Six months ago, I started work on my first short film. The story went through numerous revisions and even changed a few weeks before the animation was to be completed. It was a grueling six month exercise and I must say that I learned a ton. Trying to finish a 1.5 minute short in 6 months while animating at work, is not recommended. Sticking with something around 45 seconds is a much better idea, unless you decide to quit your job to work on it. There are just not enough hours in the evenings to finish 1.5 minutes of animation in such a short amount of time.

Like my two person dialogue shot entry, I'd like to take you through the various steps in the making of my short film. Please keep in mind that this is still a work in progress. I have only made it to step 11. Over the next month, I will finish it and post it in a separate entry.

Here are the steps in order:
1. Brainstorm and write down a number of different stories
2. Narrow the stories down to 5 of the best ones
3. Choose the top 2 ideas, refine them, and pitch them to the class
4. Choose the best story, develop it, and then pitch it to the class again.
5. Storyboard the whole film.
6. Create an animatic with the storyboard panels and a scratch track
7. Layout the entire film with the set, props and character
8. Blocking Pass
9. Blocking Plus Pass
10. First Polish Pass
11. Second Polish Pass
12. Final Polish Pass
13. Replace scratch track with final sound and music
14. Lighting/Rendering
15. Compositing

As you can see, there are quite a few steps involved in making a short film. Steps 5 through 11 each took 3 weeks to complete, so a lot of time is involved as well. I hope you enjoy the following videos that show the end product of each step. You might want to watch the last video first and then go back and see how the short evolved. Enjoy!

Step 2 Written Pitches

Buried Treasure

We open with a pirate on a large flat beach standing next to a treasure chest with a shovel looking around to see if anyone is watching. Once he’s certain that he’s not being watched, he begins to dig a hole in the sand. He digs part of the hole and then moves on to the other side. As he’s digging with his back to the other side of the hole, the sand slides back in. When he finishes with second half, he’s surprised that the first half has filled back up. He digs out the first half again, but the second half fill up. He discovers that the sand will only slide back in when he’s not watching, so tries digging one half of the hole while looking at the other. The side that he’s digging this time is constantly filling back up after every scoop. He looks back at the half that he was digging and the other half fills back up again. Frustrated, he tries putting in vertical wood planks to keep the sand out. This works, so he finishes the hole, goes out, grabs his treasure chest and is about to lift it, when the hole fills up with water. The moral of the story is “think before you do something”

Coconuts

We open with a thirsty man stranded on a deserted island near a coconut tree. A coconut falls to the ground beside him. He excitedly tries to open it up to get the milk. He tries using a shell, then a tree branch, then a rock, but with not luck. He tries climbing the coconut tree and throwing the coconut hard to the ground, but it still doesn’t break. Finally he rigs the tree like a catapult and places his coconut on top and launches it straight into the air. Unfortunately when he does this, all of the coconuts in the tree are launched straight up into the air and then come raining down on him. He runs around trying to avoid them, but finally one of them hits him square on the top of the head, driving his whole body into the sand, leaving just his head above the sand. The coconut that hit his head has cracked open next to him and he’s so excited. He tries to move, but he finds that he’s hopelessly stuck in the sand, unable to move. The moral of the story is “think before you do something stupid.”

Flees

We open with a very itchy middle aged man in the bathroom of his apartment with a box of flee powder on the counter. He sprinkles the powder over his body until the itching stops. And then, the flees are pissed. They begin to jump off his body and then bounce back and beat him up. It feels as though he’s in a fight with an invisible opponent. He tries to defend himself by punching or swatting them as they came at him, but to no avail. Until finally he’s hit so hard in the head that he’s knocked to the ground. Dazed, he grabs the powder from off the counter and tosses it into the trash. We close with him battered and broken, sitting against a wall scratching himself. The moral of the story is “be considerate of others.”

The Collector

We open with a very sleepy man sitting at his breakfast table pouring a bowl of cereal. When his bowl is nearly full, a toy rolls out and lands in his bowl. He perks up and grabs the toy. He falls hopelessly in love with the toy. As he’s playing with it, he glances over and sees that the box says “collect all three”. Even more excited, he runs out to buy two more boxes of cereal (this is done all off screen). Back to the table again, he opens one box, reaches in through the cereal and pulls out a toy from the bottom of the box. It’s the second of three. He then opens the last box only to find that it’s the same toy as the first. He runs off to the store to buy 5 more boxes only to find that they are the same as the first two toys. He keeps going in this cycle until he has a table full of toys and he’s opening his last box. Inside he finds the last toy. He’s really excited, but he happens to glance at the latest box and notices that they have added an all new fourth toy. Dejected, he slams his head down on the table, and we pull back to reveal the wall of cereal boxes next to his table. The motion of his head hitting the table causes the wall of cereal to eventually fall like a tidal wave on top of him. The moral of the story is “don’t get pulled into advertising schemes.

Jogger

We open with a professionally equipped yet overweight jogger stretching before a run in his front yard. He stretches all his major muscle groups thoroughly and looks quite confident. He sets off jogging with grace and good form. We fade out and then back in to find him extremely exhausted and his form has completely broken down to where he’s barely moving. Finally he arrives at his destination, a donut shop, and we pull back to reveal that his house is next door to the shop. The moral of the story is “things aren’t away as they seem”

Step 4 Final Story Pitch:

Step 6 Animatic:

Step 7 Layout:

Step 8 Blocking Pass:

Step 9 Blocking Plus Pass:

Step 10 First Polish Pass:

Step 11 Second Polish Pass:

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are some more facial poses that I did in the later sessions of class 4:

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m back…..again….. I haven’t been able to keep this blog going because it’s been a really stressful 4th term. This term really lived up to it’s reputation as one of the most difficult in the program. Trying to finish a one person dialogue shot is hard enough, but a two person dialogue shot is a whole other ball of wax. I was really thankful for my class because it was loaded with talent. We had four working animators and by the end of the term two students had internships at Pixar and Rhythm and Hues. After almost a year of going to school and having no life I was starting to burn out. It was really hard to find motivation. Every time I got home from work, I had no desire to animate. Being in such a talented class really motivated me to try harder though.

So I’d like to do something a little bit different. Instead of trying to making posts for each of the weeks that I missed this term, I thought I’d just show the progression of my last shot by posting all of my assignments below from video reference (first) all the way through to the final (last):

Step 4 Pitch:

Step 7 Layout:

Step 8 Blocking Pass:

Step 9 Blocking Plus Pass:

Step 10 First Polish Pass:

Step 10 Second Polish Pass:

Step 11 Final Polish Pass:

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Another week and another eye opening lecture. This time it was about design applied to animation by Mark Oftedal. He breaks design down to it's more basic elements. He shows how a simple triangle in frame can invoke different emotions depending on where it's placed and how its oriented. Then he adds a square to establish a relationship and shows how moving these around in the frame can change the relationship. Fascinating stuff! Then he describes to us a scene from Toy Story where Woody and Buzz are arguing. He shows us how their posture and relationship to each other in frame, subconsciously directs the viewers eye to the point of interest and invokes an emotional response. Wow, I had know idea that I was being manipulated like that. This lecture and the previous one about making cuts really opened my eyes into the world of manipulation. It's amazing what people know about how the brain reacts to visuals. They know exactly how to play with your mind and get a desired response.

Anywho....below I present to you my assignment. Once again you will find facial expression practice poses and for the first time I give to you my first finalled dialogue shot ever! Enjoy. It took many many weeks to get through the whole process and tomorrow I start it all over again. This time with a dialogue piece involving two characters.....yikes! This should be interesting. By the way, this next assignment is the last assignment of the term, so for the next 7 weeks I will bore you with revision after revision. Interestingly enough, this is the last assignment before I begin work on my first short film (Term 5 and 6). I'm actually looking forward to starting on my film now. I used to fear the coming of Term 5, but after all these short shots, I'm looking forward to being able to tell a proper story.

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but this week’s lecture was awesome. We learned about storytelling though cuts from Patrick Kriwanek. Patrick is an editor for film and he told us all about when and while to make cuts in a scene. A cut is basically when you switch from one camera to another during a shot. When and how you do it is very important. In fact, there are set rules that everyone in the industry follows. If you break them, you’re audience will feel uncomfortable. Sometimes filmmakers will break the rules, however, when the desired effect is to make the audience uncomfortable…..like in a horror/suspense film. Anyway, really cool stuff. I can’t wait to use it in my next shot (a dialogue shot with two characters interacting with each other….yikes!)

This week we took our facial animation out of blocking and into the refined stage. I must say that the first time that I saw this version, I couldn’t stop smiling. This was a culmination of 7 weeks of work and for the first time, I got to see the fruits of my labor. I can’t believe I’m almost done with my first ever dialogue shot! Just one more polish pass, and I get to put this shot to rest.

The other part of this weeks assignment was to find two facial expressions in magazines or the web and try to duplicate them with Bishop. We will do a number of these throughout this term to give us some practice recreating facial expressions. They’re really fun to do too!

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And without further ado….Term 4 – Advanced Acting! My new mentor is Greg Whittaker (Dreamworks). He worked on one of my all time favorite movies: Flushed Away! So cool! I know I’m going to learned a lot from him too. His whole philosophy is simple and snappy, both of which I need a lot of help with.

This week’s lecture was and introduction to facial expressions by Chris Hurtt. This guy was awesome! He was real life caricature. He had these thick eyebrows that were constantly moving around and seemed to have a life of their own. The lecture was great. All this facial animation stuff is totally new to me, so I have taking notes like crazy. This stuff is so useful.

This week our dreams finally came true…….we got the full Bishop rig with full facial setup. Wow, there are so many controls to worry about. This guy has everything. He has so much control that I’m both excited and worried. How am I do this?! There seems to be more controls in the face than there are in the body. This is going to be hard. I’m really glad that the rig is organized so well or else I would be totally lost. Plus AM gave us a video tutorial explaining all the controls. On top of that, Bobby gave us a video walkthrough of how he approaches facial animation and lip sync. His walkthrough was eye opening. He made facial animation seem attainable. He broke everything down and sort of demystified the whole process. After watching it, the fear subsided a bit.

For the assignment, we were supposed to sketch thumbnails and film reference for the face only. This was fun and a little embarrassing because I…….can’t act. I’m hoping that I can pull something out it. Here ya go. Feel free to laugh or cringe or vomit….

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week was just a recap of everything from term 3. I blew it again this week because I’ve turned into a super slacker and this term ended on a Friday instead of a Sunday. But that’s just an excuse. I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute.

This week’s assignment was to upload a progress reel of all the work this term. And away we go.

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I totally blew it this week. I turned into a total slacker and missed the lecture all together. It was a lecture about Sincerity from Mark Henn and from what I heard, it was awesome! Doh! Luckily, I have a friend in AM that is one term behind me. I can wait until he gets to this lecture and watch it with him. Unfortunately, I have to wait 3 months.

This week, the assignment was to finish the body animation with a final polish pass. Here is the latest. In just a couple of weeks, we get the full Bishop character with facial controls! Yeah! I can’t wait!

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey remember when I said “wow!” about the eyes/blinks lecture? Well this is an even bigger WOW! This lecture opened my eyes! This was a lecture about Hands by Charles Alleneck. I really wished I had seen this sooner because I had no idea how to animate hands. I never put too much thought into my hand animation and then I wondered why my hands felt so lifeless. Charles teaches us it’s a really bad idea to just block out the body and then worry about the hands later on when the shot is more refined. Bad idea. We should make sure that while we are blocking the body, we pose the hands until they look right. Hands play a huge part in acting and they should never be glossed over. In fact, bad/lifeless hands can really kill a shot. Man, great stuff!

This week, the assignment was to begin polishing the shot. Enjoy

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This weeks lecture was about Entertainment by Mike Thurmeier. I wasn’t able to finish it, but what I did learn was important. I learned that entertainment was character driven and that it’s important to know what the character is doing before and after the shot you’re working on. Also, everything you character does must be believable and feel real. This ensures that the audience with be able to related to the character because he/she is doing something that we could all see ourselves do at one time or another.

The assignment: take our shot out of blocking and begin refining. Here’s what I came up with.

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow, what a great lecture. This week we learned about animating eyes and blinks from Jason Ryan. I didn’t realize how important the eyes were and how much thought needs to go into them. It’s amazing how you can use blinks at different times to change an emotion. Also the speed of a blink can drastically change the emotion. For example, a slow blink could indicate the character is tired or sad. We also learned a number of key tips/tricks including the number of frames for the eye to close/open and the many different ways an eye can transition from open to closed and vice versa. Wow, great stuff.

The assignment: take our shot from blocking to blocking plus. That basically means more refined blocking with more breakdowns and transitions. Here goes:

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, this week was part 2 of Delio’s lecture. To be honest, it’s been so long since I watch this part and I can’t remember what he talked about. Guess I’ll have to go back and read my notes again.

This week we were given a new character called “Bishop.” I was so excited to get him too! I had seen some of the previous students shots using this character and I was amazed at the range he had. This was the character that I think most of us were dying to get are hands on. There was only one hitch……this version of Bishop had his facial controls locked off. Doh! Actually it’s a really good idea to do that. Basically it forces us to get the emotion across with the body first and then the facial animation is just icing on the cake. Many beginning animators rely on the facial animation to get an emotion across, but then your animation is only so-so. If the body is clearly showing an emotion and then the facial is merely adding to that, you are going to have one really strong animation. So for the rest of this term, I will be working on this dialogue shot without facial controls. The only controls I will have in the face are: the eyes and the mouth (open and close only….like a puppet).

This week we were in charge of taking one of our clips and blocking out the shot with Bishop. I ended up choosing the Dumb and Dumber clip because it had a lot of potential for some great expressions. The Tommy Boy clip (“Which one you want….”) was eliminated because laughs are really hard to animate and since I don’t even know how to do dialogue, I shouldn’t try to take on more of challenge than I already had. The Half Baked clip (“All my life….”) was a close second, but since my mentor didn’t particularly like this one and I had no preference, I decided to go with the Dumb and Dumber clip. Alrighty then, here’s my first blocking pass:

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week Delio Tramantozzi gave us a lecture on how to approach dialogue. The whole lecture was a walk through of how he animated a dialogue shot from start to finish. Definitely a cool lecture and I learned a ton. I was surprised at the number of times he said he would listen to the dialogue, but since then, I’ve listened to my shot well over 2000 times. Yikes! It gets to the point where you are beyond sick of hearing it and you’re numb. Animating sounds like fun, eh?

For this weeks assignment we were in charge of finding 3 audio clips from whatever source we preferred. I ended up finding clips from Tommy Boy, Dumb and Dumber, and Half Baked. It was really hard finding the right clip that I could still tolerate after working on it for 8 weeks. In addition to finding the clips, we had to sketch thumbnails and film video reference for each clip. I apologize for sync issues with my reference, but I didn’t have my roommate’s camera as I always have had in the past. He went on vacation and took it with him, so I had to film with my webcam and then composite the sound. Unfortunately my webcam doesn’t seem to film in realtime, so it plays slower than the audio. Oh well. Enjoy.

Posted by Danny Southard at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week they talked about phrasing. This is the area that I think I need the most help in. The lecture gave me some good information on how to plan the phrasing of a shot as early as the thumbnail stage. I have always been disappointed with the phrasing of my shots and I think it's because I don't plan everything out before hand. Planning it out at an early stage allows you to explore different possibilities relatively easily. For my next shot, I'm going to spend more time planning and resist the temptation to push ahead.

Speaking of bad phrasing, here is the final version of my begging shot. I may have a revision next week, so it might not be finished. We'll see. Next week I start on my first dialogue shot! Plus I get a new character! I'm really excited.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBacks (0)

This week was all about secondary action. These are actions or gestures that support the main action. In other words, secondary actions are mannerisms or subtle actions that show the characters personality or emotional state. An example ----> A man fidgets with his hands while he delivers a line of dialogue to show he's nervous. The most important thing about secondary actions is that they cannot distract from the main action. Once they do, it kills the shot because the audience doesn't know what to look at. Another important thing is that the mannerisms must fit the character and the mood. Actually there were a lot of important points brought up in the lecture, but I can't remember them all. That's why I've got plenty of notes.

Here is the polished version of my shot. If I have time next week, I might try to improve on some areas. Next week we start on our first dialogue shot! I can't wait!!!!!!

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week they talked about gestures. The lecture was a long and informative one. I learned a lot and I can't wait to try some of it out on my next shot. Once again we were told to stay away from cliche when it comes to gestures. Also, its really important to not overuse gestures and to make sure they fit the personality/mood of the character.

Anywho, here is my refined version of my shot. Please ignore the knees and elbows. Maya is doing some strange inbetweening so I'll probably need to key them on most of the frames. I wanted to make sure that my ideas read first before I start putting in a ton of keys that I won't be able to move around. There are a few more problem areas that I will fix once overall shot gets the go ahead.

Posted by Danny Southard at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow what a busy week! I had some unexpected things pop up that kept me busy for a while (I'll explain in a week or two)). I really didn't have much time for blocking out my shot unfortunately. I had to turn it in unfinished which really sucked. Actually I thought it was finished and then I got some good advice for some of the other students and my mentor. I had to rework a large part of the shot, so that took up much of my time. I'm definitely going to have to play catch up next week. Anyway, here is the latest version. Sorry I don't have time to write much else. Things will hopefully be back to normal after next week.

Oh and they talked about phrasing this week. It definitely was an interesting lecture that I think will come in handy when I revise this shot again. I wish I had seen this lecture before starting this shot because I would have done some things differently. Oh well.

Posted by Danny Southard at 8:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, the break is over and AM is back in full swing. It was a nice relaxing break and I enjoyed every minute of it, but I was dying to get back to animating. I found myself visiting the AM thread at CGtalk several times daily to find out all the latest info. It felt like it was my first term and I couldn't wait to get started. Anyway, now I'm in and starting my third term: Intro to Acting. This is what a lot of us have been waiting for. Now we have a chance to showoff or discover our acting skills. I'm a little nervous because I'm not sure if can act. I really wish I had taken an acting class at some point during high school or college, but I was just plain chicken. Ya know, thats what they say.....animators are just actors who are too chicken to get on stage.

My mentor this time around is Keith Sintay. He's been in the business since The Lion King! Wow! Its going to be a blast learning from him.

The lecture this week covered various topics in acting for animation. It's an epic lecture so it took me a while to get through it. Overall it was really informative. If it's any indications of the types of lectures this term, I'm going to learn a ton in these next 12 weeks. I'm really excited.

We started this term running as we got our first assignment on day one. The object of this assignment is to create a scene with one character with two beats. This essentially means that the character must go through one emotion change. We have 120-250 frames to do so and on this assignment they are stressing the importance of staying within the time limit. Previously they were a bit lenient and some of the assignments ballooned to twice the frame limit. This sort of thing wouldn't be allowed in a studio because they aren't going to change the film just to accommodate your epic shot.

For my shot, I chose to keep it simple. I wanted to try to animate a more serious shot with this assignment as well. I chose to animate a down-and-out character begging for money. While it may turn out to be funny anyway, I chose to exaggerate some of the movements to try and lighten the mood. Anyway, we'll see how is comes out. Here is my video reference and thumbnail pages. Next week, blocking.

Posted by Danny Southard at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This week, we learned a little more about clarity. Much of it talked about how to clear posing and simplification of the action can really make things more clear. They also touched on overlapping ideas to make each action feels as though its connected. Lets see....actually its been a week since I've watched the lecture, so I'm a little fuzzy on the specifics. I'll check my notes later and see if I missed anything.

Well, this was the final week for my box pushing animation. It's changed slightly from the last version. Again, I'm not completely happy with it. There are some parts of it that I really like and others that I couldn't seem to figure out how to fix. Despite the problems, I'm not touching this thing again. See the final version below.

I'm really excited because AM is doing another Student Showcase this winter. They pick some of the top student's work and put together a montage to show the public what the school is capable of generating. Its a really good opportunity, because several people that made the Summer Showcase are now working at major studios. It's not a guarantee, but its a great way to get exposure. I'm not that confident about getting any of my shots accepted because there are some really amazing shots that were created since the last showcase. I've seen many shots that are better than mine, so it will be a miracle if I get in. We'll see.

Matthew Coffin, an AM classmate, wants to have a unofficial winter break session and try to create something that we could submit for the showcase. I was kind of leaning toward taking a break for the next three weeks, but I'm not sure if I can go that long without animating. Hmmm.....I'll have to give that some thought.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow, what a week! This shot was by far the hardest to smooth out. I'm not sure how many hours I spent on it, but I don't remember doing much else this last week. After working on it all week, on Saturday I worked on it from 9am - 6pm. Toward the end, I thought I was going to go insane. I really need to break theses shots into sections so I can work on one piece at a time. Otherwise its really overwhelming. Its amazing how much work goes into 14 seconds. I guess as I get more experience it'll get easier. Maybe.

Anyway, this week the lecture was about advanced arcs. More specifically they talked about how things often move in figure-8s. I'll have to incorporate some figure-8s into my next shot in Term 3 and see if it can help spice things up.

So here is my latest version of my current shot. This week, I'm going to work on making some minor changes and smoothing out the whole shot. The final version is due on Sunday at noon. The following week (last week of term 2) will be an easy one, as all I have to do is put together another progress reel.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well this week was all about animating animals and creatures. As always, Rick O'Conner put together an interesting lecture. For those of you non-AMers, Rick O'Conner likes making his lectures look like movies. He puts in camera angles, cuts, and special effects. They are usually cheesy, but definitely fun to watch. This week's lecture was a short one and the first 1/3 of it had nothing to do with the topic at hand, but I definitely got some good info out of it. The animal stuff was mostly a review for me because I had taken an animal drawing for animation class at DeAnza. There still was some new stuff and the info on insects and creatures was really interesting.

The first 1/3 of the lecture, while having nothing to do with animals or creatures, was enlightening. It basically was an animator taking about how you "establish yourself" at a studio or on a show (studio-speak for "film"). He said at first you will get a bunch of small, not so interesting parts of shots to work on. No matter how boring they may be, you should work your butt off to get those finished as fast and thoroughly as possible. After a while of doing this you will have demonstrated that you can get things done in a timely fashion. At that point if you feel comfortable enough you might ask for an interesting shot. Usually it would be one that you've had your sights on for a while and you know exactly what you want to do with it. If you get lucky and they agree, then you have to hit that shot out of the ballpark. You have to nail it or its back to square one. If you indeed nail it, then the director or supervising animator will be more likely to give you more interesting shots because they can trust you to do a good job. It makes sense. Very cool stuff.

Anyway, here is the new and improved version of my shot. I re-blocked some of the actions and shuffled some stuff around to make it more clear and interesting. I have only 2 more week to finish this shot......yikes!

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Oops! I just realized that I summed up Session 208's lecture in my Session 207 entry. Guess that means that I should talk about what happened in Session 207.

The lecture was all about staging. This is basically how you compose your shot. Much like a painting, how you arrange the elements in your shot can greatly effect how your shot is perceived. There was some really interesting info on camera angles and how they effect the mood of the piece. Essentially, there are psychological methods that filmmakers use that can subconsciously effect how the viewer feels during the shot. Its pure mind control.....I love it!

Here is my first blocking pass. Its kind of rough in spots. Some of the actions don't read very well, especially the first two. I imagine this will be changing considerable in the next iteration because I'm not really happy the shot as a whole. It's a bit boring. Anyway, here it is:

Enjoy...

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week we learned about advanced timing. Much of it had to do with contrast in timing. Having all of the actions in your scene occur at the same speed can really make for a boring piece. Mixing it up by having fast, normal and slow actions can really make your animation more appealing. Victor had already mentioned this in my critiques and previous lectures had briefly mentioned this as well. They use words like phrasing and texture to describe different aspects of timing. Phrasing describes the timing as a whole. Texture is a way of describing the variation in timing throughout the scene. Much like bumps or variations on the surface of a material which is also known as texture. Ideally you would like your animation to have excellent phrasing. You do this by adding variation in the timing, thus adding texture, but in a way that works well as a whole. Just randomly changing the timing on certain objects will usually not work. You really need to plan the variation wisely.

Anyway, this week we planned out our new shots. I chose to animate a character pushing a heavy object. The heavy object was provided to us and it's basically an odd shaped box with a handle. It looks like a misshapen shopping cart with no wheels. You'll get to see what it looks like next week, when I finish with the blocking phase. So for now I leave you with my reference footage and thumbnails.

Posted by Danny Southard at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest. I incorporated Victor's comments and I think they helped tremendously. There are still some issues with the render, but I'm fairly happy with the animation. Now on to my next shot: A character pushing a heavy object. This will be the last shot of the term.

Enjoy...

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, this week we covered the topic of force. Its another very important topic that I need to make sure to put in my animation. I didn't get a whole lot out of the lecture, but I don't know if I was fully paying attention when I watched it. I definitely will watch it again if I have time. What I did get out of it was that there is force behind every movement and most movements are complex. For instance, if you lift your arm, you have to think about what the rest of the body is doing and how it is effected by the arm's movement. The force to move that arm must originate from somewhere in the body.

Another cool thing I learned was that it is possible to show force in something as simple as thumbnails. When drawing, darken the leading edge of whatever is moving. This will give the impression of movement and the force behind it. Also if one object is in contact with another, darken the edges that are touching. For example, if you're pushing on a wall with your hands, darken the edge of your hands that are touching the wall. Again this will give the impression that you're applying force to the wall.

As for the assigment, this week we were supposed to continue with our shots. If our blocking needed major revision, than all that was neccessary was to turned in a revised blocking version. If our shots required very little revision, we were allowed to come out of blocking and get as far as we could in refining or polishing. I hope I didn't get to ahead of myself with this one. I already put in a ton of keys, making it hard to make significant changes. So if major revisions are neccessary, I may be in trouble. I'll cross my fingers.

Here it is......

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This week we learned about balance. It's a really important concept that can kill an animation if it's off. They talked more about the center line again. In a previous lecture, we learned that during a walk if you can draw a line straight down from the neck to the ankle that is supporting all of the weight, then the character is in balance. In this lecture they talked about how this center line moves around depending on how much weight is on either feet. If your weight is squarely over both feet, then the center line is from the neck down to the ground between your feet. Additionally, if you want to have a character in balance, the mass of your body must be equal on either side of the center line. If you want a character to move in any direction, you must first put him off balance by putting more of his weight on one side of the center line.

When analyzing reference footage, its helpful to find out where the center line is during the whole movement and to pay attention to how much of the character's mass in on either side. This week we watched some interesting footage of a person picking up a heavy object. The center line moved in the footage, but not in a way that I had expected. What I didn't realize was that when you are carrying an object, that object's mass combines with your mass. Thus in order to maintain balance, if the object is resided on one side of the center line, then you must put more of your body mass on the opposite side in order to compensate for the additional weight. I never thought of it that way, but it makes total sense. That concept is really going to help me in the future. Man! I am learning so much this term!

We continued with our shots this week, taking them from thumbnails to blocking. My thumbnails were fairly bare, so I needed to add a number of keys and breakdowns to get the motion right in my blocking. I also had to make some changes because I only have 4 posts in my thumbnails, but there are 5 posts in the actual set. I totally blew it. I quickly glanced at the set, thought I had it memorized, and a few days later started thumbnailing. I really need to pay closer attention to the set next time. If the set was drastically different, I might have been in trouble. Its a good thing that the set is just five posts and not some complex set with tons of props. Anyway, enjoy the blocking if you can. I'll be smoothing this one out all week and finishing any neccessary revisions by the end of the following week.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This last week's lecture was jam-packed, to put it lightly. The topic was locomotion. It covered vertical motion, horizontal motion, fulcrums, center lines, weight shift and much much more! It was a real eye opener. The idea that everything pivots on fulcrums and the location of the fulcrum can change throughout a movement, was an oh-snap-thats-it moment! Then he went on to explain that there is a center line that runs vertically from top to bottom of your character and in order to stay in balance, the mass of the character must be equal on both sides. The center-line-mass idea really blew my mind. What a really informative lecture!

Now that I have finished my 180 turn shot, we are moving on to our next shot. This time we had another list of possible shots to do of which I chose to animate a character walking/jumping across the tops of four posts. The posts are a lot like telephone poles of differing diameters. This week, I had to shoot my reference and come up with some thumbnails. This assignment should be fun and challenging because we have a new character this time. His name is Stewie and he is essentially the same charcter I used in my first term still poses but without arms. Its the first time we have had the chance to animat a character with an upper body. In our last assignment of the term, starting in week 7, we get to use the same character but that time he will have arms. That will be the most challenging yet. Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyway, enjoy my planning stuff.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a really helpful video critique from Victor on Sunday. He pointed out list of things to fix and after fixing them, the shot looks a whole lot better. Well, in my opinion it looks better. The first half doesn't bother me as much. My favorite criticism was about the last leg lift. Victor said it looked like a dog scratching itself. Ha Ha! It really did. Check out my last post and see for yourself.

Anyway, hopefully this is the last or at least the second to last revision for this shot. Frankly, I'm ready to move on. The next assignment, which I will talk about more at the end of the week, involves a full body character (minus arms) who needs to jump across a series of circular platforms (like the tops of telephone poles).

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a quick update: This week we finished our shots, taking them from blocking all the way to the end. It was a ton of work and I can't say I'm totally satisfied with the end result. I discoved that I really didn't like the slow timing of the first half of the shot. I would have preferred that the timing was a little more varied and snappy. I realized this too late, however, because I had way to many keys and it would be incredibly difficult to try and move them around now. I guess I should have seen this during the blocking phase, where its very easy to adjust the timing.

Anyway, lecture was great this week. They talked about advanced overlapping action and anticipation. Lots of notes.

Posted by Danny Southard at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Week 2 is over and I'm just waiting around for AM to put week 3's lecture up so I can get started. I'm a little worried this coming week, because I have to finish this shot. 200 frames is a lot of frames to connect and polish. It should be a crazy week. Anyway, this last week we learned about basic posing. I have always had a hard time with posing and this weeks lecture gave us some rules and guidelines to making stronger, more readible poses. There was a lot of really good info in this lecture.

This week's assignment was to take our planning thumbnails and block out the shot in Maya. It took me forever to finish. First I copied the poses from my thumbnails, then I tried to adjust them based on the rules that we learned this week. Finally I spent some time moving poses around on the timeline to see if I could improve the timing. I got a lot of good critiques from my fellow students and as a result, I ended up with many revisions. Below is the latest revision.

Tonight Victor will critique my blocking. I think it's awesome that he does the critique the same day that we turned it in. By doing that, he gives us the whole week to work on our shot. And I'm gonna need it. My previous mentor did our critiques on Tues night, so we had 2 less days to incorporate his comments and finish the shot.

Anyway, got to go. The new lecture should be up by now.

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sunday at noon, the first term was officially over. Term 2 began on Monday at noon. No rest for any of us. Thats ok cause I would probably go crazy if I had to wait. This term they didn't waste any time. We had an assignment due at the end of the first week. This, like many of my future assigments, is going to be a multiweek assigment. We are supposed to pick from a short list of actions and I chose "A character turning around 180 degrees." Its pretty general, so we are free to come up with our own ideas as to how Ballie is going to accomplish this. I started filming myself doing various things, but nothing really stuck out for me. I decided to do some cheesy dance steps. Below is the reference material that I ended up with. The moves are a bit too subdued, so I'm hoping to push the poses a bit to try and make it more lively. Also below are the thumbnails that I generated from the reference. I think they are too subdued as well, so I'll probably have to work on them some more. Anyway, enjoy.

Posted by Danny Southard at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well the term is over. It really has gone by so fast. I learned way more than I thought I would. It turns out that I really didn’t know the basics as well as I thought. I’m really excited about next term, Body Mechanics. I just found out today that my new mentor for next term is Victor Navone. He’s a really sweet animator at Pixar who’s worked there since Monster’s Inc. I watched his progress reels from each film on his website www.navone.org, and his stuff is amazing. I can’t wait to learn from him!

This week our assignment was to upload a progress reel of all of our work from Term 1. I didn’t have a chance to see everyone’s Term 1 work throughout the term, so this will give me a chance to catch up. I really wished I had time to go through everyone’s workspaces and watch their mentor critiques of their work. This would be chock full of great information, but there are just too many students and too many weeks worth of critiques.

The next term starts this Sunday, so there won’t be a break. I’ll have new stuff every week until Christmas. This next term will be a little different than this one. I will only be completing 3 shots compared to 8 shots this term. It will be more work though, because these shots will be way more intricate. We will get several weeks to complete each shot, so updates on my blog might be a little tedious as I show small improvements from each week. Hopefully someone will find it interesting to watch the shots progress.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week we took an in-depth look at the hips. This is an area that I have always had a hard time with and hopefully by the end of next term I’ll have a better understanding of it. I don’t know how to summarize what I learned this class as it was very visual. We went over a lot of reference video watching what the hips were doing during different movements. The take home message here was that almost all body movement starts in the hips.

The assignment this week was to take either our vanilla walk or our character walk and animate it in ¾ perspective. I chose my character walk because I wanted to work on it further to see if I could fix it. It turns out that I still couldn’t get it right, but here it is.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that we have a vanilla walk under out belts, this week were supposed to plan out and animate a character walk of our choosing. The lecture this week focused on all types of different character walks. Its amazing how little changes can completely change the emotion and weight out a character.

Here is my attempt at a character walk. It’s a pimp limp type of walk and I had a hard time with it. As you can see from my reference, I’m still not getting it right. Hopefully I can get some good advice from Teach.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Only three more weeks and my first term at AM is over! Yikes! This week we learned about exaggeration. It’s a principle that can really sell a shot or spice things up. The take home message here is that if you take video reference and then animate you character exactly like the reference, your animation is going to bore the crap out of people. You need to exaggerate the movement to put life into it. How much exaggeration to add depends on the shot. Cartoony animation is the extreme of that, but even the most realistic movement needs to be exaggerated.

The assignment this week was to take our blocked vanilla walks and fill in the rest of the frames. This is a long process of refining, refining, and more refining.

Here is my attempt at smoothing this puppy out.

Posted by Danny Southard at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week, we had to animate a character called "Ballie." He's basically a ball with legs. We were supposed to animate him doing a basic "vanilla" walk. This is a walk with no personality and even timing. This is a two parter, so for this week we only needed to get as far as blocking. Blocking is just your main poses and breakdowns without any animation. Next week, we will fill in what happens between the these poses, and then refine, refine, refine.

Anyway, if I have time I'll write more about this week later.

Posted by Danny Southard at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a little side tracked this week and decided to put together a progress reel for the work I've done so far in AM. Its not an impressive body of work by any means, but it was fun putting it together. You may notice that all of the shots look different. Thats because I spent some time rendering out each shot to make it look pretty. The shots that you've seen prior to this have been "playblasts." These are basically quick and dirty renders that are perfect for tweaking the animation. Then when you are happy with the animation, each shot is rendered out so that it looks pretty. These renders take much much longer than playblasts, so it ties up your computer for a while.

Anyway, I'm not entirely happy with everything so far. The obstacle course shot is too dark, the first bouncing ball shot has some video glitches and some of the poses need lighting help (all of the white background ones haven't been touched yet). Plus the music has some glitches in it also.

I'll be updating this reel at the end of the term, so check back later.

Update: This video has been removed. An updated version is located in the "Session 112" entry

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the week that I had been waiting for. Arcs and path of action! I had heard people mention this principle but I really didn't understand when to use it. It turns out that I should have been using it with just about every movement I animated. I'm sure I can already look back at my previous animation and laugh. I never thought about arcs and I think that is one of the many reasons why my previous work sucked. Man, I'm glad I decided to fork out the dough for AM, because I'm learning so much!

This week we were supposed to animate a ball with a tail. I tried to put arcs in everything in this one. Seriously, I've got to get back to work. Tootles

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week we learned about overlapping action. Its an interesting principle of animation that is so vital for making your animation loose and organic. The idea here is that when something moves not every part of that object moves at the same time. For example, when you swing your arm, you move your shoulder, then your elbow, then your wrist. Our assignment was to practice this idea by animating a pendulum moving across the screen. I had the hardest time getting the platform to move like it is now. I wrastled with the Graph Editor again for way too long. Anyway, got to get back to work.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week we learned about Anticipation and Squash & Stretch. The video lecture was pretty cool. To show the importance of anticipation they had a bunch of videos of people jumping, playing golf, throwing balls, etc, but they cut out all of the frames with anticipation in it. It was funny watching people jump in the air without crouching down first to store up energy for the jump. My favorite ones were of the person playing golf. He lined up for his shot and then all of a sudden he hit the ball without even pulling the club back. Funny stuff.

The squash & stretch stuff was interesting too. Most of it was review, but it was interesting to hear it again. I figure if I hear it enough times it should stick eventually.

The assignment this week was a long one. We were required to plan out and animate a basketball/soccerball bouncing through a provided obstacle course. Sounded pretty easy…..but it was by far the hardest assignment so far. I found myself cursing at and flipping off my monitor more times than I can remember in the hopes that Maya would cooperate. I fought the Graph Editor almost the whole time. Those damn curves wouldn’t go the way I wanted them. Sorry, for some of you none animators reading my blog…..wait does anyone besides my mom read my blog?.......anyway, for those of you that aren’t familiar with Maya, there is a Graph Editor that essentially shows all of your animation in the form of curves. It’s a hard tool to master because its really difficult to figure out what your animation is doing when you are staring at a bunch of curves on a graph. I’ve tried to avoid the graph editor as much as I could in the past and I think that’s partially why my animation has sucked. I’m glad we are starting off with something easy like a bouncing ball so I can learn to utilize the graph editor or at least fight it less.

With this assignment I blocked out everything in pose to pose and then adjusted my timing in the graph editor. Then I went back to the animation, put in my breakdowns, and returned to graph editor again. The rest of my time was spend here, tweaking points and tangents. For some of the animation, my pose to pose stuff was fine, but for a majority of it, I found that I was fighting to get it working right. I ended up throwing out most of my poses and working in a layered fashion, getting the timing of each component of the movement before moving on to the next. I worked on this bad mamma jamma for way too long and I’m happy to finally be finished with it. I learned a lot in this assignment, so hopefully if I have to do something like this in the future, I won’t do as much fight and cursing as I did this time.

The other parts of the assignment were to sketch some dynamic poses, sketch some devastating poses, and pose Stu is our favorite devastated pose. Man, finding poses this week was hard. Most of the magazines that I looked through didn’t have much of anything useful. I tried looking up pictures on the internet, but that was a bust because most people don’t label their pictures with “dynamic” or “devastated.” I would’ve probably been better off going to a softball game or watching people play in the park.

I apologize if this post is bit esoteric, but it would take a long time to explain everything and frankly I don’t think anyone would benefit from my ramblings about things like curves, tangents and the like. So with that, I give you……pretty pictures.

Posted by Danny Southard at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Week 4 down. This week we learned about good and bad timing. Its really cool that by just moving a few frames up or down the timeline you can really change the feeling of the animaiton. A heavy ball bouncing has totally different timing than a light ball.

Lets see, we also learned a bunch of definitions as well. Things like "velocity," momentum," and such. They want us all to speak the same language so we can better communicate our ideas to each other. It felt like I was reviewing for a physics class.

For the assignment, we were supposed to do an animation of two bouncing balls of different weights. Sounds pretty bland since we just did a bouncing ball animation last week, but surprisingly, it was a lot of fun! There was quite a spectrum of animations that the other students turned in. Some were pretty tame, and some were really ambitious. Overall, everyone did pretty well.

Doh! Its late! I'm off to bed. Here are my assignments for this session:

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't have a lot of time to talk about what happened this week, but I'll update this entry when I get a chance. I wanted to post my assignment and see if I can get a video to play in a post without the need for an external window.

Below are my sketches, pose and animation for this week:

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Week 2 down, many more fun filled weeks to go. This week our assigment was to go to a public place and sketch people in various poses and activities. After I had gone through the lecture and assignment videos, Sonia and I went down to the park in downtown San Mateo in the afternoon On a side note, the videos are super informative. The lectures vary in length from 30-60 minutes and they are taught by the founders of AM (Bobby Beck, Carlos Baena, or Shawn Kelly) (so far). They also include clips of other professional animators adding their thoughts to the topic at hand. Anyway, back to downtown San Mateo....man it was jumpin'! There were people of all ages playing soccer, volleyball, football, playing on the jungle gym, or just cooling out in the shade. I had a lot of material to work with, but it was still really difficult. I had a hard time capturing a pose on paper when everyone was constantly moving. Most of the time I would get about halfway through drawing the body and then they would move. For the life of me I couldn't remember what the rest of their bodies were doing before that. Even though I had problems, I still managed to get a few good poses in there. The next part of the assignment was to pick our favorite pose and, in Maya, pose "Stu" ( a character provided to us fully rigged by AM) like the sketch. It was pretty hard because my sketch wasn't very clear, so I wasn't sure what each limb was doing. That's something I need to work out more on paper before I go into Maya. Planning is key. Without planning you end up wasting time and your work looks a little crappy.

So after I was finished posing, I uploaded my pose to my assigment page for everyone to look at and critique. This is a huge part of AM. Everyone can post their work before its due to get some critiques or tips. Then you can go back and make changes before Sunday, at noon, when its due. Its so helpful to get some fresh eyes on something that you have been looking at for hours. Its also really interesting to see everyone else's work so far. Sometimes they are struggling with the same problems you are.

Anywho, in a few days, my mentor will look over my pose and give me a detailed video critique where he can draw on the image as he's talking. Its kind of like in a football game broadcast on TV when the commentators are drawing on the replay video. Its damn cool. I can't wait.

Here is my sketch and pose for this week.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I just finished my first week of AM. Even though our only assignment was to get acquainted with the site and our mentors, there was a crap load of information to go through. First there were a bunch of introductory and instructional videos to go through that explained the ins and outs of the AM site and Maya (the software program that most of us will be using to animate). Then there's the forum. Its huge! Despite the fact that not every thread applied to me, there were still a huge amount that did. These forums have been building up since the school started in March of '05, so there are so many discussions that went on about all manner of animation topics. While reading though some of the topics, I noticed that many of the questions had already been asked and answered in older threads. Inevitably, in each thread, an old-timer would reply with a link to an old thread with the exact same question. I guess that means when I have a question I'd better search the forums first.

After going through some of the forums I moved on to "Cruising the Campus" Basically everyone has a page with their personal info and all of their assignments that were submitted throughout the term. Since this was the first week, there wasn't much to look at, however, most of the old-timers had progress reels posted. These are basically demo reels with the student's work that they'd generated so far at AM. There were so many to go through, but they were really inspiring. There were students whose work just look amazing right out of the gate, and then there were students who frankly, sucked, but then over the span of a couple of terms they improved so much that their animation looked great. Of course some of the students were better than others, but it seemed that most everyone was at a point where they were making some pretty descent animation. Thats a great testament to how good this school is. I'm really excited to get started.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

School finally started!!!!!!! Well, its mid-week in my first week at AM. There is so much information on the site! Its like a huge community of animators feeding off each other. I know I made the right decision. The only problem is whether I can keep up. Its going to be so much work! I had my first Q&A session with my mentor David Breaux. It was supposed to be only 1 hour long, Dave stuck around for another hour beyond that to answer any questions we had. Everyone seems pretty motivated to start animating, so its nice to be able to feed off the energy.

Anyway, I've got to get back to AM. So much to look through.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)