The Making Of: Lebowski

Here's the link to the animation, so you know what I'm on about!

Ok! So this was a university assignment for my 2D Character animation module. The task is simple. Animate to any 5 of the sound clips provided and I chose this lebowski one. 

In terms of time constraints, I wanted to get this done in less than a week because I had other modules to work on, and surprisingly, with a good reference and plenty of planning, I managed to get this down in 5 days! 

Let me break it down more:

Day 1: Planning, drawing key poses and filming reference video

Day 2: Drawn key poses and timed animation

Day 3: Added breakdown poses and started in-betweening animation

Day 4: In-between animation (and finsihed)

Day 5: Clean up and polish animation

Overall, I'm pretty damn proud of my efforts and I'm very happy with this animation. Studying and using live reference is a relatively new idea for me, for which I am embracing now more than ever. I've learnt so much from analysing live footage that I would've never learnt from just imaginative animation experience. 

I may not be a brilliant actor, but I can still break emotions down in my head and re-animate them on screen. The reference is there not to rotoscope or to copy, but to help me understand/visualise more clearly the motions required. It also helps me see things I would've never thought of doing before, such as the subtle hand rotation gestures in midst of speaking, or small details like delaying the head before the hands move, etc. 

Some of the other things I felt I've accomplished well is the use of easing. With all the keyframes in place, I really had no trouble going from pose A to pose B, knowing how everything transitions in a fairly similar fashion. I come to realise what the pendulum effect is all about. 

A major emphasis with this animation is acting. I've been studying a lot on body language and also observing, observing and more observing to the point where I feel I'm confident I can apply what I've learnt to the characters in my animations. I hope that you as the viewers can agree with me that my character is not just moving and talking, but rather an actual character that is living and breathing, and expressing himself in that particular situation.  

The planning and thought process of this piece is incredibly elaborate. Usually, I'd draw my keyframes knowing what the character is going to do, and then put on some music and essentially, shutting down my brain and just pump out all the labourous in-between keyframes. I have come to realise now that that process is very flawed. The result of which is a lifeless character moving on screen. It's like watching a bad actor in films; what's the point? 

This has really changed the way I animate. I now go through an imaginary checklist of questions, if you will. When I'm animating, I now ask myself:

1. Who is my character?

2. Where is my character at?

3. How is he going to react based on his given situation/circumstances?

4. What is he feeling at this very moment in the frame (I ask this almost every frame of the way throughout my animation)

5. Lots more...

I feel that this really helps me bring my character to life. It is now thinking, it has emotions and presents a will and motivation for his actions.  As a result, animating is now a rather painful brain-racking process where I'm always thinking... but I believe that's how great animation is made! 

One of the difficulties I had with this animation was maintaining the volume of the character. I had to redraw him about 130 times with a lot of movement (mostly subtle, but still).  Another aspect I could work on is character design... my character is generic and simple and I chose it so I don't get bogged down by all the details, and I think it could work with a better, more appealing design. 

Here's a screenshot of the project:

:)

New 3D Project screenie

This is going to be a 20 second animation about a toy character trapped and how he manages to escape. Remember I'm doing this for university work, so I'm limited to what I can do in terms of story, but I'll do my best to make it enjoyable!

Expected release date: May 15th 2009.

Making of: The Forbidden Forest

Introduction

The Forbidden Forest is actually a University assignment for my 2D Computer Animation module. The task was to animate a character defeating a demon (or villain) in the forest by using the environment to his advantage. 

So that was how this came to be. I had to hand in my first draft (line test) animation at the end of January and I never really started working on it till the week before hand-in. At the same time, I've also been playing quite a lot of Left 4 Dead, which sparked the idea of a big creature vs a little guy idea. You know, muscle vs speed kind of thing. So that was how the TAAAANK (beast) character was born. 

You can also argue that the archer character is Louis (I used his voice for the screams), in a green outfit, lol. Some say, its Link, Robin Hood, etc, but heck, think whatever you want. Fact is, I didn't want this movie to be a parody of a existing game, not completely anyways. 

What this animation means to me

First animation I've done with a Wacom tablet

2nd attempt at non-stick frame by frame animation (since Siege Outbreak in 2005)

First time I've animated with consideration to directing shots and composition in mind (since I started studying how important they are)

I wanted something sexy for my showreel

What have I learnt 

Flash CS4 is laggy and crashes because it can't handle the workload!

Flash CS3 can handle the workload most the time, until you start putting too many graphic elements into a scene in which case it can prompt the blue-screen-of-death.

You know when your animation is just too good for Flash when it takes more than one whole second to load after you hit the undo button. 

Working in multiple .fla documents help reduce memory consumption and speed things up

Working with over 200 layers in one scene is a bad idea

How to animate better!

How to create a mask to show selective rendering of my animation 

First few animations always suck, so do tests, get them wrong, and find out what to do right, then animate it again and again! 

Loads more, but those are for me to know and for you to find out :).

Some fun facts

25 Frames per second 

Mostly animated on twos, and avoided tweens as much as possible

Took 6 weeks to do 30 seconds of animation!

1 week for first line-test

1.5 weeks for backgrounds

1.5 weeks for refining the line-test (with more animation tests)

1 week of lying around and playing games (aka. animation block!)

1 week of final animation and touch-ups.

Everything was done in Adobe Flash CS3/4, including backgrounds. 

Photoshop was only used to do advanced blurring for the chase sequence and then re-imported back into Flash. 

Concept Art/ Doodles and tests!

Here are my pre-production line tests:

1st test (the one I handed in)

http://flash-deck.com/animations/ff_linetest.mp4 

2nd test (with 3d reference backgrounds)

http://flash-deck.com/animations/ff_linetest2.mp4

3rd test (With painted backgrounds and more in-between animation)

http://flash-deck.com/animations/ff_linetest3.mp4

And the final result:

http://flash-deck.com/animations/forbiddenforest.php

I'll scan some of my doodles and drawings in soon and post them up. 

Interesting Trivia

Where does the archer get his arrows from? He doesn't have a quiver on him!

The arrow on the beast's forehead in the beginning dissapears when he initiates the chase (pulled off during the reaction shot of the archer maybe?)

The beast took 2 arrows in the head and does not fall, but collapses when he gets shot from the back. 

What was the most difficult shot I had to animate?

Definitely the 3D-ish chase sequence with the perspective going nuts, 2 characters running towards the camera swinging left to right. *Takes a deep breath* Yeah,  so to start off, I had to animate a human character runcycle in the front view. Then, have him rotate left to right as he is running along the forest. Add in a few leaps and screaming animation and making sure they read clearly. Alongside that, I had to make sure it looks like he is actually running towards the camera, meaning as soon as he stops running, he should technically fall behind and look smaller in the distance. 

Then, there comes the beast character galloping behind him with the same issues, except this time, ITS A BEAST running on all 4's! But it gets worse; the beast isn't just running for its life towards the camera, like the archer. No, no, that would just be too easy. He had to appear as if he was chasing the archer through the woods, menacingly as well as throwing in a few swipes and screaming its lungs off. 

Then of course, we have the more technical issues, like the backgrounds moving in 3d space. This was done by using reference footage; I used Softimage XSI (a 3D package) - to model the main layout of the forest in 3D, very crudely might I add (in fear of simply tracing over the top). Heres a screenshot:

Once the reference video was imported to Flash, I had to go through, frame by frame of that 5 second footage, placing the trees in place. Yeah, did I mention I created a whole library of trees to use?

If I had more time, what would I improve?

I'd hire an assistant to do all the clean-up drawings and shadings. They are very crudely shaded at the moment, but could look way better if more time was spent on making it pretty. Also, if I were to redo this animation, I'd avoid animating the beast in the first place. 

First post

Test lol