I am grouped together with another classmate to complete this project. My partner is Jing Hong, and we are tasked to choose a dialogue, be it from a movie clip or self directed script, and find a rig to animate them out. There are also several requirements and bonus assignments that can be achieved through this project.
We are required to submit all our working files, a final animation, and a storyboard. The bonus section will be submitting a playblast of the blocking of our animation.
Task 1: Choosing the Dialogue
Breaking down the assignments to different sections, our first task is to select a dialogue for our animation. From dialogues of fantasy movies such as Harry Potter, war battle-like movies of Lord of the Rings, to the famous animations of Toy Story. Looking through the scenes, especially Toy Story, I'm inspired by them and would try to learn the unique poses of the animations found in the movie to display different emotions.
Finally, we have decided to choose a dialogue found in Jackie Chan's movie, "Gorgeous". The dialogue and movie scene can be seen in the video below.
Jackie Chan's "Gorgeous".
Here, we can see that the camera is moving to and fro from the two characters at enough time intervals for us to animate out the entire scene. Looking through the short movie clip over and over again, I have already decided what poses I should make at which parts of the audio.
Then, I started to look around for online video references that would aid me in drawing the storyboard of the dialogue. Knowing that animations are normally slightly different from the reality world, just looking at the video wouldn't really bring me that far into creating a good animation. Hence, I found this video from Toy Story 3.
This video is a short clip from Toy Story 3. From here, I saw the different poses that the animators from Pixar animation has done to creating this famous movie.
With that, we started on doing our storyboards. We began by drawing storyboards for our individual characters before drawing a final group storyboard of the entire animation with more detailed camera views and movements.
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| Individual Storyboard Page 1 |
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| Individual Storyboard Page 2 |
These are the key poses of my character in the animation. Especially in box 6, this pose is also found in Toy Story, showing a very shocked emotion of the animation. From this, I've learnt that by going through different materials, and exploring more, I would be able to learn a lot about animation and eventually, improving my own animations.
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| Group Storyboard Page 1 |
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| Group Storyboard Page 2 |
Here is the group storyboard, that includes both characters, with the important key poses before starting to animate them in Maya 2012.
When creating the storyboard, we have created a story about the entire animation to help in our development of it. Creating characteristics of our character and having a background story of it gives us an idea on how the characters should be feeling.
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| Background Story (Page 1 - Mr Chan) |
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| Background Story (Page 2 - Mr Allan) |
Task 2: Blocking the Key Poses
In order to create an animation, by blocking in the key poses would be one of the first steps. By looking closely to the storyboard that has been drawn, I also looked online for any video references and tips in creating unique and good key poses so that the animation would look great.
Below is a video reference seen online about pose to pose animation. I think that this is a very good video reference as the body language of the animation can show how the character is feeling and should be feeling. These are all the different emotion poses that can be used in an animation. Called "Pose to Pose Animation".
Then, I looked further into different animation tips online and found this video rather useful as well.
In this video, there are some several exaggerations made to create a very good effect of the entire scene. Especially when the body of the animation is being enlarged when it burps.
Here is the playblast of my animation's key pose blocking.
Blocking key poses of my animation
Looking through the poses, I'm really satisfied with the shocked pose that I've made for my animation. I got this idea of its pose when I was thinking about all the cartoons that I've watched in the past. It makes a very funny pose, as well as showing how scared the character is in the current frame. The hand and facial movements are not made. Only the body key poses are done in this. They will be done further in the animating process.
Task 3: Animating
From the lessons that I've learnt, animating from the blocking files would be a good way in creating a good animation as all the key poses are already being key framed into Maya. With that, I started doing the arm movements, creating a smooth motion for different parts of the scene, and also sharp motions to create shocked emotions for the animation. To further improve, I looked online once again for different references in creating a good animation since I've already reached to this process.
Here is a video about a short animation clip called, "The Pigeon: Impossible". I think the animation is really great and the animator explained on two different ways of animating that people commonly use.
From the video, I have learnt that there are two different ways of creating an animation. The "Pose to Pose" method, and the "Layered" method. Pose to Pose is about starting off with the key poses of the animation. It's the crucial moments that represent the action. This is exactly what I have learnt in class, which is called, "Blocking", that has been done above. There is further explanation into this method, called, "Adding Breakdowns". This is to add poses into the in-between of each key poses to smooth out and refine the animation, preventing things such as arms going through body or moving in a very awkward manner.
The next method, "Layered", which is building up the entire animation from scratch by creating more and more controls for the entire character, slowly building up with different poses from the start. Layered animation tends to rely a lot on the graph editor, that can create really good effects and motions.
The animator further explains that his preference on these two different methods actually depend more on the shot. If the shot has more clear poses and pauses, then Pose to Pose is more preferred. As more shots that have more movements or in continuous motion of actions, Layered would be a better choice. This is because Pose to Pose allows the scene to show the key poses that would be noticed by the viewer, without much movements of the entire structure of the animation. Pose to Pose is more preferred for snappy cartoon motion. As for Layered, is more used in scenes that are more smoother and realistic in motion. Finally, try both methods to see what's most natural and better of the animation to you.
From this video, I have decided to use the two different methods together in my animation. First, the Pose to Pose is done by what I learnt, "Blocking". Then, when creating the in between poses of the step, "Adding Breakdowns", I would decide in using Layered method to help in creating smoother and more realistic motions of the animation.
Furthermore, since my character does have some shocked and scared scenes, I decided to research further in how to create these emotions through body languages. In the video below, it helped me refine my final animation for this project.
As you can see from the video above, the body is normally stretched when in a shocked emotion, including several shaking of different parts of the body which create a great effect of being scared/frightened.
Here is the video of the animation that I've made individually, before merging it together with my partner's work.
Taking notice about what has been taught in class, especially "Ease in Ease out" motions, "Anticipation", and "Follow Through Movements". These three principles out of the 12 Animation Principles are strongly weighted by our teacher when doing this project. Keeping in mind of this 3 principles, I was able to create the animation that looks more realistic than before adding these words of advice. Also, about Holding Poses, this was mentioned in class that: "There is no such thing as freezing moments, the animation is always moving." Even when the camera is not on you, your character should be at least doing something that being stationary there. Things such as breathing or movement of head when the opposite side is speaking, or even blinking of the eyes can be done to prevent the animation from coming to a freeze motion, which is really bad to be seen in an animation. Think of animation movies, the background always have its trees swaying to creating a windy effect even though the main focus is not on them. It helps to bring the animation more "lively".
Task 4: Camera Views and Effects
Though I have no knowledge or whatsoever about camera views, I started looking through materials to help in completing the project at our best.
First Person View is thought of when it comes to the movement so the camera. We thought that having some far shot throughout the entire animation would be quite boring, hence adding this camera effect to improve on our animation.
Zooming in Effect creates a very cool and fast motion of the camera to bring the viewer change its focus onto a particular object or person at a point. Below is an example of how zooming in effect can be done in my animation when it comes to production.
We both agreed on adding effect into the scene as we find the dialogue quite dull. Looking through online materials, I found that having lightning effects on the final scene would be perfect. Hence, below is a tutorial on how to create a lightning effect.
To further improve on the lightning effect, we decided to add more lights to create the glowing effect in between the eyes of our animation, creating a very fierce feeling when the two animations begins to fight.
Task 5: Production and Conclusion
By guessing that Windows may not be able to render a good video of our animation, we went to school to and rendered our animation by using Mac desktop. The results is seen below.
FINAL ANIMATION (WITHOUT AUDIO)
Yes, there is nothing wrong with your computer's audio. The rendered video does not have any audio in the first place. We didn't know this at first, but solved the problem by adding the audio into the video through iMovie and below is the final results of this project.
FINAL ANIMATION
Facial movements are looked into greatly to create different emotions, such as the movement of eyebrows, enlarged and fast motions of (OPEN and CLOSING) of the eyes to create shocked effects, blinking of the eyes to display character being in a state of shock, and slanted mouths to create a funny animation effect. In parts of the animation, there are several reasons why the character is feeling sad at different moments, hence *NOTE: Do read the background story that is found under the section of "Storyboarding" at the top of this blogpost. This will help you further understand the animation that is made and why Mr Chan would try to resist the fight.
In conclusion, this project as really taught me the to place in the very fundamentals of animation, helping me to keep in mind of the 12 different Animation principles to create a more realistic production, and also different camera views and effects to make the animation more interesting and lively. Also, I've learnt a lot on using the graph editor to help refine the movements of my animation. Furthermore, I understood the an important process of working together with another animator to help completing the the entire animation. I enjoyed doing this project and I'm really satisfied with the production that I and my partner, Then Jing Hong, made.
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