Animation

Here is a running log of animation I’ve either worked on or are working on currently. As I generate things that I think don’t suck too bad, I’ll put them up here for all to view.

Fivebucks

Wanted to re learn how to match to live action again with new software tools and try out a non human character rig. I’m pretty happy with the second shot, but the track on the first shot is definitely off a bit.

Sound is waaaaay scratch. The actor is Jim Reed and the DP was Arnold Lee

Rain

Rain is a short piece I created using an old technique called scratch on film. I then ran the analog material through numerous digital filters to create the effects you see. My process was extremely experimental on this piece and when I started I had no idea what my end product was going to become, but after digitizing the footage and listening to the music I got the idea of creating a piece the explores my feelings about rain. Too often people think of rain as a negative thing and miss its beauty – my attempt here was to address the joy that rain can bring.

Shintai

Shintai is a study in pixilation and movement. While in Japan I decided to use my experience and experiment with a time honored technique to express the various feelings of time and place that exist there. Their sense of time is so closely tied to their spaces and environment – you see new things constantly being built right next to the most ancient of temples all the while they hustle and bustle and hurry on by. Its all about the mix of quiet moments with the intensity of modern life. Hope you enjoy it!

Airplane

The Airplane – This is a short piece, an exercise really, done in about 20 or so man hours based off of a dream I had when I was a kid. I used John Doublestien’s Andy rig and made a very simple rig for the plane. The motion is still a bit stiff and rushed, but hey I just wanted to get it out…

Day12

Day12 – A visual design test for an up and coming animation film I’m in development on the motion itself probably took only about 4 man hours – but the construction, texture, rigging of the figure and such took roughly 40 to 50 man hours. I wanted to attempt to re-create a stop-motion feel in CG with the character. The character is down in Maya and the paper work is down all in After Effects. The animation process I went through with the character was fairly simple and based off of a traditional stop-motion approach. I set the Key poses and breakdowns for the character using step key frame tangents. Once I felt the timing and arcs were working I converted the animation curves to smooth and did some decent graph editor work. The final step is really the crucial one – I then took this animation and baked out all the curves to be on 3’s and then converted all the curves back to stepped and Presto! I have my motion.

This for sure was the faster route, but it has its limits. The other route I tested, but is not represented here, was to literally animate it on 2’s for every frame just like a real stop-motion puppet. While this looked a bit better, it didn’t seem to me to look significantly better to warrant the time differences on this particular motion.

Walking

Walking – A rotoscoping exercise/test using Photoshop CS3’s new animation features. The footage was shot in Japan. I’m very interested in exploring the quality of surfaces we can create digitally and then applying that to live action to distort and push it from reality into characterization. I was particularly happy with the line quality on this one.

The Unlucky Hunter

The Unlucky Hunter – A homage to good ole bambi meets godzilla. This piece I set all the Key poses to a set camera in Maya using a pre-rig character. I then exported out the this playblast from Maya and brought it into Photoshop CS3 as reference, for all the breakdowns, and inbetweens. It was a very useful way to make sure my volumes and my foreshortening was correct since my character was moving in depth. I guess this technique is like a crazy form of rotoscoping. Since I was animating the breakdowns and in-betweens in Photoshop this bugger took a lot more time than I hoped – about 55 man hours total for 14 seconds of animation.

This also spawned the idea of animating in 3D and then rotoscoping my own animation in 2D to create non-computer generated looking styles, without having to write custom render engines or code to do it for me.

Ahhh…

Ahhh…. – Another exercise working on subtle gesture, bout 8 man hours here. The title says it all man…