Nutz Final

Ok so here's the last clip for the end of the term.

Thunder Cats Remake

For those of you who were excited at the He-man remake, here's the latests on the anime-ish remake of Thunder Cats...looking quite cool.

Latests Cars 2 Trailer

Spy movie of the year. Always looking foward to the next Pixar movie...just because all their work tends to be AWESOME!

Nutz Clip - WIP 03

Alright. This here is the polish phase for this week. Pretty much smoothed out all the kinks in the arcs and poses. Locked down the facial plus lip syncs. You'll probably want to add in all the little bits here and there and the small ideas you had along the way during this phase. Next week is the final for this clip where we will finese whatever parts that need to be finesed.

The illusionist

Nominated along with Toy story 3 and How to train your Dragon for best animated Oscar.
Very very nice animation. Most impressed.

Nutz Clip - WIP 02

Alright so for this week it's the Spline phase. Almost everything gets smooth out and the graph goes from step to linear...mostly. Sometimes you'd want to keep certain parts in stepped but for the most of it, linears normally the way to go. Refining arcs and making sure you don't lose your poses are key here.

Personality

So today in my A.M QnA, we were on the topic of personality and how it helps us improve our animation and take it to the next level. Often time we hear the age old complain of "the rig doesn't allow me to show my character's personality." Personally, i think saying that is not being really fair to yourself. We talked about how something as simple as a bouncing ball can have a huge array of different personalities, be it sadness, excitement or disappoinment. When all that's been said and done, a ball has only one controller and is a basic shape. Pushing the boundries of what your rig can do will really help with pushing your poses and passing the "rig is the problem" mark.

Personality also helps differentiate one character from another. You may have pegged a certain character you're animating with a trait. Let's say he's a grumpy person. Animating your character being a generic grumpy person will only get you so far. What helps you get past cliches and stand out above the rest it to be specific. Perhaps he's a grumpy person who has a chicken and egg problem. He wants more friends and because he has none he is grumpy...which is why he has none. Sooo adding this in means that not only will he's poses be grumpy, there will be instances where he would probably try to make some kind of effort at being friendly but still being grumpy all at the same time. Your poses will change accordingly along with mannerisms and acting choices for that character.

Having a good backstory is also a good way to come up with acting choices that define the character's personality. If you have a character that is supposed to be annoyed, it could be for many reasons that may not be present in that shot you are animating. It could be because he already has been bugged for the 100th time today. Or maybe he's just had a fight with his wife. Perhaps he's trying to concentrate on something. All these reasons give life and change to the acting choices that you decide.

Nutz Clip - WIP

Here's last week's progress for my "Nutz" acting clip. The phase i'm in shown above is blocking plus. You'll want to try to nail down all the poses and as much of the inbetweens as possible to get a smooth transition into the spline phase later. Everything is still kept in stepped mode, as you'll want to get as much info in there before the big jump into linear.



This one shows the Blocking phase. It's key to nail down ALL the golden or story telling poses in this phase. Think of it as a comic strip. In a comic all you get are poses that tell a story. The audience needs to draw that connection between the pose and what's happening in the shot. You may also want to include breakdowns to remind youself in the next phase how you want each action to flow.

Animation Reel 28-02-2011

So here's my latests updated animation reel. I'm still currently have an acting clip coming up which is still WIP. I'll post those up as soon as possible.

Past Posts

Just though i'd put down a link to a shared blog that me and a few other friends put together some time ago. It has all the past articles and sharings that I have posted. Enjoy!

http://gimbalocked.blogspot.com/