So to get back on topic.
THE ASSIGNMENT:
Its now time to post the new Oblig that we have received. This time its animation, lip sync to be more exact.
But if you think that means "oh easy! now we only animate the lips!" then your all wrong. you speak with the whole body, and that means you need to animate the WHOLE body to.
but....and yes its a but, we were given two options. we could animate only the head or a full body animation.
I went for the full body one.
For the audio clip i googled and googled until i found this clip
"http://www.moviewavs.com/php/sounds/?id=bst&media=WAVS&type=Movies&movie=Pirates_Of_The_Caribbean_Dead_Mans_Chest"e=thatsatree.txt&file=thatsatree.wav"
its from the movie "Pirates Of The Caribbean Dead Mans Chest"
One of the reasons i picked this clip is because i found the voice and audio more alive then many other i have heard. of course more alive means more more animation but also more interesting for the viewer.
So for more inspiration i figured why not check if i could find the clip from the movie were it happens.
i had no clue were in the move this act happen so I just started looking on youtube randomly.
and to my surprise i found it.
and if that wasn't surprise enough it seems like my character is headless.....or body less.... well that just made it all a bit more interesting. now i couldn't just copy the actors moves but rather invent something my self.
fair enough! lets get to business.
The planing stage!
The teacher couldn't stress this enough! planing planing planing!
listen to the audio until your so tier of it that you could die, then some more and try learn the mode and get some ideas. when you have a good idea, write it down. after you have write it down, you paint it down. then you paint some more and more until you have bunch of story board. then make it a animatic, then a 3d pre viz then another viz and another one......well this would be ideal right. but i must admit i did not do all that. at least no that many times.
I started by listening to the audio like most people trying to figure out a good idea. this is a voice that calls for some one to get to him, that means he cant get to what ever he yells to. so why not just cage inn the character. I also just recently saw "Robin Hood" and there is always some sorta bird cage with human remains in outside the castle gate. So i took that idea and started painting down stick men's for the storyboard.
I made one stick board and since I'm no good at drawing i decided to do a shortcut. i made the cage in 3d and posed the rig in the poses i already have painted down in the stick board. then screen shotted them and made a high quality storyboard.
Storryboards aint carved in stone but gives a good lead and overview of were you are going with this.
I also trew togheter a animatic, somthing i found pritey waisted since im following the beat of the audio anyways. so dont need more timing then that.
So with that planed out its time to start animating:
ANIMATING
I.m a fan of the blocking stage were you go pose to pose.
And since i already have created the poses when i did the storyboard i already had a head start.
Together with the pose to pose, i also decided to do a straight ahead since i find that more suitable at the moment, don't know why but i just felt i made sense. So without having the "step keys" on i started animating the in betweens just roughly then finer and finer.
i got a lot of useful feedback from both students and the teacher, and there were a lot of back and forth. i think the ending were changes a couple of times, and there were some struggling on how he should point out of the cage. Lucky, thanks to the weight lift animation i have learned how to dodge the major setbacks, so the whole work ran smoothly in my opinion.
Some of the changes done:
4 Principals!
1: Pose to pose and follow trough, trying to combine them.
2: I also tried to exaggerated, but seems like i did this too much since my teacher came and tuned it down rapidly trough out the animation hehe.
3: I also focused on having nice arc, i cant stress this enough, for new animators that want to archive a clean and nice look, getting arcs on the motion is one of the easiest and most efficient things you can do. and you can instantly see the result when done.
4: I tried to think about timing, but again, i felt this kinda came by it self at some points. i know i have some places were my character moves a bit fast, those could probably been worked on a bit more by timing.
My steps:
I started with the face, blocking out the open close of the mouth, then the wide and narrow. I found it easiest to do this now when the character stood still and i could just look straight on him and concentrate on the audio and the mouth.
After the blocking of the face was done, i turned back on the poses and started animating them. i kept setting alot of keys to make thing stay were they should stay even tho i knew it would be some cleaning left to do when done.
Its here between the block and rough and at the end of the rough all the tweaking were made, kinda hard to explain since there was a lot of back and forth and things i dint see earlier and test's and a lot of things going on.
When i was done with the block, the rough it was time for the glory part the "fine" animation. i turned on trajectory and made sure all of the movements had some kinda arch to them, and made some secondary motion. i also made some extra finger animation and tweaked the expressions in the character face.
The biggest troubles:
when everything was done i found out.....damn i forgot to set the animation on PAL. i have bin animating on NTSC. I don't know the major difference only that they have a different FPS on playback. but i just went with it.
Also in the end of this assignment we were told we had aspect restriction on the render output!!!
no way!..... i need my ratio or els the whole thing wont make sense. so I'm making it my way and hope the judges understand and gives me a easy go on that one.
except for this the whole thing have bin running smoothly, no crashes, no rig errors, no corrupted files, no nothing. only really tired of my own audio. hehe.
COMPOSITING:
I know only the animation is gonna be judged, but i couldn't resist my self so i render a couple of passes and started practicing composite. Also know as toxic. Never used it before but since i still have time to spare i figure why not try it out.
I renderd out zdepth pass, AO pass, beatypass and alpha pass.
not gonna explain the whole process since its not relevant for the assignment but here you can take a look.
I already typed that i was really medieval "Robin Hood" inspired, and i think i manage to get a bit of that dark old feel to the end result.
Like some one is coming to rescue the character, but sadly the hero is a weirdo and manage to run him self in to a tree.
EDIT: ok, so i came home after a long day at school tweaking the end result of the look of the movie, ye i know not the most important in this assignment, but anyways. I figured that the monitors at school is so strangely setup....no, not setup at all. so when I'm watching my movie home its way to bright.
so if the teacher reads this can you pleas see if its possible to unlock the monitors so we can tune them? thanks.
good weekend to all!
