Saturday 24 March 2012

three down, one to go...

Hello internet goers. I've finished three projects now and that only leaves the major project to go. We've still got 5ish weeks working on that, but we've got to get cracking with it, other projects have taken priority over the past month or so.

The latest project I've done is the animation assignment for our AAT unit. Our brief (simply put) was to pick a 10 second clip from any film and then reinterpret that performance in an animation. Once we had picked a clip we had to analyse the performance based on what Ed Hooks taught us, highlighting the objective/action/obstacle and the conflicts within the clip. With this information we could then go ahead and reinterpret the performance.

So I chose to do a clip from the first Harry Potter film, where the sorting hat is sorting Harry into a house. I chose to reinterpret the performance of the hat for two reasons. Firstly, the hat goes through a lot of thoughts during this clip, and as Ed teaches, thoughts lead to conclusions which lead to actions. With this in mind I knew I would have a variety of options in regards to acting choices. Secondly the hat is... well, a hat, so my view of how the clip could be acted would not be tainted by any live action acting choices. I don't want to say too much about my analysis of the clip, but my main aim was to make the situation seem a little more sinister than it is in the film. I wanted the character to be like a clever villain playing devil’s advocate as he tests the hero's worth. One last thing I must say is that the reason there is no detailed facial animation is because we are not marked on it, we are only marked on the body performance.

And without further ado, my animation:




Now that the animation project is done it is all hands to the pump on the major project. I've done half of my shots on the animation so far, which is great, but I've got some pretty tricky/important shots left to do which will take some time. It is going well though, and overall we have a third of the piece animated now. Below is another sneak peak of some of the W.I.P animation I'm doing. (The last shot is still in blocking).



That's it for now, I might go a bit quiet for the next few weeks as we work flat our on the major project, but I'll try and keep everyone posted on progress when I can.

Stu

Saturday 3 March 2012

while the going is good...

Hi again people. Just thought I'd write a little post while everything is going good to show you what I've been up to.

First off, the innovations project is due in soon, so I've finished that. It's about the process of fantasy creature animation, and how a company would build a creature document to ensure continuity of movement when a creature is animated by more than one animator. The main point of my project was the report, but the bit i can show you is my final bit of creature animation. The model and rig are not my own work.

Here you go, short and sweet.





Moving onto the major project. I've been putting off starting animation on this because of other projects, but now I'm fully into animating my shots on the major project. I've been starting with some of the smaller shots, just to get used to the rigs again. It's going quite well at the moment though. We have a sick man in our animation who coughs a lot. I've been dreading animating coughs, but so far with a lot of reference it's not been too hard. All of the coughs for the sick man have been provided by one of our group mate's dad - Phil Smith. We also have a good few sound effects for our animation, and people working on the music. So overall it's going very well. Below is a sneak peek at one shot I've animated.






In other news, we've now been given out AAT2 animation project. It is basically to take a 10 second film clip, analyse the performance based on what Ed Hooks taught us, then reinterpret the performance in an animation of the same length using the film audio. I've found a nice clip I am going to use and I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into some nice physical animation. I say physical because we're only marked on the body animation, not any facial stuff.

So that's it for now, good progress everywhere, just got to keep at it.

Stu