Pre-Production: VFX Animatics

Here's the animatics for the thumbnails I posted earlier. Some of them worked better than others. On some I restricted myself quite a bit on the motions as I didn't want to push the director into a shot or angle they didn't want to do.

Pre-Production: VFX

Way behind with this blog now. We're well into production now with 3 weeks off uni for Easter at the end of this month. Three weeks off uni doesn't mean three weeks off work though.

Things have been crazy busy on the work front, and it's been difficult finding time to get everything done. In order to attempt to keep on top of uni work I've let the blog slide alot. But I'll be trying to keep it up to date better from now on. After all third times a charm.

My dissertation was handed in a couple of weeks ago now so luckily I no longer have that to worry about. It went quite well but I found I didn't spend as much time on it as I would of liked since I also had to try and keep up with production work at the same time.

Anyway, onto the actual post. This time I'll be posting my pre-production for another project I'm an animator in. This one is a VFX project in which essentially, an elephant wanders through the streets of Cardiff. Filming for it took place a few weeks ago and it was very very cold carrying and guarding the equipment in the city centre. I'm due to start animating for this project sometime next week, if I manage to catch up with my other animation work...

Pre-Production: Echoes Animatics

Rather than overload one post with lots of images and videos, I'll post the animatics separately. Here are all the animatics made from the thumbnails I posted before. They have varying success, it seems the simpler that I draw the more effective the animatic is.

Centaur Death:

Wyvern Idle #1:

Wyvern Idle #2:

Wyvern Death:

Girl Seeing Player and Running:

Centaur Idle:

Pre-Production: Echoes

 Since hand in for pre-production was a few weeks ago now, I think it's about time that I posted it up on here. I'm due to be starting the girl animation for this project this week with the other animations spread throughout February, March and April.

These are my research for the animations on this game project.
Starting sketches are used to get a better idea of extreme poses and how the body moves.

 Thumbnail sketches let you quickly rough out an idea of a pose or move that you think would work well for that animation.
Thumbnails are then made from reference footage and the starting thumbnail sketches and are the final version of the animation idea. They are then put into animatics to see how those motions would look in sequence. If the thumbnails have any issues, a second, third etc. set are produced until the director is happy with the idea for the shot.

Spec Anim 2

I seem to have fallen behind alot on keeping this blog up to date but things have been crazy busy with uni and Christmas. I'll be spamming it a lot in the next few days as I try and catch up. There's also a new design layout in the works that should improve the layout and appearance of Sakura Animation. It's due up Wednesday unless something else crops up, so watch this space.

Back onto uni work. Quite awhile ago we finished Spec Anim 2 which was split into 2 groups. You could either do coding or compositing. In my wisdom I picked compositing and regretted the decision.

For week 1 of compositing, we had to pick a model, rig it using the Set-up Machine and animate it doing a basic walk cycle. So far so good.

In Week 2, we did storyboarding, LAVs and animatics in prep for animation. Using the footage I shot, I then  took it into Boujou in preperation for dropping an animated model into. I had a few issues with Boujou since it couldn't read the dimensions and depth of my scene, but this was easily fixed by upping the number of trackers boujou sends out to test the footage. Storyboarding and thumbnailing have always been my weakness since my drawing skills aren't very strong but I tried my best with these.

All the issues and problems came bundled up in one massive ball in week 3. These included the animation I very carefully plotted and timed not fitting into the film footage, After Effects crashing every single time it got to a certain point of rendering my scene as well as my computer breaking and losing the licenses for Maya somewhere along the way. All in all a terrible week for work. The resulting work was then, quite obviously not up to any decent standard but by that point I was staring the deadline in the face.

Although I had many many issues with this project, I think the best thing to do is accept it as a bip and move onto the next. And of course, majorly clean up my computer.

Blog Catch Up - Spec Anim

I finally got around to updating my blogs colour scheme, still have a little work to do on the banner and a slideshow of work to add but it's almost there.

We've just started our next project in uni, which is the pre-production work for our major project so there'll be plenty of thumbnails and animatics etc coming up. Before that though, I think I should catch up on the spec anim module I handed in on Wednesday.

In week 1 we were introduced to Maya and had to do a simple bouncing ball sequence using a light and heavy ball in order to get used to the software. Once that was done we also had to do a ball bouncing around an obstacle course. I didn't find this part that difficult since I've used Maya before. Getting a really nice bouncing ball animation though is always quite tricky.

In week 2 I managed to get the brief tweaked so that I could spend the week rigging a quadruped in Maya. having not much rigging experience and being the first time rigging in Maya I found this quite a challenge but also quite fun to do. There are a few things I could do with fixing on my rig but they've taught me what I need to know next time.


In the final week of spec anim we were introduced to another new piece of software called Motionbuilder. Motionbuilder allows you to manipulate motion capture data and turn it into a sequence you like. For this project we had to blend 4 mo-cap pieces together along with our own piece of animation. Once that was done we had to tweak the sequence and give it a different mood (eg. tired, angry). This was the most difficult and frustrating part of spec anim since the motionbuilder rig is not designed for ease of animation.

New Uni Year

Uni has started again and it looks set to be a busy but interesting year. For the first week we had to decide what we want to do for our major project this year. The major project will cover most of the year so it’s very important to figure it out early on.

We each have to complete 4 projects for the major project, for each of which the practical work will take 4 weeks. The pre-production is done awhile before that but it’s easier to find out now how you want to spend the third and final year.

As for me, I’ve decided to join in three collaborative projects and work on one personal project. The personal project will be to animate and possibly rigging some interesting quadrupeds. I was thinking of looking into cats, squirrels and deer’s as they all have interesting ways of moving.

Collaborative project #1 is a game project which at this moment is referred to as the “Fae Game Project” and will possibly be called “Echoes”. This game is set to be a third-person action game in which you play a fae character that has to help a human girl get back to her world. The game will be run in Unity and has quite a large team working on it. I will be doing animation on this project on a centaur, a wyvern and a small section of the girl. As I want to head towards creature animation, I’m quite excited for this project as it gives me an opportunity for creativity with animating creatures that don’t exist.

Collaborative project #2 is another game project with the working title of “Form Wars”. It’s a turn based strategy game in which the player tries to take over as many tiles on the board as possible and summons creatures in an effort to defeat the opposing king unit. In this project I’ll be doing rigging and animating of whatever needs to be done. I will also have to learn how to create game engine friendly animations so that it can be run smoothly.

Collaborative project #3 is a short VFX film project. It involves a CG animal being placed into a real city street scene and walking down the street possibly interacting with people in the street. In this project, at the moment I’m the only animator but there is a possibility of getting second-years in on this project too and extending it.

As I said before, a busy but interesting year. I also have a dissertation to write this year but I’m planning on linking that in quite strongly with my practical work so that should make things a little easier.

I’ll post more on these projects as I work on them.