Personal: Pre-Production

A personal project is what it says on the tin; a project just involving you that allows you to work on and improve what you would like to do in the future. I found I have difficulties with bi-ped animation. I can do it, it’s just a bit of a battle to get the figure to seem true in everyones eyes. With animal animation, I find I have much more enjoyment and the end results seem to work out much better. So for my personal project I’m planning on animating 4 different animal sequences. Two sequences will be run cycles, the other two will be non-cyclical motions.

As always, I’ll post up my work sheets with thumbnails up separately to the videos so I don’t get an overwhelming blog post.

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.