My Film Animation

Last semester I took a subject called Film Animation, it was a core subject and our lecturer/tutor was a professional animator and also a very laid back guy.
So laid back that in the end we just worked on the one assessment, when there was supposed to be two or something. We learnt how to use old school cameras, hand held ones that shouldn't be hand held because they're quite heavy and holding them for long periods of time would cause you to do a very slow pan down to the ground and the other type of camera was used for 2D animation, called an Oxberry camera.
The oxberry camera was cool, and was basically a top down camera, you put a piece of paper onto a platform, take a picture, change the paper to the next one, take a picture and so forth until you finish your animation. Thats a pretty bad explanation of what the camera is but if you want more information, google is your friend, I'm just your mate.

So our assignment was to work in groups and make an animation of anything, done in any style we want. A group did pixellation (Example Here), another did cut out animation, another did claymation (like Nightmare before Christmas or Coraline) another did 2D animation and our group did 2D animation.

There was four people in our group and we had to work together to make one piece of animation. Knowing that I sucked at drawing compared to the other people if we did one piece of animation using one style of art when it came to my scenes they would look horrible compared to the other scenes. One idea was to have people focus on certain parts of the animation, for example one person just does the main character, I just do backgrounds and so forth but this meant lots of meeting up and stuff to get things done, and who wants to meet up with their group?

I then took the Simpsons route and pitched the idea of a main character travelling through different worlds, and each worlds is taken care of by each animator, meaning four worlds all up. The character would travel to each world via a remote control, where it came from, nobody cares...
This idea was well received and we went ahead with the idea. The character would remain similar looking throughout the whole animation and each person's part would take 30 or so seconds each. Some people had high expectations for themselves, thinking they could do Disney-esque type animation, I took an easier path and did cut outs of my character and world. I decided to go with lots of colours and a bright world for my part, as the other worlds were different. So I went with the brightest and most colourful world I knew, the Mario world!

Now, the problem with Oxberry cameras is that you cannot go back, once you take a picture, thats it, so lots of people planned their scenes before hand. Timing everything out so that the animation would look good. I had cut outs however, and didn't find the time to time everything out properly. So I did a rough timing out of my animation and come filming day what I did was the first time I animated my part, which was quite interesting. Fortunately, I could edit it in post and did so to drag some frames out or to cut some frames out to make the animation flow better.
Overall I was pleased with my part, but compared to the other parts (particularly the first and last part), I pale in comparison. 2D animation is not my thing however, 3D is where I'm at. I'll have to compile some of the stuff I did this semester to show you guys, but that'll be another blog.

The subject was pretty fun because it was so laid back, we had no worries about failing because the lecturer was so care-free, he seemed like one of those stoner guys. A whole semester and one assignment, which produced a good result, I ain't complaining!

My 3D Animation

This semester for our Advanced 3D Animation class we had to create a 3D animation, of course.
We also had another subject (Graphic Visualisation) which involved creating our own character and making a sculpture/model of it, drawing up a concept design and making an animatic for it. I finished all that last week which felt good to finally present it all.

I ended up using the same character I created for both that Graphic Visualisation and my 3D animation subject, it just worked out that way for me. Some would call it cheap, I'd call it, fleshing out my character more.
The character's name is Slink, a robot with springs for arms and legs (forearms, calves), hence the name Slink. He basically has limited knowledge of the world and learns as he goes, often getting himself into trouble, but due to his nature, is able to get away from any trouble, most of the time. Below is the concept design for the Graphic Visualisation subject, unfortunately my Wacom Bamboo's sensitivity decided to die on me which is apparently a Windows XP problem when I searched it up. So my concept design looks like it was done in paint, but I maintained that I went for a cartoony look.



It's basically Slink in the city, being lost and such. My animatic was taken from my storyboard I did for my 3D animation class, just tightened up and shortened and ended up being 15 seconds long so when I presented it, it flew by fast while everyone else's animatics were up to a minute long, even longer for some.

Below is Slink in 3D! Chucking a pose, from the look of that pose, what sort of character would you say he is?



Finally, my 3D animation, which I spent ages doing, first modelling the character and rigging him, creating his environment and finally animating. When I started animating I realised my rig failed on me, giving me a weird glitch with his leg springs. So I had to limit the amount of walking he does, and the view you have of him walking to keep it looking decent. That also means this is a once of character in terms of large movements unless I fix it, but I think that'll involve re-doing him. I'll leave that for another time.
Animating took probably 3 nights total, with very late nights, sleeping later and later each night to get it completed. But I timed things out well and finished animating on Friday night, leaving Saturday to render everything and find sound effects/music to edit it all together. Come Sunday I put it all together, with sound effects (recorded the walking sound effects myself as I couldn't find what I wanted online) and showed it off to a couple of people, after their comments I decided to add an extra ending, and animated another 7 seconds of animation, which took....around 2 hours to do then edited onto the video and rendered it all out and now, what was to be a 30 second clip originally is now a 1 minute short film. I think it could've been better but I'm happy with what I've done, considering my first attempt was horrible compared to this. And with that I'm done for the semester, I plan to muck around with 3D during the holidays in preparation for next semester's two 3D animation subjects.
And now, for your entertainment, Slink at the Museum...



Uploaded it to youtube for better viewing than on this small video thing.

My Wacom Bamboo

SYC blog will be on pause for now due to not finding adequate time to blog about it and do it justice.
So I'll be continuing random blogging for now until I find such time, hopefully my memory will remember enough of it to blog!

Anyways, I've started my Masters (of Animation) which is very arty in nature and quite different from when I did my IT degree but I'm loving it so far. My brother found a second hand Wacom Bamboo tablet for cheap and I figured it'd be good to get one for the course, and for life!
So I got the Wacom Bamboo MTE-450k, and though that may not mean anything to you in name, it means nothing to me too, so here's a picture to show you what it looks like!

And here's a picture that I rotoscoped to test out my new technical toy!

Lookin' good