Hello there again! A bit soon to be posting again, but I'm finishing up my research. I don't actually have huge amounts of real footage of the species of my characters in motion, and if I want it to be as realistic as I imagine it, I'm gonna need a lot of that footage!
Getting bird footage is... well... difficult. Come back, birds! Where am I going to find myself a large bird of prey? An owl? Something? ...okay, surely I can gather my own cat footage. Yes, I tried, it did not go well. The most athletic thing Sunny can do is roll over. Bless him.
That poor owl. I thought it would probably make more sense to look at the owl being fairly stationary, and though the quality isn't fantastic, you do get to see some simple body language. That owl is not a happy owl!
Same idea here; this little owl is quite relaxed. (The panting might suggest otherwise, but as the video says, it's actually just keeping itself cool).
Now that is an impressive owl. Look how pretty he/she is! More what I'm shooting for for my villain. Get to see him/her moving around a bit too, which is useful. :)
The following are flying references; since that's what the scene involving the owl has him doing the most.
A nice little video of an Eagle owl; get to see him/her taking off, gaining speed, gliding, changing direction, and landing. If only it were in slow motion...
That's better, much better! To be honest I couldn't tell whether it was a very good piece of 3D animation at first or real footage. After seeing Legend of the Owls: Guardians of Ga'Hoole I just can't be sure anymore!
Two for the price of one. For some reason I really love 0:17 - 0:19 when the Great Horned Owl avoids the branches of that tree. But even more impressive is the agility of the bird in this video...
Why that is just unbelievable. I know that it's a Goshawk, not an Owl, but I think I can take a bit of licence when it comes to animating my owl, provided I can actually pull it off. That bird is amazing!
And here's some other, perhaps less related birds that I looked at, but they were very interesting to look at none the less, and I absolutely don't see any harm in giving my Owl the capabilities of other birds. He is an evil warlord with magic! :D
And I have to link these two because embedding is disabled:
http://youtu.be/gVdphioscJA
http://youtu.be/MOqteBWgBqM
Next up, cats! Like I said, my cat Sunny is a bit on the portly side, and he doesn't move much, and when he does, he doesn't move far. I mean, to be entirely fair on him, he does go out at night sometimes and probably beats up other cats in the neighbourhood but I'm not going to chase him off into the night, crawling through hedges, hopping into peoples' gardens... nicking other people's references is much, much easier!
Now this is supposed to be a video of two cats fighting in slow motion. The thing is, they're not fighting, they're just playing. The movement is still good to have though.
This is two cats fighting. It's a small fight - ever seen a REAL "extreme cat fight"? I'll tell you now, it is vicious. And it's not funny. I hate it when people get a severely distressed cat that's hissing and spitting because it's absolutely petrified and laugh about it. But I digress. Two cats scrapping. But thinking on more about it, I don't think I'll have this style of fighting, though I might keep elements of it, particularly the staring match that occurs between two cats in a confrontation.
This is a reasonably nice reference for a cat running (but why are the reference videos always in such low quality?)and personally the run cycle looks rather similar to that of a dog to me, so I could probably mix some elements of a dog run into my heavier set cat characters.
It was just then, when I couldn't find any more good videos, and all hope seemed lost, when I found out that Whiskas had a channel! Their cat biscuits and supermeat cans are absolute crap (but Sunny sure loves their packeted soft food) but these videos are fantastic. If only they weren't cut into like that they would be much better.
Cat leaping. Very good thing to have, I expect my characters are going to do a lot of fancy jumping around in trees!
Wow, that does look quite menacing.
While it's good that I found a video like this because my protagonist in my draft storyboards does fall on her feet, I feel kind of sorry for the cat just being dropped like that.
I really don't know whether I'll include a scene in which a cat is cleaning themselves, but given how much my protagonist looks like a bald rat, maybe I should. Tell the viewers, 'Okay, I know this looks like a rat, but it's actually a cat. Look, cleaning itself like a cat! Totally a cat'.
Awww! ...Ewww. ...Awww! ...Ewww. ...Awww!
That's all I have time for now, but before I post, this video has both cats AND a bird of prey in it, and I couldn't believe what I was looking at when I saw it!
That... is a BRAVE cat.
Sunday, 18 September 2011
Friday, 16 September 2011
Year 2: Ready, set...
I really can't believe it's already the Friday of our first week back.
I've been off so long, it feels like a lifetime. (And yes, I did intend to keep updating my blog throughout the long holiday, but the thousands of projects I habitually assign for myself leave me brainfried, and things I originally intend to do get forgotten).
I didn't forget about our upcoming project either; this one has to be under 3 minutes long and character-based. I think, though, that the time constraint is more a combination of Dave trying to make sure we don't bite off more than we can chew and shoot for The Lord of the Rings: The Animation! and because, if I remember right, the 3 minutes is the time limit for a submission to the Pictoplasma animation festival. But I think longer animations will actually be acceptable provided we can manage to finish the things in time, as the other animation festivals allow longer submissions.
For this project I decided to do cats. Why cats? Because I like cats! And birds actually. Magical birds. And the cats are tribal and one's a warlord who's actually an owl with a magical voodoo mask that turns him into a cat. And he's worshipped by the real cats. Who bring him birds. Magical birds. And he takes the magic from the magical birds which makes them into dead birds. It's the perfect plan!
Seriously though, there was actually a thought process that lead to this, but I'll get to it later. I expect I'll just blab endlessly about it when I do the research commentary (research is very awkward to write, isn't it? Honestly, I looked at this cat... and I looked at this bird... it's... a cat... and a bird... ) and finish all that up by Monday.
I'm actually hoping that this will be my first mixed media animation - I've realized, over the past year, that I am very, very dependent on Adobe Photoshop. Good old Adobe Photoshop! But while I stay using it, I'm not using other techniques or anything, and I'm worried my learning has suffered for it. So, this year, I'm forcing myself into a brand new work flow! I'm going to use more traditional techniques and try to combine different media and/or type of animation (and honestly, I think this intent did have a hand in shaping my project idea in the last stretch of its initial conception, it's hard to explain). For the most part, I think the animation will be traditional, hand drawn animation - on a light box, not on Adobe Photoshop... (though I might colour it up on either Photoshop or Illustrator, but Illustrator makes everything look -very- perfect with those fancy vectors and I would rather it was sketchy and rough looking) and the magic sequences I would like to do a different way, perhaps using cutout/silhouette animation. I was going to give the bird's magic very African-feeling patterns and colours, changing the background to a lush red and the like, so silhouetted characters I think would work nicely.
I'd also be able to use them to make the final fight between the protagonist and the antagonist quite nightmarish which would be exactly what I want.
I've also given myself a challenge to learn to use watercolour pencils or paints for the backgrounds while magic isn't being used; to get a sort of pale, easy on the eyes natural location... that is if I can learn to use them. Watercolours are much harder than they look!
I'm also interested in trying a bit of collage or stitching. Two years studying textiles and I haven't used a single technique in my animations. I mean... I'm not great at it by any means, but perhaps some mola cutwork or something for the magic sequences... I'm not sure.
Anyway, enough of my waffling about that. My original idea was about cats, and what they do when humans aren't looking. Anyone who's owned a cat knows that they have this amazing ability to vanish at will (Invisible Cats: The Movie?) and only return at dinner time, or when they smell your tuna sandwich. It was partially inspired by an in-joke I had with my sister about our old cat Tamara - yeah, Tamara was a snooty mastermind, he owned a casino underground. And our younger cat, Sunny, a stocky beast of a cat, he's a bouncer.
The story was originally going to be Sunny/a character inspired by Sunny discovers the casino, gets hired as a bouncer, and experiences gangs clashing; this series of events all being held together by the giggles stemming from the fact that Sunny is as thick as a brick. However I became hesitant to base a story so much on faces from home, so my second brainstorm became about a Sphinx cat (that would eventually become Okko), a cat adopted by two blackbirds after being mistaken for one of their chicks. The Sphinx grows up with the birds and becomes the avian equivalent to a superhero, fighting off the tame cats that hunt the birds in huge, exaggerated Kung-Fu Panda type fight scenes. The final challenge would be to take down the fiercest bird-killer of all, referred to as the Terrible Catbird, which is actually a large owl (this would later become Vorquan, my current draft's antagonist). Again, this would sort of be its own parody, and not meant to be taken seriously. The reason I actually dropped this draft - or altered the crap out of it, however you like to look at it - is because I was worried about this trend of funny slapstick stuff I seem to have fallen into. The thing is, I never touched or attempted funny stuff before I started my first year. It's not that I don't appreciate the talent and effort that goes into a good joke, but I don't have that talent. I'm not funny and I keep trying to be. I don't even like slapstick!
For that matter, I never usually have animals as characters either, but I don't mind it.
So, I thought okay, perhaps I'll do better on this project if I stop trying to do something that I'm just no good at. This prompted me to tweak the setting of the story: I swapped the houses and gardens for a great forest/jungle hybrid and added some fantastical elements. No where in the animation will the viewer be told they are in a more magical world, but hopefully the rules of the world will be fairly apparent: birds are naturally magical, and it is this magic that allows them to fly. The cats are magicless and somewhat tribal but still follow some general animal behaviour.
The story itself is about a cat called Okko, who is a Sphinx cat (Trivia! In the early drafts, she was male. I changed her into a female because when I sketched her she looked feminine and because I'm a feminist. :D ) who lost her mother as a kitten, but is adopted by Ralla'ool, a Purple-Crested Touraco. When Ralla'ool is kidnapped by cats and brought before the supposed God and warlord cat, Vorquan, Okko must fight to save her. During the fight, though, she strikes a blow to Vorquan's face and knocks off his mask, and he reverts to his true form, a Great Horned Owl roc. Okko finally defeats him by slamming his mask back onto his face mid-flight, turning him back into his cat form, and he falls to his death. Okko is saved from a similar fate by Ralla'ool.
The story still has its fair share of issues and the plot doesn't tie together as neatly as I would like, but I'll work on it.
As a random aside, here are some of my favourite commercial cat animations! Finding less mainstream animation with the accuracy of movement and lack of extreme stylization I'm after has proven, well... it's hard. I mean... unless you count this.
Oh, Mr. Oreilly, you do disturb me greatly. :)
There's this too, 'Please Say Something' which I really like in its own right but it isn't what I want for this animation.
...and Catface.
And here are my favourite mainstream animations so far! Firstly - and you'll see this one coming a mile off - Disney's Aristocats.
Apologies for the fact that it's not in English, it was better quality than the English ones I could find. What I love about this film is how realistic the cats are; they still have their typical Disney style as far as the character designs themselves go, but their proportions and anatomy is a bit more down to earth and it helps the movement look very natural. Compare the cats here to, say, Lucifer from Cindarella.
Doesn't really move like a cat at all. He moves like the typical cartoony slapstick character; he moves like Tom from Tom and Jerry moving on four legs instead of two. Oh, hey, another cat to look at. Fancy that!
I could do a huge long list of Disney cat characters that are poorly animated in the sense that they don't move like cats compared to the characters in the Aristocats, but I think it would be slightly redundant. Sergeant Tibbs in Disney's 'One Hundred and One Dalmatians' has a lovely design but he doesn't really move like a cat. To be fair, most of the time he's marching, but the animation is still nothing compared to Aristocats. But the dogs move fantastically. Why? Because the main characters are dogs, they get the most screen time, so its reasonable to say that more time for research and more time for animation was afforded to the leading characters. That's all it is, really, I believe. On a very random aside, the animation of the cats below still isn't as good as the Aristocats. But they needed to be posted somewhere. You can't look at Disney cats and not look at these two.
They're so cute, yet so evil, and so catlike, yet so evil. Love them. They do look curiously like the Siamese from the 'Everybody Wants to be a Cat' song in Aristocats though.
Stop. DonBluthtime.
Don Bluth's 'Banjo the Woodpile Cat':
I'll tell you now, I love Don Bluth. He is the master of facial expressions and dialogue animation - just take a look at 3:09 to 3:25 on that first video. I watched that bit so many times its unbelievable.
The cats in this animation are a bit odd in that they flip-flop very severely between being excellently accurate to... getting up on their back feet and dancing the night away. It's somewhat typical of films like this (it happens in Disney films too) that in upbeat sequences the characters become more humanlike, though, and its not really something that bothers me too much, but when the cats are being catlike, it's done fantastically. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's better than the Aristocats, but its still very good. And the characters are adorable, especially Banjo.
Next up I'm going to take a look at Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns. Good film, if a touch short.
I've been off so long, it feels like a lifetime. (And yes, I did intend to keep updating my blog throughout the long holiday, but the thousands of projects I habitually assign for myself leave me brainfried, and things I originally intend to do get forgotten).
I didn't forget about our upcoming project either; this one has to be under 3 minutes long and character-based. I think, though, that the time constraint is more a combination of Dave trying to make sure we don't bite off more than we can chew and shoot for The Lord of the Rings: The Animation! and because, if I remember right, the 3 minutes is the time limit for a submission to the Pictoplasma animation festival. But I think longer animations will actually be acceptable provided we can manage to finish the things in time, as the other animation festivals allow longer submissions.
For this project I decided to do cats. Why cats? Because I like cats! And birds actually. Magical birds. And the cats are tribal and one's a warlord who's actually an owl with a magical voodoo mask that turns him into a cat. And he's worshipped by the real cats. Who bring him birds. Magical birds. And he takes the magic from the magical birds which makes them into dead birds. It's the perfect plan!
Seriously though, there was actually a thought process that lead to this, but I'll get to it later. I expect I'll just blab endlessly about it when I do the research commentary (research is very awkward to write, isn't it? Honestly, I looked at this cat... and I looked at this bird... it's... a cat... and a bird... ) and finish all that up by Monday.
I'm actually hoping that this will be my first mixed media animation - I've realized, over the past year, that I am very, very dependent on Adobe Photoshop. Good old Adobe Photoshop! But while I stay using it, I'm not using other techniques or anything, and I'm worried my learning has suffered for it. So, this year, I'm forcing myself into a brand new work flow! I'm going to use more traditional techniques and try to combine different media and/or type of animation (and honestly, I think this intent did have a hand in shaping my project idea in the last stretch of its initial conception, it's hard to explain). For the most part, I think the animation will be traditional, hand drawn animation - on a light box, not on Adobe Photoshop... (though I might colour it up on either Photoshop or Illustrator, but Illustrator makes everything look -very- perfect with those fancy vectors and I would rather it was sketchy and rough looking) and the magic sequences I would like to do a different way, perhaps using cutout/silhouette animation. I was going to give the bird's magic very African-feeling patterns and colours, changing the background to a lush red and the like, so silhouetted characters I think would work nicely.
I'd also be able to use them to make the final fight between the protagonist and the antagonist quite nightmarish which would be exactly what I want.
I've also given myself a challenge to learn to use watercolour pencils or paints for the backgrounds while magic isn't being used; to get a sort of pale, easy on the eyes natural location... that is if I can learn to use them. Watercolours are much harder than they look!
I'm also interested in trying a bit of collage or stitching. Two years studying textiles and I haven't used a single technique in my animations. I mean... I'm not great at it by any means, but perhaps some mola cutwork or something for the magic sequences... I'm not sure.
Anyway, enough of my waffling about that. My original idea was about cats, and what they do when humans aren't looking. Anyone who's owned a cat knows that they have this amazing ability to vanish at will (Invisible Cats: The Movie?) and only return at dinner time, or when they smell your tuna sandwich. It was partially inspired by an in-joke I had with my sister about our old cat Tamara - yeah, Tamara was a snooty mastermind, he owned a casino underground. And our younger cat, Sunny, a stocky beast of a cat, he's a bouncer.
The story was originally going to be Sunny/a character inspired by Sunny discovers the casino, gets hired as a bouncer, and experiences gangs clashing; this series of events all being held together by the giggles stemming from the fact that Sunny is as thick as a brick. However I became hesitant to base a story so much on faces from home, so my second brainstorm became about a Sphinx cat (that would eventually become Okko), a cat adopted by two blackbirds after being mistaken for one of their chicks. The Sphinx grows up with the birds and becomes the avian equivalent to a superhero, fighting off the tame cats that hunt the birds in huge, exaggerated Kung-Fu Panda type fight scenes. The final challenge would be to take down the fiercest bird-killer of all, referred to as the Terrible Catbird, which is actually a large owl (this would later become Vorquan, my current draft's antagonist). Again, this would sort of be its own parody, and not meant to be taken seriously. The reason I actually dropped this draft - or altered the crap out of it, however you like to look at it - is because I was worried about this trend of funny slapstick stuff I seem to have fallen into. The thing is, I never touched or attempted funny stuff before I started my first year. It's not that I don't appreciate the talent and effort that goes into a good joke, but I don't have that talent. I'm not funny and I keep trying to be. I don't even like slapstick!
For that matter, I never usually have animals as characters either, but I don't mind it.
So, I thought okay, perhaps I'll do better on this project if I stop trying to do something that I'm just no good at. This prompted me to tweak the setting of the story: I swapped the houses and gardens for a great forest/jungle hybrid and added some fantastical elements. No where in the animation will the viewer be told they are in a more magical world, but hopefully the rules of the world will be fairly apparent: birds are naturally magical, and it is this magic that allows them to fly. The cats are magicless and somewhat tribal but still follow some general animal behaviour.
The story itself is about a cat called Okko, who is a Sphinx cat (Trivia! In the early drafts, she was male. I changed her into a female because when I sketched her she looked feminine and because I'm a feminist. :D ) who lost her mother as a kitten, but is adopted by Ralla'ool, a Purple-Crested Touraco. When Ralla'ool is kidnapped by cats and brought before the supposed God and warlord cat, Vorquan, Okko must fight to save her. During the fight, though, she strikes a blow to Vorquan's face and knocks off his mask, and he reverts to his true form, a Great Horned Owl roc. Okko finally defeats him by slamming his mask back onto his face mid-flight, turning him back into his cat form, and he falls to his death. Okko is saved from a similar fate by Ralla'ool.
The story still has its fair share of issues and the plot doesn't tie together as neatly as I would like, but I'll work on it.
As a random aside, here are some of my favourite commercial cat animations! Finding less mainstream animation with the accuracy of movement and lack of extreme stylization I'm after has proven, well... it's hard. I mean... unless you count this.
Oh, Mr. Oreilly, you do disturb me greatly. :)
There's this too, 'Please Say Something' which I really like in its own right but it isn't what I want for this animation.
Please Say Something from David OReilly on Vimeo.
...and Catface.
And here are my favourite mainstream animations so far! Firstly - and you'll see this one coming a mile off - Disney's Aristocats.
Apologies for the fact that it's not in English, it was better quality than the English ones I could find. What I love about this film is how realistic the cats are; they still have their typical Disney style as far as the character designs themselves go, but their proportions and anatomy is a bit more down to earth and it helps the movement look very natural. Compare the cats here to, say, Lucifer from Cindarella.
Doesn't really move like a cat at all. He moves like the typical cartoony slapstick character; he moves like Tom from Tom and Jerry moving on four legs instead of two. Oh, hey, another cat to look at. Fancy that!
I could do a huge long list of Disney cat characters that are poorly animated in the sense that they don't move like cats compared to the characters in the Aristocats, but I think it would be slightly redundant. Sergeant Tibbs in Disney's 'One Hundred and One Dalmatians' has a lovely design but he doesn't really move like a cat. To be fair, most of the time he's marching, but the animation is still nothing compared to Aristocats. But the dogs move fantastically. Why? Because the main characters are dogs, they get the most screen time, so its reasonable to say that more time for research and more time for animation was afforded to the leading characters. That's all it is, really, I believe. On a very random aside, the animation of the cats below still isn't as good as the Aristocats. But they needed to be posted somewhere. You can't look at Disney cats and not look at these two.
They're so cute, yet so evil, and so catlike, yet so evil. Love them. They do look curiously like the Siamese from the 'Everybody Wants to be a Cat' song in Aristocats though.
Stop. DonBluthtime.
Don Bluth's 'Banjo the Woodpile Cat':
I'll tell you now, I love Don Bluth. He is the master of facial expressions and dialogue animation - just take a look at 3:09 to 3:25 on that first video. I watched that bit so many times its unbelievable.
The cats in this animation are a bit odd in that they flip-flop very severely between being excellently accurate to... getting up on their back feet and dancing the night away. It's somewhat typical of films like this (it happens in Disney films too) that in upbeat sequences the characters become more humanlike, though, and its not really something that bothers me too much, but when the cats are being catlike, it's done fantastically. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's better than the Aristocats, but its still very good. And the characters are adorable, especially Banjo.
Next up I'm going to take a look at Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns. Good film, if a touch short.
Monday, 2 May 2011
Believe it or Not, I'm alive!
Yes, I realize that it's been a while since my last update. Apologies as usual, once again, my infamous lack of consistency has won the day!
(It's a work in progress, promise.)
Wow, before I continue, I just have to say that Blogger is being unusually glitchy today. I press enter to skip a line and my cursor goes flying all over the place. Might just be me but still... odd.
Anyway, I've been busy looking at a lot of 3D animation, even as entertainment! (How's THAT for two birds with one stone?) And recently went to see a recently released film called Rio (twice in a week) that I found to be particularly noteworthy for its rather bizarre blend of realism and anthropomorphism. Usually, bird characters are notorious for being very anthropomorphised - wings become arms, feathers become fingers, beaks become lips, etc. very little of their natural movement is conserved - in fact, the best example I can think of other than Rio is the pidgeons in Bolt which were also good for it, though the difference between those and the characters in Rio is that they are more comedy relief and aren't true protagonists and so they don't have the duty of conveying all the emotions the protagonists of Rio have to. That being said, Rio is probably the best (in terms of realism) mainstream film I've seen yet for capturing the mannerisms of birds while the emotiveness and likeability of the characters doesn't suffer at all for it. For the most part, wings are wings, beaks are beaks, and feet are feet and hands... which is sort of right, parrots and the like have very good control of their feet.
It reminds me of Ratatouille which was also kind of unusual for retaining more animal characteristics than are usually retained in this sort of animated film. I have to say it makes a pleasant change. I really appreciate the love and care it must take to believably recreate the animalistic motions in these sorts of characters (particularly in birds) and I think it does help the characters from an emotion standpoint - they become more the animals they're based on than humans that sort of look like animals, though the rendition does work well in films like Kung Fu Panda (2008). A film that also comes to mind is Valiant (2005) in which the pidgeon characters are VERY humanlike... actually, the mouse character is too. Now there's a comparison I need to add to my research. Rio/Ratatouille versus Valiant in terms of animation style. Wait. Wait. Another one is coming to mind... Ah! The Ugly Duckling and Me. Very very humanised rat and bird characters to compare, though the CGI in that film was already outdated by the time it was released... ah well, animation is what's important.
The worst thing is, I don't know about The Ugly Duckling and Me, but I think Valiant would have been much more effective if it had more of the realism that Rio had; I think rather than making the characters more small flying humans (with only small references or changes to dialogue to remind you that they're little pidgeons, besides the overtly human-like visuals) if they were actually displayed closer to the small, vunerable birds they are the film could have 1) been less offencive with racial stereotypes and 2) had a greater sense of peril. Rio did an excellent job of making the characters have conflict on their own level (via Nigel, the primary bird antagonist) but also keeping the audience aware of the bigger picture (via many perils of the city and smugglers). Valiant should theoretically have a big focus on the bigger picture (they are delivering messages during warfare after all) as well as the bird antagonists.
I know I've never been keen on characters with too many humanized characteristics so there's obviously some bias present, but I do think Valiant could have worked very well if the characters were... how to say it... less soldier, more pidgeon.
On a completely different note, I recently purchaced a new game that was on offer - well, actually, quite an old game. It's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Now, going back to a game like this:
After being very used to games that look like this:
Is naturally going to have the player urking at the graphics for a while until they get used to them. That's normal. But the thing I noticed was... why are the characters in these older games made up of multiple pieces as opposed to characters in newer games that are usually a smooth mesh? I'd say obviously graphical limitations but doesn't having several parts make the model just as graphically straining as having the same model joined together, with the same poly count? I'm thinking it might be to allow the characters to perform nessessary animations without having to worry about essentially 'scoring' the joints so that they can bend without too much deformation (and therefore ending up with a lower poly count) but can I hear anyone else's ideas about why this might be?
That randomness aside, it's back to work, turning these messy notes into readable material. I need to finish my dragon model too (I'm thinking of prioritizing the Faun for now until I make my desired tweaks to the dragon's mesh - and I still need to figure out how to do those wings. I've been looking at a couple traditional dragons in CGI - Dragonheart, Dragonheart 2, Eragon, The Last Dragon, etc. No one ever animates bats in detail in 3D... or maybe I just need to search harder. Poor bats. So cute but they never get any love!)
Anyway, I'm off for now, see everyone tomorrow!
(It's a work in progress, promise.)
Wow, before I continue, I just have to say that Blogger is being unusually glitchy today. I press enter to skip a line and my cursor goes flying all over the place. Might just be me but still... odd.
Anyway, I've been busy looking at a lot of 3D animation, even as entertainment! (How's THAT for two birds with one stone?) And recently went to see a recently released film called Rio (twice in a week) that I found to be particularly noteworthy for its rather bizarre blend of realism and anthropomorphism. Usually, bird characters are notorious for being very anthropomorphised - wings become arms, feathers become fingers, beaks become lips, etc. very little of their natural movement is conserved - in fact, the best example I can think of other than Rio is the pidgeons in Bolt which were also good for it, though the difference between those and the characters in Rio is that they are more comedy relief and aren't true protagonists and so they don't have the duty of conveying all the emotions the protagonists of Rio have to. That being said, Rio is probably the best (in terms of realism) mainstream film I've seen yet for capturing the mannerisms of birds while the emotiveness and likeability of the characters doesn't suffer at all for it. For the most part, wings are wings, beaks are beaks, and feet are feet and hands... which is sort of right, parrots and the like have very good control of their feet.
It reminds me of Ratatouille which was also kind of unusual for retaining more animal characteristics than are usually retained in this sort of animated film. I have to say it makes a pleasant change. I really appreciate the love and care it must take to believably recreate the animalistic motions in these sorts of characters (particularly in birds) and I think it does help the characters from an emotion standpoint - they become more the animals they're based on than humans that sort of look like animals, though the rendition does work well in films like Kung Fu Panda (2008). A film that also comes to mind is Valiant (2005) in which the pidgeon characters are VERY humanlike... actually, the mouse character is too. Now there's a comparison I need to add to my research. Rio/Ratatouille versus Valiant in terms of animation style. Wait. Wait. Another one is coming to mind... Ah! The Ugly Duckling and Me. Very very humanised rat and bird characters to compare, though the CGI in that film was already outdated by the time it was released... ah well, animation is what's important.
The worst thing is, I don't know about The Ugly Duckling and Me, but I think Valiant would have been much more effective if it had more of the realism that Rio had; I think rather than making the characters more small flying humans (with only small references or changes to dialogue to remind you that they're little pidgeons, besides the overtly human-like visuals) if they were actually displayed closer to the small, vunerable birds they are the film could have 1) been less offencive with racial stereotypes and 2) had a greater sense of peril. Rio did an excellent job of making the characters have conflict on their own level (via Nigel, the primary bird antagonist) but also keeping the audience aware of the bigger picture (via many perils of the city and smugglers). Valiant should theoretically have a big focus on the bigger picture (they are delivering messages during warfare after all) as well as the bird antagonists.
I know I've never been keen on characters with too many humanized characteristics so there's obviously some bias present, but I do think Valiant could have worked very well if the characters were... how to say it... less soldier, more pidgeon.
On a completely different note, I recently purchaced a new game that was on offer - well, actually, quite an old game. It's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Now, going back to a game like this:
After being very used to games that look like this:
Is naturally going to have the player urking at the graphics for a while until they get used to them. That's normal. But the thing I noticed was... why are the characters in these older games made up of multiple pieces as opposed to characters in newer games that are usually a smooth mesh? I'd say obviously graphical limitations but doesn't having several parts make the model just as graphically straining as having the same model joined together, with the same poly count? I'm thinking it might be to allow the characters to perform nessessary animations without having to worry about essentially 'scoring' the joints so that they can bend without too much deformation (and therefore ending up with a lower poly count) but can I hear anyone else's ideas about why this might be?
That randomness aside, it's back to work, turning these messy notes into readable material. I need to finish my dragon model too (I'm thinking of prioritizing the Faun for now until I make my desired tweaks to the dragon's mesh - and I still need to figure out how to do those wings. I've been looking at a couple traditional dragons in CGI - Dragonheart, Dragonheart 2, Eragon, The Last Dragon, etc. No one ever animates bats in detail in 3D... or maybe I just need to search harder. Poor bats. So cute but they never get any love!)
Anyway, I'm off for now, see everyone tomorrow!
Monday, 11 April 2011
Updates Don't Get Much Later Than This
Hello again, time for an update. A very, very late update.
So work on my 3D character has been coming along alright. The basic model of the body is more or less done, except for the few bits of clothing my character wears which I'm going to add separately (and hopefully add cloth physics to). He's also going to need hair and fur, but I think as far as the hair is concerned I'm going to go for a partially clumped look, maybe with strands of hair partially visible at the tips of the hair if possible...
(And yes, as an example of what I'm thinking, I'm going to refer to an old favourite of mine. Yay for predictability!)
Like this perhaps. Bless you for your simple CGI, Final Fantasy IX. Bless you. *salute*
It's the best example I could get for what I want. Blocky, but floppy. Surprisingly not that common nowadays! (Usually, it's either floppy and realistic or blocky and stiff, which isn't what I'm after).
On top of that, I might make minor changes to his mesh but it's not decided yet. Originally, the intention was to try for a style part way between Hiccup from Dreamworks's recently released CG film 'How to Train Your Dragon':
and Disney's older, traditionally animated film, 'Tarzan':
Sorry if that's a tad big. Anyhoo, Tarzan uses this nice, clean, angular sort of style I wanted to use. A similar style is found in Disney's 2001 film 'Atlantis: The Lost Empire'. But my character sort of evolved away from the angular style, probably out of personal habit more than anything else. I'm considering adding in extra loops in order to just sharpen the edges I already have.
I would take some full body screenshots of my model to put here, but Cinema 4D is locked down right now (it always is before noon on Mondays, what a pain) so this will have to do.
'What'chu lookin' at?'
Yeah... it's got a way to go, though I'm happy so far. I'm currently working to get him all rigged up, and also to come up with a name for him. Everyone keeps calling him Mr. Tumnus, but I think I'll have to pass on that one. Don't really have the money to just go around getting myself sued... sorry guys.
Since Fauns are supposedly from Roman mythology (as opposed to Greek, which I think was the case with Satyrs who often get confused with Fauns) I took a look at some old Roman names and thought Felix suited him. But since he lives in a completely seperate fantasy world, I might just scrap it later... I'll see how I feel about it after some thought. Felix is a cute name.
I have a long list of animations I've been looking at but I'm going to pop them all in my next post. For now, I have much Cinema 4D experimentation and possible computer-killing to do. Next time!
So work on my 3D character has been coming along alright. The basic model of the body is more or less done, except for the few bits of clothing my character wears which I'm going to add separately (and hopefully add cloth physics to). He's also going to need hair and fur, but I think as far as the hair is concerned I'm going to go for a partially clumped look, maybe with strands of hair partially visible at the tips of the hair if possible...
(And yes, as an example of what I'm thinking, I'm going to refer to an old favourite of mine. Yay for predictability!)
Like this perhaps. Bless you for your simple CGI, Final Fantasy IX. Bless you. *salute*
It's the best example I could get for what I want. Blocky, but floppy. Surprisingly not that common nowadays! (Usually, it's either floppy and realistic or blocky and stiff, which isn't what I'm after).
On top of that, I might make minor changes to his mesh but it's not decided yet. Originally, the intention was to try for a style part way between Hiccup from Dreamworks's recently released CG film 'How to Train Your Dragon':
and Disney's older, traditionally animated film, 'Tarzan':
Sorry if that's a tad big. Anyhoo, Tarzan uses this nice, clean, angular sort of style I wanted to use. A similar style is found in Disney's 2001 film 'Atlantis: The Lost Empire'. But my character sort of evolved away from the angular style, probably out of personal habit more than anything else. I'm considering adding in extra loops in order to just sharpen the edges I already have.
I would take some full body screenshots of my model to put here, but Cinema 4D is locked down right now (it always is before noon on Mondays, what a pain) so this will have to do.
'What'chu lookin' at?'
Yeah... it's got a way to go, though I'm happy so far. I'm currently working to get him all rigged up, and also to come up with a name for him. Everyone keeps calling him Mr. Tumnus, but I think I'll have to pass on that one. Don't really have the money to just go around getting myself sued... sorry guys.
Since Fauns are supposedly from Roman mythology (as opposed to Greek, which I think was the case with Satyrs who often get confused with Fauns) I took a look at some old Roman names and thought Felix suited him. But since he lives in a completely seperate fantasy world, I might just scrap it later... I'll see how I feel about it after some thought. Felix is a cute name.
I have a long list of animations I've been looking at but I'm going to pop them all in my next post. For now, I have much Cinema 4D experimentation and possible computer-killing to do. Next time!
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Rendering Problems and Character Design
So I spent my entire day yesterday wrestling with Adobe Premiere. Heck, I even spent the time I was supposed to be here typing an update about how I was wrestling with Adobe Premiere wrestling with Adobe Premiere. What a pain.
The problem I've encountered is that it wants to be very snooty with how I set up the project. I've tried several identical projects with different settings and different render settings, but it will not render in widescreen and still allow Quicktime to play the file. I can get it to do one or the other only - either it's widescreen and Quicktime can't read it, or Quicktime CAN read it and it's smooshed. Obviously there's something I'm doing wrong but I can't figure out what.
We'll get there. Also, don't mind my idiocy in my last post... rendering it then recording in Fraps, eh, was definitely a Monday... But the Chroma key's quality is rubbish, so though I'll take a peek again to see if there's a way to improve it, I'm mostly going to move away from that idea and see if Adobe Premiere understands empty space on layers. Since Photoshop does I'm guessing Premiere does too, but we'll see.
This morning I've been trawling Conceptart.org for faun designs and I've found a few that interest me:
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=207015&highlight=faun
The Faun character viewable in this thread is of particular interest because it actually has the same shape that the brief said my character had to have: skinny. Character just has to be skinny. Though I do like this work and the way they've taken a reasonably well-used concept and made it interesting by embellishing the character, it's a bit too flowery and nature-oriented, that would suggest they're going down the usual fantasy-elves-live-in-peaceful-forests-with-magical-trees type route, which isn't really what I'm aiming for. I'm wanting something a touch tribal with some modern trappings for familiarity. So though I do really like it, don't think I'll be doing something all too similar.
One faun I found that I really like is this one from 'Pan's Labyrinth':
http://www.americanneopaganism.com/2006_pans_labyrinth_wallpaper_002.jpg
...because it really has an interesting way of embellishing the whole inhuman side of the creature; this faun is not just a human with goat legs, it's something else entirely. That's something I'd like to nail with my design - hopefully the mannerisms involved in the actual animation will make up for what more human characteristics I'd remove physically - as well as the whole tribal thing. Let's be honest, though, that faun is incredibly interesting looking but also very creepy. Let's try to steer clear of creepy.
On the other side of the spectrum completely is Mr. Tumnus from 'The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'. Now this character is, honestly, just a bloke with goat legs. But he's so cute and endearing I just had to give him a mention.
http://jamesmcavoy.fansiter.com/pictures/james-as-mr-tumnus-narnia.jpg
I also found some pretty nice 3D models of a faun character, among other things, here:
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=faun+character&view=detail&id=0F89312BF43D43E95C4A7C32B798EAE17F883149&first=1&FORM=IDFRIR
Now to be fair, these are obviously for video games, not animated film/shorts like the kind of stuff we're shooting for, but still, they're fantastic. Same problems though, too familiar...
I'll figure something out. Hopefully. But it's gonna have to be soon, because I don't have forever to finish this model, and it's best to make changes while it's still in progress.
Here're some other pieces I enjoyed:
http://www.conceptart.org/index.php?artist=Exeivier&cat=updated
I just adore the simple and warm style here. It's quirky and easy to get into. I wonder how it would come across in 3D?
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=194252&highlight=faun
This man is so creative with his creature designs it actually gobsmacked me. Fantastic, make sure to look at every page of that thread, or your life is incomplete!
Next thing to do is to brush up on my tribal research and finish touching up this character so I can make appropriate changes to his 3D model before I get too far along into it. Rigging starts soon and I don't want to fall behind and miss the rigging!
'Til next time.
The problem I've encountered is that it wants to be very snooty with how I set up the project. I've tried several identical projects with different settings and different render settings, but it will not render in widescreen and still allow Quicktime to play the file. I can get it to do one or the other only - either it's widescreen and Quicktime can't read it, or Quicktime CAN read it and it's smooshed. Obviously there's something I'm doing wrong but I can't figure out what.
We'll get there. Also, don't mind my idiocy in my last post... rendering it then recording in Fraps, eh, was definitely a Monday... But the Chroma key's quality is rubbish, so though I'll take a peek again to see if there's a way to improve it, I'm mostly going to move away from that idea and see if Adobe Premiere understands empty space on layers. Since Photoshop does I'm guessing Premiere does too, but we'll see.
This morning I've been trawling Conceptart.org for faun designs and I've found a few that interest me:
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=207015&highlight=faun
The Faun character viewable in this thread is of particular interest because it actually has the same shape that the brief said my character had to have: skinny. Character just has to be skinny. Though I do like this work and the way they've taken a reasonably well-used concept and made it interesting by embellishing the character, it's a bit too flowery and nature-oriented, that would suggest they're going down the usual fantasy-elves-live-in-peaceful-forests-with-magical-trees type route, which isn't really what I'm aiming for. I'm wanting something a touch tribal with some modern trappings for familiarity. So though I do really like it, don't think I'll be doing something all too similar.
One faun I found that I really like is this one from 'Pan's Labyrinth':
http://www.americanneopaganism.com/2006_pans_labyrinth_wallpaper_002.jpg
...because it really has an interesting way of embellishing the whole inhuman side of the creature; this faun is not just a human with goat legs, it's something else entirely. That's something I'd like to nail with my design - hopefully the mannerisms involved in the actual animation will make up for what more human characteristics I'd remove physically - as well as the whole tribal thing. Let's be honest, though, that faun is incredibly interesting looking but also very creepy. Let's try to steer clear of creepy.
On the other side of the spectrum completely is Mr. Tumnus from 'The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'. Now this character is, honestly, just a bloke with goat legs. But he's so cute and endearing I just had to give him a mention.
http://jamesmcavoy.fansiter.com/pictures/james-as-mr-tumnus-narnia.jpg
I also found some pretty nice 3D models of a faun character, among other things, here:
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=faun+character&view=detail&id=0F89312BF43D43E95C4A7C32B798EAE17F883149&first=1&FORM=IDFRIR
Now to be fair, these are obviously for video games, not animated film/shorts like the kind of stuff we're shooting for, but still, they're fantastic. Same problems though, too familiar...
I'll figure something out. Hopefully. But it's gonna have to be soon, because I don't have forever to finish this model, and it's best to make changes while it's still in progress.
Here're some other pieces I enjoyed:
http://www.conceptart.org/index.php?artist=Exeivier&cat=updated
I just adore the simple and warm style here. It's quirky and easy to get into. I wonder how it would come across in 3D?
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=194252&highlight=faun
This man is so creative with his creature designs it actually gobsmacked me. Fantastic, make sure to look at every page of that thread, or your life is incomplete!
Next thing to do is to brush up on my tribal research and finish touching up this character so I can make appropriate changes to his 3D model before I get too far along into it. Rigging starts soon and I don't want to fall behind and miss the rigging!
'Til next time.
Monday, 14 March 2011
3D Character Animation Start
Well, back after a good week break (that, I have to admit, I desperately needed) and I've got my new brief.
It's the best brief in the world.
AD108 covers 3D character animation, which has long been a subject of interest for me. A while back I began to learn basic modelling, rigging and animating in Blender. Since I started college I haven't had much time for it, but I've been trying to brush back up on that as well as practice in Cinema 4D. It's crazy how different the two programmes are, considering they both do pretty much the same thing. Though admittedly I haven't read about any Blender equivalent to Cinema 4D's NURBS (and also, what does that even mean? A nurb? )
But I'm feeling motivated and quite excited to get back into the meat of it, though I might tweak my character design a bit (I never actually liked it... but it ticked the boxes for the module).
Another good thing is that I passed my two previous modules! Actually came as a BIG surprise because I was almost entirely certain I'd failed, and miserably at that. But hey, I must have done something right!
What's even more surprising is not only did I pass, I passed better than any pass I've achieved previously. So what I thought were my two weakest modules actually turned out to be my two strongest... it's a strange world.
Oh, speaking of which, I think I might have come up with a much easier and more time efficient method of combining the two halves of my ident. Before the problem was that I was animating in Adobe Photoshop on a decent sized canvas. (Bare in mind I'm not the best when it comes to animating in Photoshop). I'd have this big canvas, then, and one run of the Granny's arm animation is almost 60 frames/layers. The cat, if I remember right, was between 40 and 50 frames/layers. As you can see on my last post, the Granny does her motion about 6 times. So 6x60 is 360. 360 frames for the Granny plus the approximate of 40 for the cat's single run, 400 layers. Then consider whatever final touches, like extra E4s or leaves falling (these could be keyframed for position change but rotation would have to be done manually, so let's say an extra 30 layers for all of them)... we're looking at 430 layers on a whatsit-by-3000 pixel canvas.
Wouldn't be a problem if I was using something like Final Cut (if I were any good at using Final Cut...) but in Adobe Photoshop it just becomes much more difficult. Now, two options.
1) Continue in Adobe Photoshop, weathering the struggles of my poor tiny computer, and chip away at it
2) Struggle with Final Cut Pro (Hey, it can be tricky you know!) which would get the job done but I'm not awfully experienced with...
But first, I'm actually going to try something that, if it works, will let me combine the two halves with minimum effort and super quick. Basically I've been trying to learn how to use Adobe Premiere and its chroma key effect. I'm going to remove the background from the Granny and the Cat, replace it with a strong green or so, render, record at max quality with Fraps, go into Adobe Premiere and chroma key them back onto the original background and together.
It might not work. It might be a trainwreck. But if it does work it'll save a lot of time and effort and lag. I'll just have to give it a go and see what I can come up with. And also, I can't forget to put the sound in.
Either way, I'll probably repost the final once I've puzzled out the best way to go about doing it.
Related AGAIN is that I got to see everyone elses' idents too, and my, they're fantastic. You guys better upload them soon so I can oogle at their animated brilliance again, okay?
What else... oh yes, we watched a lovely little film called 'Cat Shit One', where two rabbit soldiers take on a base filled with enemy camels to rescue hostages. It was actually really, really good, if bizarre, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. War films usually aren't for me, but thanks to quirky writing and cute character design I got really invested in the two protagonists really quickly, and the animation was brilliant.
Oddly, though, I could tell by looking at it that it was Japanese in origin. I think there's a particular style in Japanese animations that involves character expressions, lip movements (like the shapes that the mouth makes, even if the English speech is synched well) and the camera angles. I felt like I was having flashbacks to the idealized style of Final Fantasy Advent Children all the way through.
Japanese animations seem to keep mouth movement to a minimum; characters often seem as though they should be opening their mouths wider and making more distorted expressions but don't. The same is true for the facial expressions in general; any distortion is very minimal. A lot of the expressions of the characters seem to be created using the movements of the eyes instead.
Unfortunately, Youtube doesn't seem to have an good quality clip from Final Fantasy Advent Children, but here's a decent example of what I mean. In the first 20 seconds of this clip, watch Cloud, the blonde man with spiky hair who's being addressed. Watch his eyes. Though his face hardly ever changes, his eyes are used to express his emotions instead. He goes from quiet anger to uncertainty to fear to annoyance in 20 seconds. And most of his face barely moves.
This was the sort of thing that happened in Cat Shit One. The faces of the characters were quite still, but the eyes told you what they were feeling.
Camera angles is a bit harder to go into, and in Cat Shit One the oddly recognizably Japanese use of camera angles was mixed together with more standardized war camera angles (yep, over the shoulder shots and the like frequent war films), but they were there. I think the general difference is American or English films tend to make dialogue between two characters easy to keep track of, often simply having the camera flick back and forth between the characters (and the characters do not invade and move around each others' shots) while Japanese animations are a little more dynamic with how the characters actually speak to each other and don't follow the speaking character quite as obviously. Like I said though, it's hard to explain, and there's no set-in-stone formula or overriding rule of 'American cameras are like this, Japanese cameras are like that'... it just felt Japanese.
Overall, though, it really worked for me. The lip synching left a bit to be desired but it wasn't hugely distracting, and the story was told well with good pacing. Thumbs up! If you get the chance to watch it, I'd recommend giving it a look in.
Well, I think that's all the blabbering I have to do today.
It's the best brief in the world.
AD108 covers 3D character animation, which has long been a subject of interest for me. A while back I began to learn basic modelling, rigging and animating in Blender. Since I started college I haven't had much time for it, but I've been trying to brush back up on that as well as practice in Cinema 4D. It's crazy how different the two programmes are, considering they both do pretty much the same thing. Though admittedly I haven't read about any Blender equivalent to Cinema 4D's NURBS (and also, what does that even mean? A nurb? )
But I'm feeling motivated and quite excited to get back into the meat of it, though I might tweak my character design a bit (I never actually liked it... but it ticked the boxes for the module).
Another good thing is that I passed my two previous modules! Actually came as a BIG surprise because I was almost entirely certain I'd failed, and miserably at that. But hey, I must have done something right!
What's even more surprising is not only did I pass, I passed better than any pass I've achieved previously. So what I thought were my two weakest modules actually turned out to be my two strongest... it's a strange world.
Oh, speaking of which, I think I might have come up with a much easier and more time efficient method of combining the two halves of my ident. Before the problem was that I was animating in Adobe Photoshop on a decent sized canvas. (Bare in mind I'm not the best when it comes to animating in Photoshop). I'd have this big canvas, then, and one run of the Granny's arm animation is almost 60 frames/layers. The cat, if I remember right, was between 40 and 50 frames/layers. As you can see on my last post, the Granny does her motion about 6 times. So 6x60 is 360. 360 frames for the Granny plus the approximate of 40 for the cat's single run, 400 layers. Then consider whatever final touches, like extra E4s or leaves falling (these could be keyframed for position change but rotation would have to be done manually, so let's say an extra 30 layers for all of them)... we're looking at 430 layers on a whatsit-by-3000 pixel canvas.
Wouldn't be a problem if I was using something like Final Cut (if I were any good at using Final Cut...) but in Adobe Photoshop it just becomes much more difficult. Now, two options.
1) Continue in Adobe Photoshop, weathering the struggles of my poor tiny computer, and chip away at it
2) Struggle with Final Cut Pro (Hey, it can be tricky you know!) which would get the job done but I'm not awfully experienced with...
But first, I'm actually going to try something that, if it works, will let me combine the two halves with minimum effort and super quick. Basically I've been trying to learn how to use Adobe Premiere and its chroma key effect. I'm going to remove the background from the Granny and the Cat, replace it with a strong green or so, render, record at max quality with Fraps, go into Adobe Premiere and chroma key them back onto the original background and together.
It might not work. It might be a trainwreck. But if it does work it'll save a lot of time and effort and lag. I'll just have to give it a go and see what I can come up with. And also, I can't forget to put the sound in.
Either way, I'll probably repost the final once I've puzzled out the best way to go about doing it.
Related AGAIN is that I got to see everyone elses' idents too, and my, they're fantastic. You guys better upload them soon so I can oogle at their animated brilliance again, okay?
What else... oh yes, we watched a lovely little film called 'Cat Shit One', where two rabbit soldiers take on a base filled with enemy camels to rescue hostages. It was actually really, really good, if bizarre, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. War films usually aren't for me, but thanks to quirky writing and cute character design I got really invested in the two protagonists really quickly, and the animation was brilliant.
Oddly, though, I could tell by looking at it that it was Japanese in origin. I think there's a particular style in Japanese animations that involves character expressions, lip movements (like the shapes that the mouth makes, even if the English speech is synched well) and the camera angles. I felt like I was having flashbacks to the idealized style of Final Fantasy Advent Children all the way through.
Japanese animations seem to keep mouth movement to a minimum; characters often seem as though they should be opening their mouths wider and making more distorted expressions but don't. The same is true for the facial expressions in general; any distortion is very minimal. A lot of the expressions of the characters seem to be created using the movements of the eyes instead.
Unfortunately, Youtube doesn't seem to have an good quality clip from Final Fantasy Advent Children, but here's a decent example of what I mean. In the first 20 seconds of this clip, watch Cloud, the blonde man with spiky hair who's being addressed. Watch his eyes. Though his face hardly ever changes, his eyes are used to express his emotions instead. He goes from quiet anger to uncertainty to fear to annoyance in 20 seconds. And most of his face barely moves.
This was the sort of thing that happened in Cat Shit One. The faces of the characters were quite still, but the eyes told you what they were feeling.
Camera angles is a bit harder to go into, and in Cat Shit One the oddly recognizably Japanese use of camera angles was mixed together with more standardized war camera angles (yep, over the shoulder shots and the like frequent war films), but they were there. I think the general difference is American or English films tend to make dialogue between two characters easy to keep track of, often simply having the camera flick back and forth between the characters (and the characters do not invade and move around each others' shots) while Japanese animations are a little more dynamic with how the characters actually speak to each other and don't follow the speaking character quite as obviously. Like I said though, it's hard to explain, and there's no set-in-stone formula or overriding rule of 'American cameras are like this, Japanese cameras are like that'... it just felt Japanese.
Overall, though, it really worked for me. The lip synching left a bit to be desired but it wasn't hugely distracting, and the story was told well with good pacing. Thumbs up! If you get the chance to watch it, I'd recommend giving it a look in.
Well, I think that's all the blabbering I have to do today.
Saturday, 5 March 2011
E4 Ident - Two Halves
Okay, I promised myself I'd post sometime yesterday but I ended up sleeping for most of yesterday (I didn't sleep at all through Thursday night, I was trying to push to finish the thing but... gah, the speed at which I work is nothing short of pathetic). So, today, I'm finally updating. Go me!
Though I didn't -quite- manage to outright finish my Ident, I did complete most of the animation for it, which, as usual, I didn't make an easy task for myself (yes, my Granny DID have to move in 1s and have almost 60 frames for one movement of her arm. It was completely necessary!) - but, in the end, I'm reasonably pleased with what I have. I just wish I could have combined everything into one truly final piece before the deadline. And when I've recuperated from the terrible effects of deadline week, I will finish it. For myself mostly... I'm one of those 'start a billion projects all at the same time and never finish them' type people and believe me, I'm going to change that. It already drives me crazy when I can't bring a close to my personal projects, it becomes extra frustrating when the habit spills over onto my college projects as well.
But enough of that, here's the first part of my animation. Please bare in mind how this is intended to work; the Granny version of the animation is the required length of 10 seconds. The Cat version would be intergrated into this, not added on, so the final thing would be exactly 10 seconds long, as the brief specified. The Cat is part of the Granny animation, the Granny isn't a part of the Cat animation. If that makes any sense.
The Granny Version:
Okay, here we go. The Granny was intended to be the main focus of the animation, though she is the most boring aspect of it. My original intention was for her to be hand-drawn in each and every frame but I decided not to - both for time constraints and so that she would feel extra static; the less interesting movement to be observed from her body, the more attention you pay to the part that IS moving - her arm. If you're watching her arm, you naturally follow the arm to the walking stick. And from there, the bright colours of the E4 logo itself should catch your eyes, making you aware of it. But it's not in your face, which is a complaint I had with a few idents I looked at. I preferred, largely, idents that made you aware of the E4 logo but didn't feel the need to shove it so close to your face you felt like it was going to bang you on the nose. So that's what I tried to do.
Problem with this is that it is, at the end of the day, boring. So when I was drawing the storyboards I added in a little bit of randomness to try and inject a little offhanded humour into it, and hopefully something a tad unexpected. And that's below:
So down falls the cat and the lawnmower. The cat itself was generally taken from the old 'old lady trying to get Tiddles the cat out of the tree' sort of idea, the lawnmower was added for an element of the randomness and unexpected entrance I was after. Besides this, I wanted there to be this sense that there's this woman, and she's prodding at this E4 'apple', and there's odd stuff going on around her but she's so absorbed in the E4 that she doesn't notice anything at all. The final animation would have had quite a loud crashing sound effect when it fell down and a loud engine roar as it moved, just to drill in the point.
Well, I hope anyone reading liked this anyway. It was fun, but tiring, and I think this project (and the module running along with it) have been my weakest yet. Still so much room for improvement. But, looking at the bright side, each module I've done the final animation gets closer and closer to being finished. My first animation was barely there at all, my second was halfway done, this one very close to completion. The next one will be finished by the deadline! ...Geez, my time management is awful.
Though I didn't -quite- manage to outright finish my Ident, I did complete most of the animation for it, which, as usual, I didn't make an easy task for myself (yes, my Granny DID have to move in 1s and have almost 60 frames for one movement of her arm. It was completely necessary!) - but, in the end, I'm reasonably pleased with what I have. I just wish I could have combined everything into one truly final piece before the deadline. And when I've recuperated from the terrible effects of deadline week, I will finish it. For myself mostly... I'm one of those 'start a billion projects all at the same time and never finish them' type people and believe me, I'm going to change that. It already drives me crazy when I can't bring a close to my personal projects, it becomes extra frustrating when the habit spills over onto my college projects as well.
But enough of that, here's the first part of my animation. Please bare in mind how this is intended to work; the Granny version of the animation is the required length of 10 seconds. The Cat version would be intergrated into this, not added on, so the final thing would be exactly 10 seconds long, as the brief specified. The Cat is part of the Granny animation, the Granny isn't a part of the Cat animation. If that makes any sense.
The Granny Version:
Okay, here we go. The Granny was intended to be the main focus of the animation, though she is the most boring aspect of it. My original intention was for her to be hand-drawn in each and every frame but I decided not to - both for time constraints and so that she would feel extra static; the less interesting movement to be observed from her body, the more attention you pay to the part that IS moving - her arm. If you're watching her arm, you naturally follow the arm to the walking stick. And from there, the bright colours of the E4 logo itself should catch your eyes, making you aware of it. But it's not in your face, which is a complaint I had with a few idents I looked at. I preferred, largely, idents that made you aware of the E4 logo but didn't feel the need to shove it so close to your face you felt like it was going to bang you on the nose. So that's what I tried to do.
Problem with this is that it is, at the end of the day, boring. So when I was drawing the storyboards I added in a little bit of randomness to try and inject a little offhanded humour into it, and hopefully something a tad unexpected. And that's below:
So down falls the cat and the lawnmower. The cat itself was generally taken from the old 'old lady trying to get Tiddles the cat out of the tree' sort of idea, the lawnmower was added for an element of the randomness and unexpected entrance I was after. Besides this, I wanted there to be this sense that there's this woman, and she's prodding at this E4 'apple', and there's odd stuff going on around her but she's so absorbed in the E4 that she doesn't notice anything at all. The final animation would have had quite a loud crashing sound effect when it fell down and a loud engine roar as it moved, just to drill in the point.
Well, I hope anyone reading liked this anyway. It was fun, but tiring, and I think this project (and the module running along with it) have been my weakest yet. Still so much room for improvement. But, looking at the bright side, each module I've done the final animation gets closer and closer to being finished. My first animation was barely there at all, my second was halfway done, this one very close to completion. The next one will be finished by the deadline! ...Geez, my time management is awful.
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