Fugitive Animation - First Blocking Pass

Fugitive Animation - Blocking from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here is the initial pass at my fugitive animation for the 1st assignment for the 3rd class of Animation Mentor. It's part 1 of 3-4 scenes that will tell a little story about this fugitive who survived his prisoner transport vehicle crashing and in the process breaking him free of his restraints.

I gave him a limp/sleepy foot to add some interest to his movement.

As for this term, my animation mentor is Martin Hopkins who has been a long time Dreamworks animator going from their older 2D projects into their 3D films. So he has a lot of experience to pull from and I think he will be a great mentor this term like Drew was last term.

In other news, I have a new job. I am no longer a Production Assistant, I'm now a Storyboard Revisionist for Generator Rex. So now I get to draw all day for a living, finally! Now I can keep improving my 2D drawing skills and 3D animation skills without any of that paperwork stuff getting in the way, I'm looking forward to it.

See ya next week.

1 Week Left

Run and reverse direction - refining from Matt Long on Vimeo.

So here's my animaion as it currently stands. I have one more week until it is due, and a little under a half week after that to make any final adjustments for the end of term progress reel. So this week is going to be pretty much getting in there and getting the beginning all splined and polished up, and fix some spacing issues in the run and then really refine the movement and timing of the slide and run at the end, that part is still pretty rough. This week I've shown it in a few different views to see it from static camera, the first is the one that matters though.

Run and turn - more blocking

Run and reverse direction - Blocking+ pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Not much to say, just making progress.

Double update!

Run and reverse direction - Blocking pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

This is my latest animation, still in the blocking phase, with and without the extra stuff. The assignment was to have Stewie running, and reversing direction. So I set up this junkyard scene for it. The dog poses are just stand-ins to sell the idea, and the BG elements are going to be desaturated and slightly out of focus in the final render so it will be easier to read the action. The run spacing is temporary as well, the strides should be closer and faster but it didn't read well at-speed in blocking like that, a bit too Benny Hill looking, so I spread it out to help at this stage. It's also my first time animating to a moving camera, it's a welcome addition I think.

Walking in a heavy wind - splined from Matt Long on Vimeo.

This is the spline pass on my heavy wind walk. It's not really polished, more just cleaned up and somewhat presentable. Life took priority that weekend, I'm going to finish it off for the end-of-term progress reel though.

See ya next week.

Refining the blocking pass

Walking in a heavy wind - Refining Blocking Pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here is the same animation, this time taken a step further with more breakdown poses. This week I'm finishing and polishing it up.

Class 2 Assignment 2 - Blocking

Walking in a heavy wind - Blocking pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's my blocking pass of my new assignment. I'm to have the no-armed Stewie walk in a heavy wind for 120-200 frames, that's all the assignment asks for. I approached it the same way Mike Nguyen taught me during my time at July Films, to try to feel the forces and where they originate and how they act on the body and unfold throughout the animation to make for good clear animation. I think it's pretty successful and reads fairly well.

Saw Inception this weekend. It was really good and I highly recommend it. Interesting story, great acting, and an intense 3rd act. What is it with Christopher Nollan always making Cillian Murphy wear a bag over his head in his films?

Polishing pass, and Comic Con

AM Class 2 - Big step Polished Pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here is my polishing pass on my animation for Animation Mentor.

I went to Comic Con today. Overall it was a bit underwhelming. I think I've been to too many in a row that I'm running out of books to buy now. I only got 4 books this time. Peck 'n Paw, Florian Satzinger's "Duck," John Nevarez' and Chris Sanders' new sketchbooks. Even Stuart Ng offered nothing that I had to have, closest was the oversized Daan Jippes process book that shows his roughs and final art on non-reduced pages. The $200 price tag however turned me away.

So that's it for this update, see you next week with a new animation assignment.

Refining

AM Class 2 - Big step Refining Pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's my refinement pass on Ballie. Got a few minor notes from my mentor on it, so I'll fix those and then take it into spline mode to smooth it all out. This is mostly on 2's with some 3's and 4's in there. I have to finish it up soon, San Diego Comic Con is this weekend and I can't stay up all night Saturday working on it.

Squirrely Run Cycle - WIP Part 2

Squirrely Run Cycle - WIP 2nd Pass from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's my 2nd pass, now on 1s. I disabled the tail for now as I'm working from the body's core outward. Added quite a bit more weight to the run and delayed the upper torso during the passing position, as well as further delaying the shoulders and head. This makes it much more organic and you can feel the contact better. Still need to adjust the legs a little to get the push-off of the feet, and then it's off to all the little extra details like ears, hands, toes, tail, and then facial.

Squirrely Run Cycle - WIP

Squirrely Run Cycle - WIP from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's a work-in-progress playblast of a run cycle I've been doing in Maya. I initially started off animating it straight ahead, similar to how I approached the sack hop and soccer kid runs in 2D. It worked pretty well, just took some adjustments after. This was on 2's, now I'm inbetweening it on 1's while making changes and tweaks to it like delaying the individual parts more, fixing the tail so it actually works, and other such things. Stay tuned for more updates on this one.

Another animation clip and some thumbs

Run and Hop Animation from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's the 3rd of the last set of boys hopping. This one is taking off from a run and into the hop. There's not much to the rest of the hop so I'm just showing the first part. Some minor things to change but overall this conveys what I wanted. I originally did the whole thing and it looked horrible, so I erased it all and started over, some of the old one can still be seen on this as a ghost image. This is all on 1's done straight ahead.



I had these thumbs lying around and figured I would share them, this is the first set that I did above. Not much analysis or anything being done here. The very first tests I posted on my blog of the hops were following this.



I went back and watched some videos, further acted out some hops, and broke everything down into the basic mechanics and did this sheet of thumbnails. The animation I posted above is a mix of the 3rd line here and the line drawn on the back that you can see showing through lightly on the bottom.



I call this one "My Little Land of the Lost" my take on Mike's My Little World. During a break from doing the hops after the first pass failed I sketched this really quick on the side of some scratch paper, just a random drawing that I thought was fun. I learned I shouldn't draw dinosaurs from memory.


Just a little teaser, I'm animating something in my spare time at home, above are some quick lunch-time studies for it from stills of Disney's "Wonderful World of Color" with Ludwig Von Drake. So stay tuned for some stuff from that in the next few weeks if it's worth posting.

More Straight Ahead Animation

Sack Hop Race Animation from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's what I've done recently. As you can see these two have a bit more personality than the last ones and are breaking away from their patterns a bit. It helps add a lot of life and interest when you break the cycles, which is something Mike has been trying to get me to break away from. I have a tendency of finding something that works and sticking with it, and it gets repetitious and boring, so that's my next step in this journey.

One of the things I've noticed is I'm getting much looser with my drawings and speeding up quite a bit but am still able to maintain and even increase the quality of animation. I think because of this I'm able to keep my thoughts and feelings within the first pass more than before where I'd get new ideas mid way through and start losing the essence of the animation. With the first boy I wanted him to think he can get ahead with a larger bounding leap only to find it takes time to recover from and ultimately doesn't pay off. The 2nd boy I wanted him to lose his hold on the bag and then regain it while for the most part maintaining much of his momentum. Hopefully it comes across clearly.

So that's all for now, also if you didn't know Vimeo lets you download the original video file (you may need to register) if you want to frame-by-frame any of these recent animations. I like it much better than Youtube for that.

Soccer kids animation

Soccer boys animation from Mlong128ir on Vimeo.

This animation pretty much speaks for itself. It was the first animation I did at July Films not for any production, just for my own practice under Mike's guidance and took seemingly forever. I re-did so many parts of it and made many dumb decisions. For one, I didn't plan it out too well and it started to snowball out of control, luckily I found a way to wrap it up in the end. I also analyzed my movement when acting things out and animated that rather than finding the force and animating the feeling I felt acting it out, so it came out mechanical. I learned so much from this animation about what not to do as well as made some discoveries that will help in the future. If you watch it you'll notice it loosens up as the animation progresses towards the end with the runs, this is because I didn't work the whole thing all at once and refine it but instead worked on it in sections from beginning to end. So the last part with the runs was animated much later than the beginning when I started to loosen up and get a feel for the characters. Not a very good thing to do as it makes everything seem disjointed and ruins the pacing.

Sack Hop Animation 2nd Pass

Sack Hop Animation 2nd pass from Mlong128ir on Vimeo.

So here is my 2nd pass at this particular sack hop animation, I made some minor changes to it after this like some things with the hands, but overall this is pretty much the final version. Mike went over my last one with me as mentioned in my previous post and gave a great critique and sat down and animated over my drawings to really emphasize the points he was making. The major thing was to push the delayed parts to allow the drawings to breathe more naturally, to create overlap. I've always tried delaying parts, but when Mike sat down and showed me on my own animation it all just clicked. I wasn't delaying enough, he was really able to push things (check out the drawing below of the 1st squash on contact) and just by seeing the still drawing it feels like it's in motion. I naturally tend to try to move everything all at once so texturing the timing of separate parts of the body has to be a conscious effort for now, I just didn't know by how much it should be done. Hopefully it will become more and more a natural tendency.

Another thing he had mentioned was in some of my drawings while the boy is in the air, I jump from the beginning to the end poses and shapes too quickly leaving myself nowhere to go for the follow up drawings. That's why in my original a lot of the drawings are very similar, they're just advancing forward in space. So to counteract that he had me change the sleeve to a ball form while in the air for a frame to give a transition from the concave to the convex sleeve shape so the change is more pleasant. Edit: Here's a simple diagram I did to clarify this.


He also had me push the curve of the torso in the ascending part of the jump so that it can have somewhere to go while in the air by reversing direction. Also he reminded me to add change between the drawings by making sure the angles in the pose, in this case the torso/upper legs/lower legs and sometimes the bag increase or decrease in succession rather than just having a squash, a stretch, and then another squash that last several frames into another stretch. Seems like an obvious concept, but it's so easy to get sidetracked when focusing on the other things. Here's Mike's quick diagram from when he was telling me, so simple but it drives the point home.



Finally Mike really pushed the head and neck out to give it that urgent strain that somebody in a potato sack race would have, which he then delayed way more than I had. He also really pushed the contact squash more than I had which gives it a bit more spring and personality. Here are all of Mike's drawings in sequence that demonstrate everything I mentioned up to now.

And here I my originals below so you can compare, they look really stiff and lifeless in comparison.


Mike now wants me to animate more kids hopping, this time giving them all different approaches to the hop that display their personalities. From hitch steps, to small quick hobble-y strides to stutter steps and large leaps, anything that will break it up and make the scene breathe.

Sack Hop continued

Sack Hop Animation from Mlong128ir on Vimeo.

Here is my latest version of the sack hop taking into consideration many of the notes Mike gave me on the last two. This one actually is about the 5th version of this particular hop if you take into account all those eraser marks you can see at the beginning. Right now I feel it's just "good enough"mechanically but can be better overall, Mike had a few notes on this one as well and felt the bottom portion was working fine, but the upper body can use some work. The way he put it was, "You have the technical aspects down, now it's time to work on the emotional." He said next week after the holiday he will sit down with me and draw over my drawings to demonstrate exactly how he goes about doing that. I know I'll have many "A-Ha!" moments when I see him plus-ing my work as is always the case when I see him demoing. Stay tuned for the results from that in a couple weeks.

Also this time around I tried out Vimeo, I think it preserves the video quality better than Youtube. Hopefully you can all see it.

Sack hops

For those of you who visit my blog (anybody left?) that may not know, I've been fortunate enough to be allowed to hang out around July Films www.julyfilms.com a few hours a week and learning some things about animation from Mike Nguyen www.rainplace.net okay learning A LOT of things.   It's been a great experience and I can see the growth in my work and confidence in animation. Staring at a blank page before getting started is no longer as scary and intimidating as it once was.  

Above are two quick animations I did last night at July overlayed into the same video. Both share the same first two drawings, and both need work. The ghost images that appear are due to this being done on old pieces of animation paper, it pays to recycle. Just thought I'd share since I thought this place could use an update.

Another FX post

Here's an explosion I animated a little while back, just trying some new things. It was fun to do.

Just a little something

It's been a long time since I last updated, and some people have been giving me a hard time about it. Maybe I'll begin updating it more often to silence them all.

Here's a flame FX animation loop I did the other week really quick, my first time trying to animate fire. It's not looping very well though.