Rigging a puppet in AE + Moodboard

Rigging a puppet in After Effects

This character was provided to me by Lara Popovic from Creative Connection and she enquired as to how I would animate it. Using puppet pins was the thing that jumped to mind.

I used a couple of resources to learn and apply the process of rigging - a page from ae tuts+ which has a complete set of tutorials by a dude called Daniel Gies, and this great free plug-in - DUIK which creates Inverse Kinematic movement in just a few clicks once you have the pins set up.

Rigging a character with IK allows for its movement to be key framed by animating just a few controllers. It means that the knees and elbows bend automatically as a result of moving other parts of the body. Once rigged in this way, animating is a much simpler process then it otherwise would be.

Expressions utilised (mainly for my own reference) 

The expression used to connect puppet pins to their respective nulls:
 n=thisComp.layer("layer name"); nullpos=n.toComp(n.anchorPoint); fromComp(nullpos);

This makes it easier to control as nulls are directly accessible and also are not just limited to transformation - i.e. they can be rotated as well.

If using the rotation movement of one null to drive the Y transformation of another null (both attached to puppet pins); the following expression could be used in the affected nulls position:
PosX=transform.position[0]; PosY=transform.position[1]+thisComp.layer("layer name").transform.rotation;[PosX,PosY] 
I used this to make elements like the sides of the shirt move up as the legs are rotated.

Incidentally, I am keen to get my head around JavaScript - and I have started to go through this page found on Motion Script.com - written by Dan Ebberts - this is a fantastic resource for learning expressions and scripting.

Mood board

I created this mood board to serve as visual reference for the animation I'm currently working on with Creative Connection. It is themed on community activism. The images are from several sources - Banksy, Modern Toss, The Mighty Boosh and a book called Traveller Daze.



visual attributes -  earthy colours / graffity / stencils / DIY style (torn newspaper etc.) / simple + effective. 

CBT promo film complete!

It includes time lapses, a composited news room, a sound track and some nice motion graphics. The image below the embedded video provides some idea of the content.

Sketchbook work 2012/13

"The Incomplete Activist"

Alongside the work I'm doing at the RCA, I have also teamed up with the fantastic group of artists at Creative Connection. We will be creating a 3 minute animation - "The Incomplete Activist" - that reflects a thesis currently being written on the theme of incompleteness and contradictions found within community activism. It's an exciting and creative project to be a part of and I'm looking forward to seeing how we progress with it.

Here are a couple of animations that our client helped to create previously, themed around the concept of 'Church' and its current form in society:

Drawings + Love Soldiers update

Drawings

I got stuck into some drawing yesterday - really enjoyed getting into 'the zone' with it all..

Hands are a tricky thing as they are so versatile so I practiced sketching my own hand.

These sheets contain some drawings of my g/f Nina and some things I drew without looking at any reference including a small self portrait.

These sheets show my visual interpretation whilst listening to some podcasts at Radiolab - one on inheritance and another on speed. Both very interesting! Anyway, it's good practice for drawing quickly + aiming to get information across efficiently.

Inheritance

Speed

"Love Soldiers" update @ the RCA

Here's a pic of our studio with director Chloe in view.

"Love Soldiers" is slowly but surely coming together, and the way that we are working is fairly organic. Some shots are nearing completion whilst others are yet to be animated.

Recent tasks I've completed

- Inking over some animation of a face falling into pieces.
- Colouring a sequence in Photoshop (here the Photoshop actions have come in as a great time saver.)
- Utilising a turbulent displacement effect in After Effects to make it look like the clouds are warping/moving.
- Rotoscoping over printed live action shots of walk cycles.
- Compositing layers of animation together.
- Producing (creating a time schedule.)
- Scanning the inked animation.
- Updating the edit-in-progress.

I'm aiming to keep doing a couple of days a week here, though I try and do more if my schedule allows. It is a fun project to be working on and these are great people to be working with!

CBT promo complete + Luksus Ident for LS

I have now officially completed the Clear Blue Therapies promotional video! It feels like a good achievement, and I hope it does well on the Kickstarter page. It is not up there live yet, but I will be sure to post it when it is.

Here is an ident I coloured/textured and animated (The drawings were provided from Chloe.) This is the fictional film company ident that precedes the animated film "Love Soldiers" that we are working on at the RCA. Chloe was after an 80s style (I think the light rays could be a bit post-80s but it is quite a nice touch!) This took around half a day. I got quite into the timing of it - as soon as one effect stops another one starts.

Kickstarter CBT promo video update & making of

I have almost finished this project now! It has been a bit of an epic and has drawn on my skills as a motion graphics designer, compositor, camera man, editor, 3D artist, time lapse recorder and musician! If anyone has any ideas of one word that I could use to fit these different roles, I would appreciate it! Audio-visual artist could be a good umbrella term.

Just a quick reminder - this work is for a promotional video made to represent Clear Blue Therapies on Kickstarter. Clear Blue Therapies is a therapy business founded by Saskia Griffiths-Moore. The video utilises motion graphics and draws on a news broadcaster theme to promote interest and help delineate Saskia's four phase plan.

Here are a few screenshots showing different parts of scene 2 on which I have created some nice bits of animation / motion graphics. The actual film itself will be out on Kickstarter soon - I will keep you posted. I just have a few final bits and pieces to sort out following some final feedback from Saskia.

I enjoyed getting the pencil out and drawing this piece to represent a conference.



Following this, I worked over it in Illustrator, then animated it in After Effects. Playing with the opacity of the fills adds a nice element of visual interest to the image. Also, conceptually, I reckon it enhances "the meeting of minds" element.



I also found it quite rewarding and satisfying working in 3D for parts of this project. The spinning logo and the books turning. Simple but effective!

And - this is a bit of an odd one - I'm quite proud of the train style LED text I put together. The font itself is called LCD Dot, and was created by Omer Kose --- http://www.omerkose.net/ I downloaded this off Dafont.

The bit that I'm proud of is the nice repetitive dot pattern I created in Illustrator for the LED light background! This lines up with the dots of the font. Then of course the colour and glow effect. It mimics the train style LEDs quite well. As things have turned out, I have been asked to change this style as it could be confusing, and takes away from the cohesion of the other fonts in the video. Think I may have taken Saskia a little too literally when she said 'text like you see on train displays'. Nevermind though!

Watch this space! The promo video will be out shortly....

Royal College of Art animation project - Love Soldiers

Love Soldiers directed by Chloe Feinberg

Recently, I have been asked to offer some assistance on a project being created at the Royal College of Art on the MA Animation course. Love Soldiers is a hand drawn 2D animation, which draws inspiration from the likes of David Lynch. Chloe described it to me as "a surreal dreamlike fantasy with 80's male sex symbols set on a luxury yacht. A lot of it is reconfigured pieces from films of the 80's (usually with macho cop guys.)" Having watched the animatic a couple of times I can safely say that it is quite interesting, unusual and unconventional to say the least! Here are a few images that give some idea of the look/content of the project. The top right image is how Chloe intends the final film to look like.

So far, I have helped out with a bit of animating, producing and compositing. As there are only a handful of us working on the project, the nature of my role crosses different areas which keeps things interesting. Having said this, I believe compositing will be the main area I will be working in, as I have a good knowledge of After Effects and Chloe is keen to get the majority of the hand drawn animation done herself. Below are a couple of stills from two shots that I have animated.

The workflow goes like this -

1) Filming or sourcing reference
2) Drawing a style frame to get the sketch and shading right
3) Rotoscoped hand drawn animation, (just the lines)
4) Inking the lines
5) Batch scanning
5) Colouring in Photoshop
6) Comping in After Effects + layering on some actual film textures
7) Editing / Sound

More recently, I have been compositing. Putting together several different layers of hand drawn animation. The technical hitch was that the paper used for animating on had it's peg bar holes punched in slightly different places which meant once I had batch scanned all the work in, the animation wobbled constantly from frame to frame which is not how Chloe intended! To get around this issue, I drew 2 little crosses in the same place on every frame and voila! - a bit of position/rotation stabilising in After Effects led to a much smoother playback of the animation, as it was intended. It was quite satisfying letting the computer sort it out rather then trying to manually adjust each frame in After Effects.

The experimental nature of this project makes it a joy to work on. It's great to be back in a small team again collaborating on a short film, and quite a novelty to be at the RCA. 

Title sequence - workflow and screenshots.

This took around 3 days. I shot the timelapses and footage; created the sound (utilising a 120 bpm house loop by "afleetingspeck" off Freesound) then worked between Premiere and After Effects (using the Adobe Dynamic Link) to edit it together and add effects. The timing and visual/audio synchronicity seems to be key in maintaining a steady pace and flow to the sequence. As you can see below, the shots change precisely on cue with the drum beats.

The additive dissolve makes for quite a nice transition between shots. To further visually convey the pulse of the soundtrack I added a blue moving line effect in sync with the drum beats. It's simple but effective! I will upload the movie here when the video is up on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter campaign progress

Just a quick post this week. I have been quite busy spending time seeing my sister this week so I will be aiming to get this project complete for next Friday. This week, I have worked on adding text to imitate the look of the british rail LED screen type - this is timed perfectly with the words as they are spoken. I found this type off Dafont. It is called LCD Dot, made by Omer Kose.

 I also spent half a day going into town and recording some timelapse footage for the news title sequence. This looks great. The next step is creating a soundtrack to go with them - there's some great stuff on Soundcloud but I could run into copyright issues by using it, so instead I have found a good house loop off Freesound and will work on the track myself.

Train LED style text

Timelapse stills

Kickstarter update and some inspiration

Here are some icons and a main image created for the CBT Kickstarter campaign I'm working on. I'm aiming to get the film complete by next Friday, so it will be a busy couple of weeks!

And now for some animation inspiration...

I came across this neat little ad for the french post office a while back on motionographer. I really like how well it has been thought out and executed. Nice sound track too (from Amadou & Mariam.)



Here is a great little animation I watched yesterday made by Perrie Murphy. There is a simple element of truth within Colin that I'm sure many people can empathise with! It's pretty funny - definetly worth a watch!



So that's it for now. Catch you next Thursday!

"Sparkle Mouse" in the making...

This is a personal project that I have been chipping away at for a while. The basic idea stems from a simple and effective technique that I came up with when I was juggling glowing balls. "Sparkle mouse" is a working title - I'm open to suggestions!

The basic idea

Here I am, juggling (such is the life of a creative ey?) -

+ some After Effects trickery =

Pretty cool! What if the ball had a bit of character -

                                                             Introducing... a background!

The plan (aka pre-production) and production

Brief: To create a short visually interesting and entertaining animation, using the above technique.

Here is a rough plan of my idea. The ball interacts and navigates itself around the environment. At one point the ball transports from inside the laundry basket to above the bongo. The numbers on the plan have helped with the editing as this was not all managed in one take. It took me around 7 hours to dress the set, photograph some stop motion animation of the furniture and film myself in the dark moving the glowing ball around.

Post production

This has been the lengthy part of the process. It took me another day to edit the ball into one cohesive sequence. (I recorded about 8 seperate takes as the moving-a-ball-around process was a bit fiddley.) With the help of Maya and a handy tutorial, I animated a cool 3D sphere cracking effect for the transportation bit. This took about half a day.

Most of the work has involved cleaning up areas using masks where there are discrepancies between the environment and the ball. It has taken several days to go through this process. The moral is - use a good tripod!

Half way through, I thought "hey wouldn't it be cool if I kept the effect of the bounce light caused by the ball on the environment" so that added another few days of After Effects work! In the process I have learned better ways of organising my AE comps. Firstly, using colour coding for layers makes things much easier. Secondarily, rendering out pre-comps as you are going along helps a heavy composition become much faster to work with. Here is a screenshot of my work organisation in AE.

At the moment Sparkle Mouse is nearing the end of the clean up phase, and will enter a final edit, possibly with the addition of sound and a title before final delivery. WATCH THIS SPACE :-)

Promo film for Kickstarter

Hi everyone, so it has been quite a while since I last blogged. Sorry folks! From now on I intend to do regular blog posts to keep people in the know of what I'm up to. Since compositing a couple of shots on the independent feature film "The Otherworld" I have realised that I would be much better suited to work on short form productions which offer a higher degree of creative input and a greater variety of work. One of the things I have been working on recently is a promo film for my friend and aspiring alternative therapy business entrepreneur - Saskia.

Promotional film for a Kickstarter project

Saskia has a plan to set up an alternative therapy business and needs the video to act as an essential part of her kickstarter page. I had designed some business cards for her previously, which have proved successful. I believe she is aiming to raise around $10,000 so the video promo is definitely a worthy challenge! The basic idea for her promo is to create a news themed "special report" featuring Saskia as both reporter and massage therapist. Some clear and simple motion graphics, that sit with the live action recording will help delineate her ideas. So far we have done the shooting and now I'm working on the post production. I used my Sony NEX5 to record the footage in HD, and coupled this with sound recorded into a clip on mic.

Business card

Video Promo - still

The shooting took place in my flat, with Saskia filmed against a cream coloured wall. It took me a couple of days to create a clearly defined matte of Saskia which has enabled me to cut her out and place her into a news broadcasting themed environment. I have learned from Ron Brinkmann's book "The art and science of digital compositing" that the most efficient way to rotoscope is to use several mattes - not just one. So here, I have pulled mattes for her body and hair seperately, then combined the two. I have also used a light wrapping technique which creates a subtle effect of the background colours lighting up her outline. The images below show the work in progress:

For my own future reference, and for those of you who are curious - here are the effects I applied to pull a matte of her hair at a part of the video where it swings to the side. These effects are applied to a pre-comped garbage matte so the dynamic range is concentrated to the section of hair being cut out. The still shows the garbage mask and the subsequent matte along with the effects. I pushed everything into the green channel as this provides the best contrast between hair and no hair.

Next, I will be working on integrating some motion graphics with the next scene which shows Saskia as a massage therapist explaining her idea. Here is a still of that shot: