Sunday, January 04, 2009

Animation styles

So I've started up a short piece of animation (about 13 seconds, just shy of a 181A film) to practice acting and dialogue, something I don't often get to do at my job. I suppose if it turns out well I could put it on my demo reel, but I'd like feedback from other animators along the way to get it up to a good quality. I'm in the layout/blocking stage on the primary character:




The camera operator is an unseen third character (hence why the main character sometimes looks at the camera). I'll add some hand-held camera shake and a blinking "REC" overlay when I'm done with the animation to emphasize that.

I know at A.M. they start full body acting without any facial expressions - they have a rig with arms and legs and a head, but no face. I've heard that it's a good habit to get into when roughing out animation: make sure the body movement tells the story first, then add the facial expressions afterwards. I can see the merit to that, you don't want to get lazy with the body motion and rely on the face to sell the shot. At the same time, a viewer's attention is drawn to the face and eyes in particular, so shouldn't the facial emotion at least be considered when blocking?

I tend to switch work styles depending on the shot, although for acting I prefer to begin by setting keyframes on the entire body (as above) rather than working on parts at a time. Perhaps it's the traditional animator in me. :)

Hand-drawn animation was getting a swift kick in the pants when I started college, so I only really got a year's worth of training in the craft... and probably not the best training either. But I seem to recall wanting to draw the entire character, face and all, when roughing out the keys. Is that bad? Glenn Vilppu always told us "there are no rules, just tools."

ANYway. Guess I better get back to animating!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Erica,

That's very cute!! Cant' wait to see you finish the animation!! Yosemite is really fun in winter, with thick snow and all. YOu guys should definitely go ... I am planning to explore Big BEar snowshoeing trail sometimes soon ... are you guys interested?!

Andrew Chan said...

Hey Erica,

Those characters are quite cute!

These are reference videos may help you out! When I had a look at your animation I realized there isn't much. You might want to turn down the speakers cuz the kid gets really crazy but it's great because they take it to the next level.

Overly excited Wii Kid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n41c6eXWZwM

Overly excited n64 Kid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFlcqWQVVuU&NR=1

With the Wii one, you can see him sitting there normally waiting for presents to be unwrapped, but when it gets unveiled u see him kind of pause in shock and when it absorbs into him that he got a Wii, you can see a total change of reaction.

When you study the scene I think the energy is well built. When you think of a Story it starts off, then there's a climax, and it comes back down to settle off. That kind of what you want here. U want the energy level to be low but once he sees the present bring it to the climax asap instead of gradually. I think that makes it so funny where he has so much energy and it keeps growing from there.

He gets up and yells.. Then he jumps up and down, after that he rolls around on the floor. But after a while he settle down more near the end slowly.

With animation you could have good poses but bad timing and spacing might not make it as good as it could be~ Currently I think it looks too even. I would probably make him act more excited by making it go more wild once the gift is unwrapped just like the reference video!

Even Timing and Spacing..It's something my teacher tells everyone in my class and it's so hard to understand for me since I don't really focus on being an animator.

I dunno lol. But I hope this helps even a little.

I was wondering.. for the technical side of 3d... How would you make the present wrapping tear off the box to show that it's unwrapping?

I want to do something similiar... I modeled an entire starbucks but I want to fire a missle at it and blow it up into little bits. I am wondering if I'll have to manually cut up the polygons or is there something that just does it for you randomly~

erica said...

Wow, thanks for all the analysis, Andrew! Lots of stuff to think about. I agree, this initial layout doesn't do much for exaggeration, anticipation etc. I'll work on really pushing that in the next phase.

As for the wrapping paper, it was a tricky thing and it probably won't really look right, but for now I cut up the box into pieces manually and have applied wire deformers to each piece so I can sort of control a crumpling effect. I could spend a lot more time trying to get the paper to look right, but I'd rather not worry about it and focus instead on the character animation.

With explosions, there are a number of different ways you could do it depending on how you want it to look. This tutorial looks kinda neat:

http://www.imanishi.com/mayablog_en/2008/09/maya-tutorialexplosion-using-p.html