11 second club - pre-production

The 11 second club is a monthly animation competition hosted here.

We have to make an 11 second piece of animation to a sound clip of some dialogue. To hear this sound clip check out the link above or see the video of me acting it out further down in this blog post. (I have entered the November 2010 competition.)

So far I have got to 'just before the animation' stage which I will start doing once I have finished blogging. I'm really looking forward to getting the ball rolling with this. I reckon it will be quite fun to do. Anyways, here is my progress so far showing how I came to my idea up until my final character designs and layouts as well as a funny clip of me acting it out.

Ideas development

Here I have documented how I got to my idea. Some brain storms to start off with (or mind mapping for the politically correct.)

Here is my first idea: A tramp who has stolen a fancy car which is obviously not his. The rich guy comes along and yells at him:

Here I have written out the dialogue along with accents. The red lines not only reflect the tonal range/intensity of the dialogue but will also dictate to some extent the movement of my characters.

My final idea. The chicken finds his egg has been stolen by the fox. The comedy comes from the fact that the chicken is physically way more inferior to the fox yet he will be the one who is persecuting the fox.

Here I wrote out brief instructions of how to act out the dialogue:

Some more initial character sketches:

A rough layout drawing. This is going to be pretty similar to my final layout.

Acting out the soundtrack

Hopefully this will be of much use when it comes to designing my key poses and getting the timing good.. As Derek has mentioned about using L/A reference I will try to intensify the key positions and not just imitate them.

Character Development

I got a bit of research first of real and cartoon chickens..

I used this reference to trace over and draw the volumes of both real and cartoon chickens. Apologies for the poor paper quality - in the future I anticipate not having tea sitting next to my work.

This sheet shows physical characteristics that cartoon chickens share with real chickens as well as physical characteristics that are are not shared with real chickens. Doing this allowed me to figure out the best approach for designing my cartoon chicken.


The chicken with the star next to it is the one I have picked to use as my final character.

As you can see I have retained the real chicken elements of small eyes, small crown, a conical body and small legs. I have played around with the wing and beak sizes. I like the tiny head because it emphasizes the comic nature that he is the persecutor throwing accusations at a fox. Subverting expectations.

I then applied this whole process to the fox:







I got my final design for the fox pretty quickly. When designing both my characters I looked back at my initial sketches (shown higher up on this blog post) so I could keep something of the initial mood I created in the characters.



Final Character Turnarounds and Scene Plan

So here I have got the volumes of the chicken in 4 key turnaround sketches. This will definetly come in useful when animating.

Hopefully I will have the animation completed in this look:

The fox gets the same treatment.

This will be my layout. If time allows then I may think about cuts/close ups etc. but for now I'm happy with this.

I actually spent quite a while drawing this second pose - trying to get the weight balance to look right. In doing so came up with a good working methodology for doing the animation. I will make all the rough key poses in this style, with the red, green and blue lines. It will be much simpler and quicker to do it this way rather then drawing all the volumes for legs, arms and neck. Then following this I should be able to layer on top the final character in a 2nd pass.

Onwards with the animation :)

Experimental - Smarties tube

Inspiration struck me this morning looking at a smarties tube..

My idea is we could have the smarties tube rolling along the floor like a bit of rubbish. When it stops we see it raise up with legs that grow out of it (A bit of photoshopping a single image to make several and sequencing them.) Then we see the tube move along a bit like a caterpillar. We could even give it eyes..

Here is the start of a constructed smarties tube, with just the one leg:



Materials needed will be some red wire or wire and red paint - the legs will need to stand out. Drawing pins to make the initial holes to poke the wire legs through. Pliers, scissors, blue tack, see through tape, gaffa tape - to secure the legs inside and double sided tape to close up the smarties tube again.

I did an experiment on flash to see the different positions needed:



Ok - so not mega realistic but not bad for 4 simple poses. Here is a breakdown of the 4 different poses + the starting pose:



So what I would like to do is make 5 different smarties tube creatures with legs all in the different positions, then stop motion them either on a green surface to allow for it to go on any backdrop or somewhere for real. I guess the other option is just to make one smarties creature with strong and flexible legs but this may be harder to pull off and more fiddly...time will tell.

Now I must go and buy lots of smarties :)

Experimental - Frog videos..

Here are our attempts at animating an Origami Frog. I'm fairly happy with it. Theres a couple of frames on the second landing that could be deleted - at the moment it looks like it loses its balance a bit on this part. I'm liking the way it looks like a bit of rubbish rolling into the shot and comes out a frog!



Here, Ryan has composited it on a video of grass..

Comp 1 from Ryan Mace on Vimeo.

I think it would be a good idea to take another video of grass to put behind it and check to mirror the angle and panning of the camera we used on the frog. Maybe if we paint in some shadows as well, this way it should look more effective.

Experimental progress..

Since the last post on our experimental project we have stop motioned an origami frog.

Unfortuantly I have had my hands full as I am having a go at the Animated Exeter Trailer. I have not got round to compositing it and placing it on a live action / alternative background so nothing to show of that yet.

Ideas have cropped into my head about what to do next.. especially whilst sitting on the toilet looking at a pile of toilet rolls! I thought it would be cool to make the toilet rolls form into a loch ness monster style creature and then we could make it look like the creature goes into the toilet and then comes out of the sand at the beach. Just an idea..

The useful thing with that idea is that I did a similar experiment for fun with my mate Carl several months ago using a clay loch ness monster :



Luckily I kept the diagram I made at the time. This could be very handy:



So perhaps construct a Loch Ness style monster from toilet rolls or maybe one could be made from origami. We would have to make several of the same if we were to imitate the technique I used earlier in the year - as you can see we did it using 3 seperate bits of clay to show the 3 humps. There were also several variations for each hump (except the middle one which tended to stay the same.)

Experimental - Animating Origami

Here is our latest progress on Dereks experimental assignment..

We begun by making some origami. Here I subverted expectations in subtle ways
(giving the bird a tiger look!)- I think its fun to alter what is normally expected of things. In an earlier blog post I commented on the inventive style of animation in The Life Aquatic ie. the rainbow seahorse. I have been quite inspired by this idea.





Here we finally got round to starting some Animation. Early days at the moment.
Me and Ryan are quite happy with this..



I think it carrys a lot of possibilities. I like the idea of having live action footage of panning over grass, then a ball rolls into the shot and turns into a frog and jumps away.

The soundtrack we are using is called Redencion. Its a great track for layering things up and our current thoughts are to start with one creature and gradually add one at a time until there is a whole collection of them all having a gathering at the park or the beach or somewhere.

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..