Continue reading »]]> We had another group meeting today that went well.  We have worked out out timing and made a basic storyboard.  We actually did it a little bit differently because the story board is had to show a lot of details in this type of animation.  Our basic concept is that the poster is a “freeze-frame” in time, so we are easing in various pieces to come in and out of real time throughout the shot.  After the story board was done, we realized it still couldn’t really encapsulate the timing that well, so I wrote out a quick timing chart with the groups input.  That should make things a lot easier if when we need to divide up the work, although we are still going to try to work on it as a group.

We meet again next Monday to start production!

Continue reading »]]> I went today to see the London Transport Museum Depot, which houses all the works that are not shown at the Transport Museum. We took a tour through the artwork and poster rooms and were given a lot of good information surrounds the history of the TFL posters. It was really interesting to see history through the eyes of advertising.

I don’t know that it was particularly helpful with the actual animation part of the project, but I’m glad I went. It gave a great context to many of the posters that we are working on, and it was great to see the change from “how it used to be done” to what it is now.

Continue reading »]]> I have been assigned a “real world” exercise with a client and quick deadline which I am pretty excited about. Our client is the London Transport Museum, and after out animations are completed the are going to be available to view at the Museum! (through QR codes to the museum website… but still).

There is a pretty quick deadline for this project, but I’m not to worried about it I’ve got a good group (Max, Steph, Alex, and myself) that has some experience in Flash (because there is no way this is happening in 3D) so I think I’ll be learning quite a bit as things progress.

Our Poster is:

                By Freda Lingstrom

I think aside from the awkward title it will be fairly straight forward to work with, as there is a given character.  We are having a group meeting soon to start working, we’ll see how it goes!

Continue reading »]]> My second lip sync was a personal pick, I like the audio, but this one was much more complicated to animate. The lines are spoken quickly and a bit mumbled, which was really hard to show much movement in the lips. After the render I realized that I need to go out and take out a lot of the up and down of the jaw, there is just way to much going on.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Continue reading »]]> The first lip-sync assignment we got was audio clips from student interviews.  My audio clip was a bit awkward out of context so for the basic concept I tried to juxtapose what was being said to what was being seen.

The quote is:

“Ummmm , well… I went to a convent… sooo…. probably God…. *awkward giggles*”

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think the lip sync body animation when pretty smoothly, the actual sync is kinda of complicated, it’s hard to judge what we gloss over when speaking natrually and what we don’t, I need to invest in a mirror for my desk!

Continue reading »]]> I tried a different approach to when I was animating the facial expression assignment, I think it was probably how I should have been working the whole time, but it was a much smoother workflow and easier to come back in to edit later.  Rather than messing much in the graph editor, I step keyed everything and tried my best to add in as many inbetweens as possible rather than using the graphs for motion.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It helped a lot after crit comeing back into the animation because I had more reference areas that were easier to change to tweak the things that were still not working with the animation.

Continue reading »]]> I raelly enjoyed this week.  It was our first real acting piece that we had, and while mechanics are hugley important to animation… they can also be painfully dull.  It’s nice to animate some emotion every now and then.  The assignment was to animate a reation to a piece of art that your character sees in a private viewing, and it needs to be clear through body language.

My scene was someone seeing a sculpture and thinks it is awful:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I got some pretty good feed back from the crit and am going to change some things. Apparently the “gag” at the end is only funny to me…. so I am going to take that out, and repose a few actions to push the “awful” a bit more than the “shocked”

Continue reading »]]> We were given a brief for a mood change walk to be done in either 2D or 3D.  Since I have already completed my sneak walk in 2D and have just roughed it out in 3D I am going to adapt the 3D walk into a mood change.  I decided that as he is sneaking away, he should be sneaking from something, so I am going to model a quick room so he is sneaking out of the house…  After he passes infront of the door, he’ll glance back to double check his ninja skillz, then stand up straight and walk away.

Here is my rough pass for the mood change:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Continue reading »]]> I have done a bit of redesign on the dog character.  I finally came up with an acronym for Chaz (my dog’s actual name) that fits with the character concept:

Cog Hound – Automaton Zeta (CH-AZ):

I think the rigging may actually be harder than I want because the way the shoulders will move… they in one direction from two differnet points, but I have talked to my mentor and he has offered up some advice, so when I have some more time to concentrate on modelling rather than animation, I’ll have a sit down with him and go over some of the finer details