The Challenge is over

Well the summer has been over for a while, but I never got around to making these final posts. I got swept up by thesis, which has been so much fun.

Here is an over view of all the shots I did over the summer

It was so much fun and I feel like I learned so much from these exercise. I would like to thank David Torres for the idea. I tried my best to keep to the original assignment. I would also like to thank everyone gave me there thoughts on how to make my shots better. All the comments were much appreciated.

I am still accepting crits and comments because these shots might make my reel this year and if they do I want to go back and polish up some things.

I also would like to know what shots you guys like best. I always like to get others thoughts on what shots they like because I can't look at these objectively. And if you feel like it you can tell me if any of the shots are just not working or just stink. Don't worry I can take the bad news.
Here is a reel of all the shots in chronological order and below the video is a link for each shot that you can download.


Well it’s been fun but it looks like this blog is seen its last post.



below each picture is a link to the animation

thanks for stopping by

BYE!



CLICK ME!




CLICK ME!





CLICK ME!





CLICK ME!





CLICK ME!


















Peace Out
-Scott

11 Second Club Progress

Some people have asked me to see my process work. I tried my best to keep track of my process on this shot,

Usually when I start a shot I will make a list of ideas and concept that might work well for the chosen dialogue. Once I have come up with my concept and characters start freely brainstorming poses and thumbnails. I do some initial thumbnails before I shoot reference to really get the creative juices flowing. I also come up with internal dialogue and any other thought processes the characters might have. Once I have some ideas I then get up and shoot some reference. I will start off by improving the scene a few times to see if I come up with any happy accidents. Then I do some intentional acting. his is were I am trying to act out the poses and ideas I came up with in my initial thumbnails. I then sit down and watch the reference , make some notes and then start doing some finalized thumbnails and ideas.


Once I fully understand what I want to do in the shot I start blocking out my scene. I typically work in stepped and stay in stepped till it is all on twos or fours. I start of by blocking the main story poses. I try to really quickly get the try to read in as few poses as possible. I then i keep breaking things down until I ma happy with it. I then shift it over to linear where I shift my keys around till i getting looking as good as possible by just messing with the timing.

Finally I grin and bear and spline my animation and keep messing with curves till I run out of time.

So enough with the chit chat.

Here are some of thumbnails that I did over the course of working on the shot. It is everything from initial ideas to how I wanted to pose out the mouth. This is only about a third of them.








Here are some videos of the animation in progress
These are thumbnails that I plugged into monkey jam to test out some timing stuff

Thumbnails for July 11 Second Club from smcwhinnie on Vimeo.

Here are some variations I had on my blocking pass








Then Someone on the forums suggested that I have an opening shot to show what the elf was looking at. I didn't think it was necessary, but I always like to give things a shot because you never know it could be brilliant.




More progress




More progress




2nd pass Splinning




Here is an alternate version I was working with




Here is the final version
Still needs a lot of work, but don't they always

11 Second Club

This past July I participated in the 11 second club competition. To my suprise I placed 3rd, which was super cool and exciting. It was so much fun working on this shot and getting everyone's feedback on the progress of the shot. It was so nice to finally get some feedbackon my shots, becausefor a while I have felt like I was animating in my own little bubble. I was really excited to get back to school to get back in that creative enviornment.

Anyway here it is...

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/july11/entry/0peki1

In my next post I will be posting some of the progress of this shot

More Animation Studies

Here are a few more animation studies I did over the summer




Since I have been doing a lot of facial animation I wanted to look at some nice facial animation from How to Train Your Dragon and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.




And this next shot I looked specifically at the hands for one of the shots I was working on over the summer.



These are just a few studies that I wanted to share.

Winnie the Pooh

So I saw Winnie the Pooh because it is amazing and you should do the same. The story was so-so but it was so funny, I couldn't stop laughing.

Here are a few of my favorite clips. The acting on these shots is so good it is sickening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcwFWoY83k

In this first shot I love how when pooh hears that the honey is gooey and he responds by saying it is his personal favorite and he bites down on the paper is so cool. the timing and posing and spacing on that shot is just perfect.
Since this was a traditionally animated film you can do cool little things like when Owl says "gooey" his eyes get this crazed look. Another personal favorite(haha)shot of mine was when pooh says " ...especially the strange one" The facial animation is spot on even though they are working with just a couple of dots for eyes. The animators on this film are amazing and I would love to pick there brains about some of the shot. Thank You Disney for sticking to traditionally animated movies.

So I was planning on talking about a few clips on this post but half way through I decided to spilt it up into multiple posts so expect s few more of these. Plus more animations

UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I got some great notes on the piece with the kid with the shoes. This shot has been a real tough one, but I think kit is getting better. Still not where i want it yet but I figured I would post where I was at with. There are still some notes I got that I am trying to figure out if they will work. Like a got a note about possibly having him pull the shoes towards him instead of pushing them away. i really liked that note but I could not get it to work with this guys huge head, but I am going to give a few more whacks at it because I think it could be really cool. Also opened up the shot a bit to clear up his mouth and clarify things. It was amazing how much better the piece got by just doing that. I think the first time i meet with David Torres he told the entire class that "Clarity is King" or something along those lines.( not sure if those were the exact words)Still got a lot of work to do on this shot but it has been nice to have a challenge this is something very different from what I normally do.

thanks everyone for all the great comments. i have a new shot in the planning that I will actually be posting more of the progress and showing how I go about animating a shot because i got some request to show the progress of my shots.

shoes from smcwhinnie on Vimeo.

and I forgot to thank Adam Cambell on my last post for this rig

yeah a new shot

So here is my new shot not done but I'm going to take a break from it for a bit and work on fixing up one of my old shots. But i wanted to post it here to get some feedback before I finish it up. But come July I am going to do the 11 second club no matter what the audio is and hopefully that will turn out nice.

Another New Book

I finished up timing for Animation! I thought it was pretty good . I do wish that it went into a little more depth and it seemed to be a general animation book and not so much one on just timing. though it did touch on a lot more timing than most other animation books. I did enjoy the section about character.

Character is something that I have been wanting to work on in my animation. in fact the shot I am working on now is all about contrasting two characters in one shot and working on directing the eye with two characters in a shot. Anyway...

My new book is actually one that I have already read called Acting for Animators. it is such a good book and I feel like i need a refresher. Because my two goals this summer was to improve my polish and my acting . I feel like I have come along way on my polishing , but I don't feel like I getting the acting thing. From here on out that is my main focus.




PS I have found some really cool blogs that I want to post a little later. and don't worry I have new and updated animation it is just a pain to get blogger to work

New Shot

Here is my thri shot of the summer and this one was incredibly hard. Im not too happy with it right now but I think it will come together once I get some more time to really work on it. Shots like this are really hard for me but I learn so much. this shot is obviously not even close to being done but I figured I would post it anyways and I plan on getting back to it in a few days. My CA teacher last year Kieth Osborn told me that you have to show them your ugly too if you want to get any better. So here is my ugly. i relly want to get this one to work. so any crits would be awesome. I have gotten behind on my animations due to a number of things so the next week or so I wil be trying to catch up with my shots. really spending som time getting them to sing. I really want to make sure that my shots look nice and not just be done. I also hve a lot of posts to catch up on.

Updated Animation

So as you can tell I am a little behind on the posting I have been busy with moving and also working on thesis. But I have been trying to keep up with my work. I updated booger cookies. I think it is working a lot better but there is still a ton of things that I want to change on it. Also now that I have had some time a way from the first shot there is another huge list of things I want to fix. It never ends. I do have another shot that I " finished", well actually I got behind on it so it si more like 2nd pass. It was a tough shot. And I am working on my fourth shot right now. I am trying to do something a little more fun. Any way here is the update Shot

Animation studies

So In addition to all of the animation I am doing this summer and the reading. I have also been studying animation that I think are very good or have something special. Basically I am analyzing others animation that impress me. One of the first things I looked at was blinks because I was having some trouble with the blinks in the shot i was working on. I opened up Up and found a shot that had a variety of blinks in it and started to analyze things about the blinks. some interesting things I noticed was that every one of the blinks I looked at had more frames on the coming up than on the coming down. Also for the most part the closed position always held for 3 frames and I found it weird that over those three frames the lids didn't continue to compress or anything ( this might of been because of the poor quality of the image) I also found this new way to blink which I call the squint blink. which is a blink but the lids do not close completely they both come inward and break the edge of the iris, hold and then go back to there original locations. the timing and spacing are the same as a regular blink but the lids just squint.

Here are the notes I wrote up

New book

Yeah I finished How To Cheat In Maya. It was a good book for learning the animation tools in Maya, but in terms of animation, it was okay. But I do think that anyone who is just starting to use maya for animation shuold take a look at this book. It was great for showing you all the cool tools maya has to offer to help you animate. There was a great chapter on animating with props and how to prevent gimbal lock. It also came with a DVD with example animations and maya files, which I want to explore more.





I have now begun reading timing for animation.

animation revisions

After I finished up my last shot I went back for a few days to make any revision to the previous shot I had worked on. Here is the new playblast of my last shot with some revision. I plan to do this with ever shot.

Right Click Save As

Booger Cookies

So i finished this shot last week but blogger has been annoying so I have not been able to post it, but anyways here is my 2nd shot of the summer and i am pretty happy with it, but I feel like it is a long way to being finished. On that note any comments and crits is greatly appreciated. The rig is by tommy Taylor a great modeler and aniamtor you can check out his film here ( which the character is from) Night of the Living Dad

Here is my animation
Right Click Save AS



The shot I have planned next is really going to push me as an animator so we will see how that turns out.

Power to the character

A couple of days ago I saw the Adjustment Bureau. really good Movie I highly recommend it.

But anyways the reason I bring it up is because I saw in the movie a great example of a single character and how they act and react differently according to there surroundings. in this case people. It was the main adjustment guy that chase whats his face ( i think Matt Damon around) when he talks to Damon he is the one in control and has all the power over Damon. He is intimidating and really scary. But as soon as this guy is talking with his superior in the adjustment bureau he suddenly acts like a scared little school girl. now that is a little exaggerated , but it gets the point across. I was just really intrigued by how a character can behave so differently in two shots that were so close to each other in the film, but it never seemed out of character. I wish I had these clips so i could really analyze them and so i could show an example.

I just thought I would share.

My first Animation

So Here is my first animation of the summer. It was a lot of fun and I feel like i learned some things from this shot. Like Plan everything and don't ever say Oh ill figure it out later because I won't and I didn't. Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out except the beginning. In the begining I do not like the acting and it is still really rough animation and this is all because this was the one part of my aniamtion that I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to do , I just said I would figure it out. And it clearly shows that I did not plan. Unfortenitly that was a hige acting moment that I totally missed out on. O well il get it next time.

Also the Cube in the foreground willl eventually be another character.

So here is the animation.

the rig is from Russell Miler and Eric Chou and it is from there Senior film. Check it out here. http://vimeo.com/23427776

it still needs alot of work but i said I would post it today and I am going to I am goging to put t aside for a week let it settle and Ill be back in a week to tweak things for a couple days. So any comments I would love to hear. So tomorrow I start a new shot , this one involves cookies. woot woot. I will make sure that before I move one control on the charcter that I have everything thought out and know what I want to do for every second of the shot.

the first book of the summer

So i got this book earlier this year but never got around to reading it and now that prepro is all done I've decided this should be a great book to read first. So far it has been great there hasn't been much on animation specifically , but I have jumped ahead a bit and there is greatness to come. So far the book has been a goldmine for improving workflow. It teaches you all these little shortcuts. a lot of the things that I wish I could do I have found out that I can or I have found an easier way to do things I have done before. I have enjoyed the book a lot so far and highly recommend it to begin CG artists. Plus it has a DVD that contains maya files so you can follow along in Maya.

O yeah by the way it is called How to Cheat in Maya by Eric Lutha

If there are any great books out there that you think I should read or blog posts let me know I am always down to explore something new.

First Post

Howdy all this blog is dedicated to a challenge I was initially given to by David Torres, Supervising animator at Dreamworks. I had an interview with him a few months back and he gave me a summer homework assignment. It was to animate dialogue/ acting pieces of animation that were around 80-100 frames and do them in one week. So I am taking him up on this challenge. So every Sunday I will be posting the animation I have been working on and hopefully it will be done, but I will post it no matter what state it is at. I am also pondering the idea of going back to each shot after a week of working on another shot as to work on polishing up my animation.

During every single interview I had with recruiters I was given the note to continue to work on my acting and to polish polish poilsh. So those are my goals. I want to create believable characters that think within my shots and I want to be able to polish a shot out the wazoo. I am also wanting to read and study animation more this summer and I plan on posting about my findings.

Hopefully this site will help me keep my promise to David Torres. And learn something this summer,

So if there is anyone who actually stumbles upon this blog remember to annoy if you do not see a new animation posted on Sunday. Except this Sunday because I need a little bit of a break, but next Sunday it begins.