Quit

This week's clip is from Airplane (Abrahams, 1980), with one of the many hilarious lines from that movie.

I wanted to practice more on facial animations, so I decided on a clip that was short and precise that was easy to work on, but ended up being a bit more difficult since the actor says his syllables quite fast.

I contorded and twisted his jaw to over express his words, as well as pulling his face muscles around his mouth to make his theet more visible. Still, I feel the lip synch could use a lot more work to more visibly emphasise each word, but it may not come across well anyway since the syllables comes quite fast as previously mentioned.

What I also did was put more effort into making the character move his entire body, and not just the arm and head. This I feel helped a lot to feel the character is a lot more vivid and alive, and to make it more belivable that he is in obvious distress about the creature he is currently holding in his hands. I didn't use any graph editor in this animation, so it's all just plain keyframing.

Rigs

Alex: http://vimeo.com/55507904
Rexxy: http://animationbuffet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/rexxy.html

The Girl Next Door

I finished this animation on friday, but due to a freak storm the internet was promptly shut down. I guess that's what I get for living in a rural Cornish farmland. This animation took me a bit longer to animate since I wanted to really perfect the animation on both character, but I still feel there's a lot more room for improvment.

The audio clip I used was from The Girl Next Door (Greenfield, 2004), and the idea for this was to have the characters do a lot more motions with they're bodies as they speak, to increase the dialogues substance.
The graph editor ended up being my best friend in this regard, as I could make exaggerated movements with the characters hips and arms. I also put more time into facial animation, as you can see the characters pulling faces and making large mouth movements. I feel all of this helped making the dialogue more interesting and vibrant, which is key to make the audience bored of the scene.

Bonnie having a chat

My weekly/bi-weekly animation got delayed due to a sudden rush of work, but finally got some few hours to work on my next one, which will be a 15 second animation based on a audio clip from the movie "The Girl Next Door". Decided to work on something that would really flex my character animation skills, and so there will be better body and facial animation in this one.

Here's a short playblast of what I've done so far. Hopefully I should have it animated and rendered before the end of week.

A Light From the Dark - Report 2

This clip was to see how rig would react to being animated to walk in reverse, which is more of a way of making me practice on unusual movements. Overall it wasn't very difficult since the FK controls on the rigs feet are quite good. Only problem I've had is that one of it's feet refuses to 'roll', meaning that it won't do a realistic step, for when you walk forward or backward you're heels are elevated and one of the feet's refuses to do that. I found a way around it by just animating the entire foot and the toes separately.

A simple physical motion of the character being knocked back as the monster pounds on the door she's desperately trying to keep close. Making her fall is quite easy enough, but I only had a second of animation to make it look believable that she was hit by a massive force on the other side of the door.

So I animated her to look curved as she is tossed back, making it look more fluent rather then having her fall like a sack of potatoes.

This animation is based on a reference, but I didn't want to follow it too closely since I felt that if I did that I might as well just motion capture it all, but it was used as a very handy tool to figure out how the girl would grab the door and then turn around completely to get into position.

I don't often animate characters running, apart from 'on the spot' running cycles, so this was also a very good practice at animating running without using the root control as a cheat to 'float' her over to the door.

A simple animation of the girl landing from an extensive elevated jump.

It has nothing to do with the actual production, but I just wanted to see how flexible the rig is with extreme motions. The problem with this animation was to prevent the legs from going right through her torso, since there is no limit on how far forward or backwards her legs can go.

It led to a lot of clean up, but after some minor tweaks I managed to make it look more fluent and realistic, much thanks to the graph editor which helped me curve some of her motions. 

A new running cycle for the girl, taking in criticism that her previous running cycle was too stiff and unnatural. This time I took more time to make sure her legs did more to absorb the shock of touching the ground and to make her torso react more flexible. I followed reference very carefully, while key'ing each animation at every third frame to make sure her speed look natural.

Following reference material, I animated the girl from a laying position to a standing position, which was quite tricky since the knee and elbow controls don't automaticly follow the body around. So I had to individually animate each and every joint as she turns around and stands up. The idea is that during one of the scenes she gets knocked down by the monster and has to get back up before running away.

Following reference made it even more difficult since I tried so hard to make it look as similar as possible, which ended up with me having a lot of trouble cleaning up the animation.

Following reference material, the girl faces a wall as she runs away from the monster, then she turns around to face the horror. This one I used the graph editor heavily, since I wanted her turn to look as less stiff as possible as she rotates around, finds her footing and reacts to the creature behind her. So I made her lean towards her right side as she turns to simulate a bit of centrifugal force as she quickly reacts to the threat behind her, followed by a short "settling" animation. The last part was a bit tricky, because at times the keys changed a bit abruptly to each other, which is why the graph editor came in handy once again. This made the animation a lot smoother overall without having to add extra time or tiny altering keyframing to make it work better.