Funny In 15 Project

We have been given an assignment titled ' Funny In 15 in 5 '. The goal is to create a 15 second animated film that will make the audience laugh. We are also to complete it in 5 weeks, hence the title.

 Our class was divided into groups, and my group has 3 members - Leo, Katie and I.

 Katie is in charge of storyboarding, and the initial idea of the film was a half-witted seagull who is sitting idle in the middle of an ocean. A ship is sailing towards the seagull, but the seagull dodges it and flies away, only to hit against a buoy and then fall into the ocean.

The current storyboard is slightly different - The seagull dodges the ship, but then flies away and hits against the hull of another ship. And that other ship just happens to be the Titanic :) The Titanic then immediately sinks in a comical fashion. The punchline is that the seagull was the real reason behind the sinking of the Titanic, and not icebergs.

In this project, I have been given the role of creating and animating the ocean, the boat, and the buoy. But of course with the new storyboard, I will be creating and animating the Titanic as well. I am using Maya to create and animate all of these, and I will using the fluid effects in Maya to animate the splashes, ripples and waves in the ocean. Since we are going for a 2D-ish look in this film, I am going to apply toon shaders to all the elements in Maya.

At first I didn't know how to apply a toon shader to the ocean as it uses displacement textures. But after going through a few tutorials online, I discovered that the ocean first had to be converted to a polygon mesh without history, and then the toon shader could be applied. After applying the toon shader and tweaking with the outlines, I achieved the following look.










Log: 17th October, 2014.


I modelled the Titanic and applied the toon shader to it.
Modelling took a very short time as it has a nice simple, minimalistic, charming design. I also made a short sample animation of it sinking, and showed it to my team. I used two tone shaded brightness for the toon textures on both the titanic and the smaller boat. By doing this, the models have a 2D appearance, but at the same time it doesn't look flat and without a sense of volume, thanks to the shading element. I'll also have a go at making some splash tests with the toon ocean.

Log: 22nd October, 2014.

Due to a short amount of time before the deadline, we have decided to scrap the Maya simulated ocean, as experimenting with the toon shader and figuring out how to create satisfactory toon textured foam, waves and ripples, would take too long for us to get the film ready by time. I finished the final renders today, which were 3 sequences. One of the small boat sailing towards the seagull, the panning shot (where the bird hits the hull of the titanic), and the overall shot of the titanic sinking. Animating the boat was fairly simple. I just marked the start position and end position at the appropriate keyframes, and positioning the boat higher and lower from its default altitude a few times between the keyframes to make it bounce and up and down when it moves. I had to animate the bouys as well. And I made 2 bouys react according to the wake from the boat, as they were close to the boat.

The panning shot (where the seagull hits the hull of the titanic), was a laborious part. The speed at which the Maya camera moved accross the 2 buoys and titanic, was much faster than how the camera panned in the animatic. This was because of the number of frames that the animation had to be in. The animatic did not have a frame limit, hence it could pan the desired distance at the desired speed. However in this situation, time is a constant. The camera had to pan a considerable distance to have a satisfactory effect. So deciding how much distance the camera had to pan, how far the bouys had to be, how close they had to be to the camera, was a huge task that took a whole lot of time. After much tweaking around, we managed to get a good result after resizing the buoys, positioning them closer to the camera, and reducing the distance the camera has to pan, but not by too much so that it still looks close to what is in the animatic. We were then satisfied with the speed at which the camera pans.

 The titanic sinking shot was easy to animate. However at this point, Maya was beginning to create horrible problems. The rendered images in the sequence that came out, appeared stretched vertically. I have no idea why this happened. I hadn't changed any parameters in Maya since the last render which happened perfectly. I googled, googled, and googled and didn't seem to find any similar problem to which there were solutions. I then switched the renderer from Maya software to Mentalray and that seemed to do the trick. The rendered images from mental ray came out alright.

I encountered the same stretched images problem when re-rendering the first boat shot because the earlier one had an unwanted polygon plane. Again I used the mentalray renderer and it did the trick.



Log: 24th October, 2014.

We finished the project! Katie and Leo were very happy with the final renders, and they mixed the sound effects with the final footage, and uploaded it on the Learningspace. It's a shame we didn't have enough time to create the 2D Maya simulated ocean. It would have worked really well I feel, creating lush, detailed splashes and waves.

Experimental Animation

For this assignment, we had to produce 3 different 20-second animations using 3 different techniques that did not use the computer apart from post production and editing. We were also given a choice of soundtracks to work with and the idea was to make the 3 films play along with the soundtrack and relate to it in some way.

 





1st Technique: For the first technique I used a pencil, paper and a lightbox to animate a stickman character dancing to the first 20 seconds of the song I chose. I then photographed each page with a camera and arranged the frames together in Adobe Premier. I paid close attention to the variations and rhythm of the song and how the character would react to it. Before I animated, I imagined myself dancing to the song and thought of what I would do if I were in the stickman's position, and then I went ahead and animated what came to mind. Two inspirations I used for this song was the famous ' Staying Alive ' dance move from Saturday Night Fever and a dance move which Johnny Bravo uses in his cartoon intro.

 


2nd Technique: For the next 20 second film, I cut green coloured cardboard paper in small pieces and arranged them on an A4 paper positioned below a mounted camera connected to a laptop. The idea fo this film was to make the green cardboard pieces react to the music. I found this technique very easy because it was easy to manipulate and move around the green paper pieces. I was focusing more on the song here and deciding how the bits of paper would sway and react to the music.







3rd Technique: For the third 20 second film, I decided to make a stop motion animation in which computer peripherals come to life. I made on mouse climb out of a hole on a table and inspect a crushed green paper that was lying on the other end of the table. Then another mouse climbs out of a the same hole and moves along to inspect the crushed paper too. Mouse 1 accidentally knocks the paper off the table and then Mouse 2 gets annoyed because of this and Mouse 1 and Mouse 2 engage in a fight and in all that chaos another green crushed paper lands of the table, and all three of them fight over it, and then the film ends. I had to take many frames for this animation to ensure that the characters in it moved in a smooth enough manner, and I had to put my flexibility skills to the test too as I was holding the controller for the mounted camera on one hand and stretching out my other hand to hold the wire of the mouse from underneath the table and keep it still.



AT-ST Model

This is a project I started about two weeks ago. I'm modeling an AT-ST (From the Star Wars universe) in Maya. AT-ST stands for All Terrain Scout Transport, and it's a 2-legged vehicle, armed with laser cannons and a few missiles. You see these vehicles in ' Empire Strikes Back ' during the Hoth Battle scene and in ' Return of the Jedi '. I haven't finished the model yet but this is a picture of what I have created so far.

I have somewhat completed the model, but I am not completely satisfied by it. I feel like it needs more detail to give it some more life. I haven't textured it yet and it definitely needs a nice layered texture for that rough dirty metal look.

I tried 2 renders with the model - One in standard lighting and the other with a physical sun and sky based lighting. The 2nd one makes the model look like its made out of plaster, and that is definitely not the effect I intended. The first render though is close to the effect I'm trying to achieve.

Another issue is that the head of the AT-ST looks very disproportionate to its legs. I'll have to make it a bit smaller. It does look a little comical now, almost like a caricature and it would work well for a nice cute Star Wars themed cartoon but I'm trying to achieve a more realistic look, much closer to what is seen in the films.

Motion Studies Walk Cycle Assignment

For this motion studies assignment, we had to design a character's walk cycle. I made a stickman figure in Flash and then created a rig for him using the bone tool. This was the first time I tried something like this in Flash and I ran into many problems in the beginning with this character because the joints acted funny and moved in ridiculous ways. After much experimenting, I finally managed to make the character move in regular earthly way.

Traditional Animation

Traditional Animation:

Recently our class has started creating simple animations using traditional animation techniques - Pencil, paper and lightboxes.

I actually found this more enjoyable than Flash because it was way more intuitive and everything felt more natural and organic. It was more tedious yes, but it was a nice experience.

Our first assignment using this method was to animate one character throwing a hammer at another character and then animating how that character would react after being hit:

MAZED Project

MAZED Project:

Log : (9th March 2014)

Our class has been approached by a company producing iPhone Apps which help people learn about the history of Cornwall. Our class was divided into groups and each group was assigned a particular story. The stories are Cornish Folk tales, and each group is supposed to make animations depicting the respective story they are given. My group has been given the story ' Copper for Cake ' which is an old folk tale about a miner. The groups assign various roles within themselves. In my group, I have been given the role of Editor and the person in charge of post production. I am also in charge of sound effects. My group has decided to make the animation in a 2D cut-out style. My team has come up with impressive character sketches and a storyboard so far. I am currently arranging the frames of the storyboard into an animatic and I will post it on this space when I am done. As I finish each segment of the project I will post it on this space gradually and keep logging the date when I make each post.

 As of now I feel like making the sound effects shouldn't be too difficult. I will have to find an effective way of recording the sound effects that take place within the cave and ensure they have the appropriate reverberation.







Log: (11th March 2014)

I finished the first draft of the animatic yesterday. One part I had difficulty with was deciding how much of a time gap there should be between when Sam's helmet falls on the ground and when the knocker reaches in to grab the Figgy 'Obbin. The time gap had to let the Knockes appear sinister and let the audience know that it had planned to kill Sam. But if it was too long even by a second, the animation would appear awkward. The first draft of my animatic did not contain sound. I then went on youtube and downloaded some sound effects such as loud clanging sounds and the sound of a rock falling on the ground, and added these to the animatic. Dan had also recorded his voiceover of the narration and I mixed this in with the animatic. I used Audacity to edit the voiceover and separate the segments in the track to insert them in the appropriate areas of the animatic. I now have to add ambient sound effects that play when Sam enters the cave and sounds such as birds chirping and wind blowing when he steps outside.




Log: (18th April 2014)

Today I made the 4th version of the animatic. Jack had redone certain parts of his storyboard over the Easter break and added some new frames so I  made the same alterations to the animatic. This time I added the soundtrack that we have decided to use and several other sound effects. Nick had told us to add shot numbers to the animatic so I did that too. The fourth animatic flowed and looked really good with the extra sound effects, voiceover and especially the soundtrack! The sound effects were downloaded from a website called http://www.freesfx.co.uk/.


Log: (1st May 2014)

Today the remaining members of my group finished their animations and the final movie was supposed to be handed in tomorrow afternoon. My job was to edit the film - arrange the scenes, insert the dialogue, sound effects and finalize the film. The day was absolutely chaotic and the other team members were struggling to finish their animations as soon as possible, and the animations were handed to me at night. I worked on the film from 12:00 AM to 9:00 AM in the library. I ran into countless problems because I didn't know where the various scenes where stored and which versions I had to use. And I couldn't ask anyone because they all were asleep after 3 AM.

 I'm not whining or anything, but it would have been great if my team had finished their animations at least 1 day earlier so that I had more time to work on it. And it would have been even greater if they arranged all their scenes into one folder so that I knew where to look, and kept all the scenes in one format. One of the scenes even had a problem as the main character had 4 arms instead of 2. Many of the scenes had huge file sizes and since I was using an extremely slow computer, I had to use a media encoder to change their format to compress them so that they wouldn't cause a heavy load on the computer.

I should have stressed to my group earlier that it was important for them to finish their work early enough for me to edit it. I will keep this entire experience in my mind the next time I'm on a group project and make sure I do so.

4 Poses With Eleven

In this assignment, we were supposed to use the Maya character rig called ' Eleven ' and take rendered shots of him in 4 different poses, showing emotion.

For this first shot, he is in a sinister pose, rubbing his hands and plotting something evil. However the squated legs depict a certain sense of childishness and innocence in him:

In the second shot, he is in a joyful pose, like a ballet dancer in mid air.

In the third shot, he is in a horrified and shocked state, as if he just at that moment lost something precious to him.

For this fourth pose, he is in a very condescending pose. Bewildered at the same time, as if he is listening to a person who he thinks is speaking absolute nonsense.

In this assignment I learnt quite a bit about how to operate character rigs in Maya and how their various features can be easily controlled through the channel box.

Bouncing Ball In Maya

For this assignment, we were supposed to animate a ball bouncing in Maya.

Eleven Pushing A Block

Here I have animated the ' Eleven ' character rig that were given for our Maya assignments. I have animated Eleven pushing a large block. I wanted to make the block look it was heavy, so I first animated Eleven's movements, and then animated the movement of the block. I gave Eleven some head movements to make it look like he was putting quite a bit of effort into pushing the block.

Eleven Picking Up a Block

We were given a Maya character rig called ' Eleven ', and in this project we were supposed to make him pick up an object from the ground. I made the character pick up a simple grey block from the ground. I went through problems in this assignment because an error had caused the textures of the character to go haywire, so I had to re-texture the character's skin and hair. I was also unable to texture the eyes and so in this animation his eyes are black.

Burt Walk Cycle

This was one of our Maya assignments, where we were given a character rig called ' Burt ' and we had to make him walk. This was the first time I was animating a character within Maya and so I found it difficult to animate the foot placements, foot and toe roll, etc. I made Burt walk on a checker textured plane to give the viewer a sense of the distance covered by Burt. 

Flash Sound Project

For this project we were given a sound clip and we were supposed to come up with an animation that we could mix the sound clip with and that would give the sound clip some context. The sound clip contained all sorts of strange noises and a scream at the end. I decided to animate a cafeteria scene, because I felt the sound effects in the audio clip matches some of the things that go on in a cafeteria really well. A customer's burping, the chef chopping vegetables in his station could associate well with the snapping sound effect in the clip, a receptionist speaking into the phone, the splashing sound effect in the clip could be the sound of another customer drinking from a nearby water fountain. And of course the alien, mumbling the word " hello " while slowly creeping up on the receptionist, causing her to drop the phone and scream in terror.

Cubey Emotion 2

In this assignment we had to animate Cubey along with another character. Either one of the characters takes on a more dominant role while the other one takes on a submissive role. The story behind my animation was: Cubey is painting something on an easel, and the smaller character comes rushing into the scene in a joyful mood, and bumps Cubey in a playful manner, causing Cubey's hand to move and create an unwanted mark on the canvas. The moment he bumps Cubey, he realizes his mistake. Cubey gets frustrated, pointing at his painting and becomes furious. The smaller character gets scared at this point. Cubey then intimidates and makes the smaller character walk backwards to the other end of the frame. The smaller character then becomes sad, as Cubey tells him to go away. This entire scenario is very identical to the common situation of a child interrupting his father while he is working, and the father then getting agitated and telling his son to go to his room, and that was the inspiration for this scene. I used symbols such as the exclamation mark on top of Cubey's head, the smoke that comes out of his ears and the lines around his head to emphasize his anger and irritation. To show the sadness of the little character, I animated his back bending, and then him slowly walking out of the frame. I made a few mistakes in this animation, like how the paint on the canvas still shows when Cubey's head is supposed to be in front of it.

Cubey Jump

In this assignment we animated a cube-like character (Cubey), jumping from point A to point B. This was one of my early assignments and I made the mistake of drawing in too many frames, making the animation look very shaky.

Bouncing Balls in Flash

This was our first Flash assignment on the course. We had to animate a football bouncing and a bowling ball bouncing. I used the squash and stretch element for both the balls, but to a much lesser extent for the bowling ball to show its rigidity and heaviness.

Cubey Emotion

This was a Flash assignment that we were given in which we have to animate a cube-like character (Cubey), reacting to a sudden noise. Cubey first had to stand in a calm and confident pose, and we then had to decide how Cubey will react to the sound. I chose to animate how Cubey would react to the sound of a UFO and its tractor beam. For the first pose, I drew Cubey standing straight with a puffed up chest to show his confidence. Then he hears the sound, gets alarmed and immediately turns to look in the direction of the sound. He soon realizes the UFO's presence and begins to panic and run back and forth. In desperation, he starts hopping on the spot, crying for help even though he knows no one is around to help. He then see's the UFO coming closer to him and he runs as fast as he can to get away from it.

 I used two classic 2D animation elements here such as the tiny dust clouds on the ground when Cubey skidded to a halt during his manic running, and the lines around his head to denote his emotion of being alarmed.