a lot of time re-working the timing so that the reactions play off eachother ( the girl reacts to the elephant and vice versa - not both performing actions at the same time.) Derek also mentioned I could play with the volumes a bit more - it doesn't have to be so rigid. I will keep this in mind for future projects as I did not have the time to do it with this one.

I also got feedback from my girlfriend who mentioned that when the girl
does her chin wag she is facing upwards when she should be looking at the
elephant, she also mentioned how the elephants head should move - perhaps when it starts to get agitated. So I made these changes too.

I traced over all the drawings and filled them with colour. The final touch was
adding the grass texture which I have to say looks quite nice!

So without further ado here is my final animation:



Of course it is not completly complete. If I had more time I would add all
the inbetweens and make them look like proper characters. The girl would
have clothes etc. With the 11 second club looming up I must call it a day
on this project and start thinking about the next. Bring it on!

Technical note for future reference: I worked at 250 % in Flash with brush size 1.0. and the second brush shape down with 40 on the smoothing.

cool light tracing animation

Just came across this little gem on youtube..



Amazing! love the look of it - the contrast of bright
colours against a dark background..

Experimental - light glass spin

Here is a random experiment I tried out, totally
unrelated to Uni work as we are animating origami
for our experimental project..



I'm liking the light effects.. theres good potential
with the simple combination of lights and glasses!
Plus it is very open for experimentation in after
effects which I have just started to get into.

During the process I learned how to batch resize
images using photoshop. I needed to change many
7 megapixel photos down to pal dv dimensions (788 by 576.)
Its a very easy process which saves lots of time:

In photoshop you just go File --> Scripts --> Image processor.
In the dialogue box you say what file containing all your
photos you want to change and create/pick a destination
file in which all the resized images will be exported to.
You type in whether you want JPEG, PSD or TIFF files and
what the new size will be then click the run button. Then
photoshop does it all for you! How handy is that!

3d Walk

For this I decided to go for a wealthy looking character with a happy confident stride. For reference I looked at a photo I took in Canary Wharf, London of some rich looking businessmen striding through a shopping mall. From these I made some thumbnail sketches.







Following these sketches I blocked in the key poses in Maya. I went through them all several times adding further keyframes for arcs of movement.



It needs a good extra dose of life which would probably require me spending
more time in the graph editor injecting a bit more acceleration/decceleration
in places and altering the key frames of various body parts to make it a bit
more natural and flowing.

I think the key is to not land everything all on the same key frame as this looks too robotic/mechanical (I have been reading Keith Langos article - very informative and helpful.) I have tried to do this to some extent - the hands holding a couple of frames longer before swinging down, the head rotating in its own time. At the moment its a bit gloopy so more practice with the dopesheet and graph editor required...

Life drawing

Here is all the life drawing I produced today. I really enjoyed the quick poses and poses showing emotion.

Animation - picking up a heavy box

Heres my Animation of a character picking up a heavy box. I traced over the key poses of me picking up a heavy box then drew all the inbetween shots using a wacom tablet. This way I was able to keep some animation integrity without just imitating live action footage. This has been my first attempt at frame by frame animating in Flash and it has left me feeling content..

My first music video! + summer update..

In a nutshell this summer I spent 8 weeks travelling and working in Europe with my friend Carl. Our trip took us through France, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, Czech Republic and Germany..

This included staying 2 weeks on a pretty new agey eco farm in Croatia where amongst other things, I helped construct a drain pipe to carry rainwater into a container. This resulted in quite a dr seuss style creation. I was quite inspired by the guy who owned and ran the place he was an eccentric cheerful motivated guy to say the least. It was all about living in harmony with nature and being thankful for the planet. This led to me coming up with ideas for an Animation series based on the guy who
ran this place and led to the creation of leaf dude. There will be more of my sketches and ideas on this at a later date..

When I returned to the UK I had a week back in my home town - Brighton and Hove and managed to create a music video with my mate Nathan (he also created the sound track as music is his passion). Low quality as I used my digital camera but nevertheless very fun! We did it all in one evening/night. After Brighton I went to Bestival which was awesome - Jonsi of Sigur Ros had some great animation that really helped build a mind blowing atmosphere. The Flaming Lips also had really good visuals and animation accompanying their music.

Anyways without further ado here is the music vid:

Will And The People - Mr Sketchy - Official Music Video - Uncut

This is a very cool Music Video my friend Jack directed.. A nice idea
carried out effectively with really good bits of 2d animation. Its a cool
example of combining live action and Animation. The track is really good
as well. Jack graduated last year from an Animation degree at Southampton Uni.



Track: Mr Sketchy by Will and The People

Blake Evans

Just a blog post to say that we had a lecture by Blake Evans. I found some of his work to be quite inspiring and I liked the way he combined 2d, 3d, live action and pixellation. Amongst his work my favourite things were the music video for flutter by bonobo and his e4 stings. These contain inventive use of 3d and a creative and illustrative drawing style with Flash.

He seemed fairly laid back and puts down a lot of his professional success to having a bit of luck - knowing the right people etc.. His work is impressive and I liked his creative 2d style. He mainly uses Flash, After Effects and Maya.

He currently works with a couple of other guys who cover more of the business side of things -

dealing with clients etc.. and are also knowledgeable with Maya. Check out their website for their professional work... (inc. Bonobo music video)

This myspace page has many of his own videos that cannot be found on the above link 

(inc. e4 stings.)

Paper plane flight animation

I had this idea (while I was bored) of a piece of paper turning itself into a paper plane and flying off... Then over the next 2 days made it happen!

In the process I developed my understanding of using photoshop, flash and premiere and compositing animation with live action. I mainly worked at just getting the plane flying along although I did also use stop motion photography to make the paper turn itself into a plane but havn't included this in the animation.

Here is several hours of work (and me risking my life running down stairs holding a camera) all for your enjoyment...

The Catsters Paradise Design Bible complete extravaganza!

Presenting.....

The complete design bible for the Animal Firm project. This was really fun at times. In particular I enjoyed coming up with the characters, writing about them and designing the family trees of how they are connected..

I learned about how important characters are when it comes to creating a show or film. Once you have a good idea of the characters the next step of developing a narrative/story becomes much easier.. In the development stage some characters looked really human just with animal heads (this was pointed out to me by my girlfriend Nina.) I took inspiration from Puss In Boots in Shrek for the character of Jazz Jules.

I did not have much spare much time for creating the animal world in which they lived and could only fit in a few single panels of situations. I think if I had another week I would have been able to come up with more situations, gags and better ideas for the world in which they inhabit. One idea I had was to base a night club underneath a pier but didn't have time to do it..

Beijing Olympics Monkey Animation 2008..

I've always loved this. Everything about it is amazing. The character designs, concept, animation, music and background art.

I would really like to learn the method they used for making it. I'm guessing the background has been done in 3d with painted textures. The animation looks 2D yet they move quite nicely in a 3d space so maybe they're actually done in 3d but made to look more

cartoony then a typical Maya character.. Maybe the characters are a mixture of 2d and 3d...if anyone has a better idea of the production process behind this please let me know !

Parkour Animation

This is really cool.. Quite original, fun to watch, clever and drawn very well !

Parkour Motion Reel from Saggy Armpit on Vimeo

Group project - Final Animation + evaluation

After much effort from all, we have finished our final animation. I have spent the whole day compositing and editing it on Premiere. This involved cutting down the scenes accordingly and making sure the whole thing flows as smoothly as possible. I have also been adjusting the sound levels and checking that voices can be heard over the music. It has been a bit of a mission and I must have seen the video a million times by now! Still, it was nice putting it all together and I picked up new skills with premiere so all is good.. It feels great to have it completed. I am a happy man and whilst incredibly tired and mentally exhausted I will make sure I celebrate later....bring on the drinks and music......woooooooooooooo !!! :-)

For anyone who is not familiar with what we had to produce - the brief was to produce an animation to the script : what, what, what, what and what !

Enjoy....

The scenes I animated were the Bouncer checking Daves I.D. scene and all of the Hospital scene..

I did the following jobs: Directing, co-producing, character designing Dave and preparing him for animation, animating, voice of Henson, helping to write the script, doing the storyboard with Sam and producing the layouts which Patrick has taken and rendered in a funky artistic style..

I have also created the sound track for the first section of animation and done the final editing and compositing. I am pretty pleased with how its all gone, I think (despite some moments of bickering) we have worked very well together and kept up the momentum and group spirit!..

My main role was being director which involved approving other peoples work, working out our methodological approach to animation and checking that it maintains a consistantly high standard. Checking that my team mates know what to do and how to do it.

I also unintentionally took on role of co-producer when I found myself telling people to come in, keeping on top of everyones work, making sure they were kept busy and that we were heading towards our target. .

I now have a clearer idea of what the different roles involve. Theres nothing quite like first hand experience when it comes to learning. I would be happy to work with the same people again in future projects... Thanks Sam, Patrick and Ryan - good team effort guys :-)

Animal Firm development work

The brief in a nutshell is to produce development work for an animated series featuring an animal criminal gang. We have to hand in a 'design bible' before the 8th of June which will consist of concept,character and setting designs. So far I have found it to be an enjoyable project with a lot of creative freedom. The tough thing is keeping it going alongside the intensive group project.

Here is all the work I have done for the Animal Firm project so far...

Group project - mid-production update

Production is now well under way. I would say we have animated around a third of our final animation. Things are beginning to get exciting.. We have now entered the nightclub! Wooo!

The work I have been doing is mainly getting Dave 'rigged' in Illustrator and ready for animation in flash. I have also started making music for the Animation using Garageband.

As the director I usually find myself preoccupied a lot with telling the others what to do and keeping them busy, matching shots up to the original storyboard, helping out with flash, filling in the gaps of production and trying to keep things smooth.

In terms of group dynamics I think we are doing fairly well, I have learned there is no point getting stressed and nagging at people for not showing up as this just leads to pointless negativity! Instead its best to stay upbeat and optimistic. If someone doesn't come in you make do with what you got.

Here are my drawings of Dave that I have prepared in illustrator. I have handed these over to Ryan for animating.