11 Second Club - May Submission

This is my submission for this month's 11 Second Club competition. I kept having problems with the shadows when I rendered this, but I'm hoping they will look past that and focus on the animation, but I will still try to render the scene again if I have time.

Other then that, I put extra effort into making my characters show more body language and facial motion, to properly convey the dialogue. I feel this finally shows the improvements I have done since November, when I decided to focus on becoming a 3D character animator. Following the advices from my mentor, I made sure the audience knew who/what the characters was talking to, and made the dialogue very clear to understand. I acted out all the dialogue in the audio clip and made notes of what both characters are doing, and how to progress from one motion to another without breaking the flow or making the motions stiff.
That helped me a lot to plan out the scene, because most of all I want to catch the audience attention and get them interested in the exchange of words between those characters, which won't happen if you don't find the animation fun or compelling to watch.

To get a proper portrait of how the old man should react to the woman, I filmed myself mouthing the dialogue and acting out how he would behave. Took a lot of takes, but I liked this one the best.

It worked as a excellent reference material, and it helped me a lot to improve my animation.

11 Second Club - April Submission

This was supposed to be my submission for the 11 Second Club competition for April, but due to other projects I missed the deadline. Decided anyway to render it out anyway for my showreel.
It shows improvement in my character animation skill, the way my characters shows emotion better, but it's still too stiff. As such I need to improve body language. One of the problems in this is that I didn't properly act it out myself before I started animating, and as such it feels stiff, even though the character is properly emoting his dialogue.

A Light From the Dark - Report 3

In this shot, we see the girl running past the camera and deeper into the warehouse in panic as the monster has just crashed through the door behind her, further increasing her will to run like hell. 

The way I approached this shot was to first assess where she was going and how fast she was going to get there. Of course I knew she was heading towards the aisles, but I had to figure out how fast since there needs to be a distinctive pace between the start of shot and the end, since the eye needs to catch the action.

From there I went on to animate the running cycle, following closely a reference provided to me, and then I made sure each keyframe looked good from a profile perspective before I checked it again from the camera perspective. Afterwards I tweaked each keyframe to make the run look more autenthic and uniqe, rather then just a plain running cycle.

In this shot we have the girl running down the hallway, away from the monster, and then turning her head to look over her shoulder. This was playblasted with two different camera, but on the same project file, so I edited them together for this clip. I went on the same approach as the previous shot and did a very exact following of my reference before I altered it to suit the situation of the scene better. I then made the camera follow the girl as she runs, and simply animated the base to give the illusion of her physicly running since the camera won't see her legs anyway. 

Very simple character animation of the girl leaning over to pick herself up, but the actualy standing up part was cut to save as much time as possible, so the next shot is of the monster, and then cut to her running. 

Not much to say about this one other then it was a bit tricky to convey her feelings, when you have very limited potential for facial animation and only a few seconds of screen time to do so.