Daisy Chasing A Butterfly

This is my basic 4-legged walk cycle and my 4-legged run cycle combined. The point of the assignment was to learn how to export/import cycles in Maya, make a trasition from one cycle to another (and to a halt), and discover the benefits of Animation Layers. I think the physical aspects of the animation are OK considering how toony the rig is, and I think the small acting works surprsingly well considering that none of it was planned out.

Basic 4-Legged Walk

This is Daisy the Cow walking on a treadmill. It was great fun to create this cycle and translating all of our real life reference videos and anatomy lectures to a rig this toony was very exciting. She does walk in space just as nicely as she does on this clunky treadmill and I will prove it once I combine this cycle with a runcycle and some acting. Stay tuned...

Basic 8-Legged Walk

Just a quickie: A basic 8-legged walk cycle of a spider. Before he ended his three week stay at our school, Alex Williams had a couple of hours to do whatever; he chose to do a lecture on insect movement and, by the end of it, I had this.

Action Animation: "Parkour"

Evidence A-Z that advanced movement calls for precise planning and pre-visualization. I'm still not sure just what the first part of the movement is supposed to be and the second part took on a life of its own and decided what it wanted to be next. Anyway, the result is not terrible and I had some fun. The end.

Maya Basics: "Lift"

This is my first attempt at creating an animation of a lift and using constraints in Maya. Hogan, with his primitive robot/puppet design and rig, is not a forgiving character when it comes to physically realistic animation but I am still rather pleased with the result. I think the box has a good weight and the animation is polished enough that the big box fits is his grasp without going through his body, arms, hands, and the ground.



Rigging: "Leg Rig"



Last week, I learned rigging... well, the very basics of it at least. Our assignment was to create a leg rig and therefore to design a simple character to put the rig in. I created a retarded chicken and I think it actually worked well with the body being completely stiff when I made this walk cycle to test the rig.

 

Introduction To Maya: "Character Walk Cycles" and "Run Cycle"

...Presenting: A couple of blockbuster tributes!

Though it may be hard to spot, this is actually my Generic Walk Cycle after a few hours of altering the curves and timing.

This my second character walk made by altering the curves of my generic walk. I struggled a lot with the arms and I never really got them to work. Still, it is amazing to see how different you can make the same basic walk cycle look by moving frames and values around for a few hours.

This is my first attempt at creating a generic run cycle. I think it works OK, although the last camera angle in this shot is not favorable... but I had to have it, it's Rocky, man!

Introduction To Maya: "Baseball Pitch" and "Generic Walk Cycle"

Here's my latest two assignments in my work with getting to know Maya and 3D animation.

For this first assignment, we had to make a broad movement lasting exactly 40 frames. This meant either a throw, a kick or a swing. I chose to do a Baseball Pitch but as we couldn't add any props, I had to do it without a ball. I am rather pleased with the result and though I struggled some with the timing especially, I feel like I got it right in the end.

This second one is a generic 24 frame walk cycle. Our objective was to focus on symmetry and to make it generic rather than characteristic. Also, we focused on trying out a different workflow where we had to only work on one part of the body at a time. Though this did give a better overview, the movement had to afterwards be worked over to work as a whole.

Introduction To Maya: "Turn" & "Bow"

My first two animations in Maya with a complete biped rig...

This fellar is called Hogan and is a premade dummy for animation practice purposes.

We had to make Hogan turn from one side to another, and this is the result. I like the subtlety of the acting and the way the arms shifting makes the movement seem broader.

For this assignment, we had to make Hogan bow in any way we fancied. I could have easily spend a third day on this, polishing it and improving my spacing, though I am glad I get to move on to a new assignment tomorrow.

Introduction To Maya: "Luxo Lamp"

This was the first rigged character I worked with in Maya. I worked with two different rigs, an all Inverse Kinematics rig and an all Forward Kinematics rig. This lamp is the former. The assignment was to make a jump cycle and have the lamp do a take.

Introduction To Maya: "Ball In Room"

I'll make it brief: 3 Days in. Maya is fun. Bring on the rigged ones!

Introduction to Maya

I spend the final 3 days of the school year on an introductionary course in the 3D software Maya. This is the result of beginner 3D modelling and just a touch of Photoshop.

End-Year Exam, 1st Year CA at The Animation Workshop

This is my 1st year exam assignment from The Animation Workshop. We were given a character (Tillie the hippo from "Cats Don't Dance"); a storyboard of her stealing and eating a pie only to discover that something is wrong with it and spit it out; and a framecount. We then had 5 days to work on creating the scene. I'm fairly happy with the result, although it's not my best work. I do like the subtleness of the animation but the action itself was not interesting enough for me to really get hooked and inspired by. Also, I played it pretty safe but as a result thereof I ended up finishing before the deadline and with a prety touched-up-tied-down-whatever state of drawings.



Showreel, June 2012

This is my showreel for the 2nd semester of the Character Animator education at The Animation Workshop. As always, every piece of product I've created during school hours over the last half year is in this in cronological order. This time around though, I do think it shows progress regarding my animation skills.

Sheep Happens

For the past 4 weeks, I have been working with three other animators and three CG artists in making A Short, Short Film based on the random elements, "rocketry" and "revulsion" and the task of mashing up the styles of Mary Blair and J. Otto Seibold. This is the finished result. A lot of things could be changed for the better but overall I think the main problem (which caused a lot of frustration within the group) was the fact that our story simply isn't all that apt for a 30 second short. Anyway, I will leave it to others to judge our efforts.

I personally did most of the animation and clean-up in the middle part (from the shower scene to the rumbling cloud) as well as the background music and the sound design.

BONUS: Designing and developing the characters was shared task between Maria Henriksen, Cristina Bojesen, Marta Andresen and I. During this process, I made this animation early test...

...as well as some model sheets of the character known as Sheep Number Two.

Character Design Week 1

Hands down, this first week of character design has been one of the most productive weeks of my education so far. Over the course of 4 days, I, on my own, in pairs, and in groups with various other people, have developed ideas for/and produced: 1) A splatter paint with various characters on it as in introdution to using "random methods" for inspiration ; 2) A short film explaining something about Danish culture using silhuette cut-outs ; 3) A wall full of Collage Zombie Designs made up of webimages and pictures I took myself in the Town of Viborg with my cellphone ; 4) Three thouroughly explored concept design for the audiobook fairytale, Brave Molly.

These are my designs for Brave Molly:

This was how I broke free from my own and other predetermined styles. I cut up splatter paintings in order to make a collage with random splashes of ink, thus getting finding interesting shapes.

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These are my Zombie Designs:

It is an example of another metod we used, taking advantage of our senses and the subconcious mind - a form of pareidolia, seeing faces in random objects.

Colour Practice

I've been studying colours for the past week. I can't say I ever got a hold of using a paint brush but I learned a lot about colours so I now have an understanding of yet another gear in the big machine that is film production.

Layout

This week we've had three different layout assignments (all of them are listed below. We worked in different mediums, pencil only; pencil + Photoshop; all of the afforementioned + After Effects). One of the assignments was to make a long shot scene in an imaginary movie about Bonnie and Clyde. The scene should show the couple's car coming to a hold after the police shootout which killed them. I thought that the start of this scene, pretty idyllic, would serve as a nice contrast to the big action-packed shootout scene that supposedly came before.

Bonnie and Clyde layout:

Batman layout:

Iron Giant layout:

Dialogue Animation: The Cat Who Hated People

The result of 8 days of learning about dialogue in animation with Alberto Campos (Spacejam, Flat World, Laura's Star) as the teacher. I fell like I could have done a lot of things differently and the scene sort of became whatever it wanted to be, dispite the fact that I tried to take control of it and make some big changes from time to time (I was the only one working on it but the tone of the voice combined with the charater - both were things I HAD to use - proved to be big factors in validating my descisions).

Introduction to After Effects: A Blaze Through the Northern Sky

For the past three days I've attended an introductionairy course to the program After Effects. One of our assignments, namely this one, was to take a picture of the cathedral here in Viborg and make a UFO appear in the scene. I went for a very cliche-Indepenpence-Day-approach and decided to just blow up the house of God which is why I thought it apt to name the "movie" after a famous black metal record, A Blaze Through the Northern Sky.

Clean-Up: Scene from "The Story of Animation"

This week we did digital clean-up of our Bird Animation Cycles as well as this scene from the as of yet done-for-a-year-but-still-unrealeased promotional film, "The Story of Animation". I got the hang of it after a couple of hours and since we had a whole week to do it, I easily managed to squeeze in time to colour and put together this fancy before-and-after clip with titles that are part of the animation. It should come as a surprise to no one that digital clean-up is more of a labouring task that a creative challenge, however, it was a nice slow start after winter vacation.

Mid-Year Test - 1st year Bachelor in Character Animation

Assignment Discription:
"Students animate the character Danny from "Cat's Don't Dance" reacting with a take when he sees a scorpion on the street.
The scene must be 75 frames long and you have three to complete the assignment.
You will recieve [4] storyboard drawings as key poses, a background and model sheets."

This is the result of a 3-day test we just had. Unfortunately, I only had two days to do the test, as I mixed up some dates and gave away my third work day before deadline to wholly different matters (vacataion). But seriously, I'm sad that the whole thing was so unorganized both from my own and the school's side. But what is done is done an in the end, I'm actually really pleased with the animation I did manage to create. Unorganized as the whole assignment setup may have been, I blame it on a good workflow that I was able to finish the assignment in just two days.

Dance Animation: Candy Shop Gurl

For the past two weeks, we've had Mike Nguyen as our teacher (although he prefers that we call him "friend"). He is a very inspiring person and it was only fitting that such a big-hearted man took us through the Dance Animation Course as it is a kind of animation that requires the animator to really feel what's acted out. It was a lot of fun and very educational. A real win/win deal.

Mid Year Showreel - 1st year CA at The Animation Workshop

A closer look at the requirements for our Mid Year Showreel made me realize just how much material I was missing in my previous attempt at creating a showreel. This stretches back even further than the old one and it also has some newer material plus more of the all stuff inbetween. There is no sparetime drawings/animations in this but it is a very comprehensive collection of pretty much everything School I've done during my first 5 months at the Character Animation education at The animation Workshop.

Design 2

This week I had my second week of design. Concepts such as value, rendering and space were added to our previous lectures about shape, form and staging, and we went from having worked on a strictly abstract/graphic level to working towards fully rendered FINISHED pieces of Photoshop art. It was a huge leap and everyone in class (us Character Animators who are even more unexperienced than the CGA part of the class especially) are looking forward to a well-deserved weekend.

"Flower Power Fairy Metropolis" (13th of January 2012)

"A Chase Scene In a Steam Punk/Film Noir Environment" (12th of January 2012)

"Weapons For Atlantis" (10th of Januray 2012)

Note: All of the pictures are still unfinished but they show the progress I made during the week. As shown by the dates, I did the bottom one at the beginning of the week, the middle one next and the top one last.

Showreel - First Attempt

This is my first ever attempt at creating a showreel. i made it for school but it's not due untill Febuary, so by then, I'll most likely upload another reel with even more animations in it. The school requires our first showreel to show the progress we've been making during the first semester. Hence, the contents of this reel are, on purpose, both good and bad; it's every animation based school assignment I've had for the past 4 months.