This blog has been silent for a while...  but now I thought that I would make an effort to revive it once more.  So...  I'm back!  :-)


Just as a small update of what I have been up to during the last year;

- the development of the 2d pre-school series MILJA is well on the way.  I'm very excited about where this thing is going and can't wait for the production to start!

- I have been visiting my regular workplace at YLE, working on some documentaries for pre-school television   (had almost forgot how fun it is to work with REAL children)  ;-)  These short films are coming up on the world's best finnish-swedish TV channel YLE 5 in 2014.

- During jan-march 2013 I also participated in the pilot for the storytelling / short film production classes at Animaton mentor.  Very good to get a chance to get back working in Maya after having been involved for so long with 2D planning and thinking with the MILJA-project.

Here, below, you can see my 2 character dialouge shot from the first class of this 3 class long effort.  In class 1 we all worked on our individual dialouge shots, while at the same time developing story ideas for the upcoming short film project, which is to be realized during class 2 and 3.  There is still some polishing to be done on this shot, though.

- I was planning to go on directly to to class 2 and 3 of this production pipeline class, but the whole schedule of these classes were moved forward for different reasons, which made it a little tricky for me to actually find the time to participate.  Well, we'll see... maybe I'll join in later, sometime.

- Meanwhile, I heard the rumour about Kenny Roy starting up his COLLABS project, which seemed like a very interesting idea to me.  This would also give me the chance to real pipeline experience, just like the AM courses would, but in a shorter time span than what would have been the case if I had went on with the AM classes...  And we also get to see and learn a little about the BUSINESS behind it all, since the decision processes are transparent to all of us who are taking part in the project.  Such an opportunity to invaluable learning!

So now I can proudly make the statement that I am a member of the very first ever COLLABS project!  Really looking forward to the production which starts may 27th!  Loads of good, experienced people are coming in to aid us through the process, just the other day we also heard the decision on which project we will actually be doing  -  and even if I can't tell you exactly what it is I can tell you that it is EXCITING !

Rock on!

Polish on class 3-5 shots

Halfway into the finishing 6th class of Animation mentor! Only 6 weeks to go and focus is now completely on the process of polishing you shot to final.

This is some recent polishing work that I have done to my shots from class 3. With the help from my awesome mentor, Kenny Roy, there are some significant improvements, I think. :-)




This is also class 6 polish of my work from class 4-5, the "bankrobber".

polishing the shot from advanced acting class

Class 5 is close to its end now, just a couple of days to go. Indeed time flies here at animation mentor.

This piece is not by any standards finished yet. There are still lots of things to clean up and polish, textures that need to be fixed... the list is actually quite long. It will all be completed in class 6, or so I hope.

But for now, this is what it looks like.

(And if you are wondering why dad is rubbing his daughter's forehead in the last shot it's because he is smudging out a crayon mark that she has painted on there, a lightning bolt mark a la Harry Potter. She is obviously a Potter fan. I just haven't put the crayon mark in there yet...)

blocking plus, working in a stepped workflow

This is a blocking plus version of the shot I'm currently working on at animation mentor. Lots of stuff still to be done.... the next step will be to start blocking out some rough lipsynch.

And BTW, if you are wondering about why dad is rubbing his thumb against his daughters forehead.... The explanation is that there is supposed to be a handpainted bolt mark a la Harry Potter, that she has painted on herself using a crayon... just haven't put that in there yet. :)




I am trying hard to keep away from splining early this time. Following the recommendation from my mentor I struggle to learn how to "see" spacing and timing in stepped blocking. Man, that is hard to learn! And when I every now and then do switch over to spline to see if my judgements were correct more often than not I discover that I'm waaay off, having just looked at it in stepped mode.

It will come with experience, I guess.

Bankrobber, final (almost) polish from class 5

Well, this is almost the final version of this shot. There will be some more polishing and fixing with it in the final class of AM, but for now it is in quite I good place I think...

Progressreel class 1 - 4 of animation mentor

Four classes completed, two more to go. :-)

This last term labeled "introduction to acting" had its focus on creating belivable and interesting characters, analyzing your shot, making creative choices etc.... and we have also started to get more into the animation of more complex hand-rigs and started exploring eyes and facial expression. And in the upcoming class we will be getting even deeper into all these things...

(As you can see in my "bankrobber" assignment we didn't even touch upon the subject of the facial muscles yet, only did eye movement, blinks and jaw rotation... that will come up in the next class...)


So in conlusion, some evaluating words on this class and my experience of it...
Apart from a couple of really, really good lectures I don't think I've learned that much that is completely new to me when it comes to acting and the process of creating character, really. Knew a lot of that stuff from before...
But I have learned LOADS of new things on the more technical side. I discovered how very, very sensitive the eye animation is, how tedious and timeconsuming the animating of all the joints in the fingers can be - and thanks to my mentor Nicole Herr I've picked up a LOT of good workflow tips operating Maya and working in the industry in general.

So it has been a really good 12 weeks!

This is my progressreel from the first four classes of animation mentor, starting with the newest material.

Class 4: Introduction to acting

This is an assignment from the "introduction to acting" class at animation mentor. It's still half-finished, there is no work done on the lipsynch nor the facial expression yet... so all that is still coming up. :-)



As a minor assignment last week we also had to work with handposes. So I made this still pose. "What's happening here?" you might be asking. - Well, either this guy is having a religious vision, God is talking to him from the clouds... - OR maybe it's the police helicopter just suddenly turning around the corner, catching him by surprise. Well, he has just robbed a bank, hasn't he? :)

The neverending frustration of a musician

Jeeeez - over a month since I last posted anything. Shame on me.

But - anyway....
Here is what I have been busy with lately. Right now I am in the middle of the "introduction to acting" class of animation mentor under the guidance of mentor Nicole Herr.

Here is the first assignment from this class; "Stewie vs. Bach"
If you ever have played an instrument you know how frustrating it can be at times :-)



As an extra bonus for those of you who are interested - here is the videoreference clip I used to study the scene.

Halfway finished already ????

How time flies by! I am already halfway through animationmentor - can't quite believe it myself, it still feels like I began just a couple of weeks ago.

These last days before christmas break we are summing up and reviewing what we learned in class 3 the past three months. It has all been about body mechanics, animating physicality, and I must say that this was the hardest class so far with lots of hard work on the assignments but also with a lot of new information and "stuff" pouring in all the time that somehow caused some kind of information overload in my poor head.
At this stage it really feels like I could stay at this level for months or years and just repeat the things I've learned so far, read the same stuff over, do the same kind of physicality exercises and work on getting to understand this complex area of animation better.

But - come january there will be new challenges as we go into acting classes. I'm really looking forward to that immensly, it will be a lot of fun.... but... I really could have used another three months of jumping and running and leaping and falling and balancing.

Here is my compiled "anim jam"-assignment from the advanced body mechanics class. I hope to get back to it later, in polish and portfolio class, and do some more polishing and maybe add some more detail to the setting.

First part of anim jam

Still some polishing to do on this one... and I didn't really have the time to meet all of Sean's notes especially on the setting... and the timing could also be pushed a little, it's still a little even - so if I get back to this one later I will have to work on it some more... But for now it's the final version of part 1.



And here is where I am at right now; planning and making rough blocking for part 2 of the airport story... I will have to push it a little, since I'm planning to take a couple of days away from school in two weeks. I'm going on a little trip to Bradford, England, to take part in the Bradford Animation Festival! Yippeee!

Hello class 3! ...and first blocking for part 1 of "anim jam"

Class 2 "psychology of body mechanics" was mindblowingly good! I learned sooo much from it. Now I am hoping that class 3 "advanced body mechanics" will overwhelm me just as much.

My mentor for this class is Sean Ermey, have a look at his site here: http://www.seanermey.com/
Looking forward to be guided by him through the following three months.

At the start of this class we got to choose if we wanted to keep all three assignments of this class collected under a unifying theme ("anim jam") or if we wanted to have different themes for each assignment ("animation exercise").
I'll go for the anim jam and the choice of my theme is "Stewie at the airport"...

The story goes something like this:
Stewie is late for his flight, steps accidently on slippery floor and does a little sliding around on it, loses his ticket which gets stuck high up on a roof beam.
In the second part he will have to climb up there and get it - and of course it ends with him falling smack to the ground (breaking a leg and getting severe brain concussion in the process).
In the third part he will have head and leg in bandages, jumping along on a crutch on his way to the plane. He slides on his crutch and the ticket flies off and falls down into a draining hole in the ground. END.

So there I have my work for the rest of this fall piled up for me.

Here is a first initial blocking of part 1.
Of course things are missing here and there... The part where the legs aren't moving at all right now is where they later will spin around as crazy...



Cheers!

class 2: what bad planning can get you into

This was my final job from class 2 at Animation mentor.

I learned a lot from this assignment, the main lesson being, "it's no bloody good to be to sloppy in your planning, stupid!"

I wanted to do a nerdy dance of some kind ( and of course Stewie would have to perish at the end of it ) - so I searched for some funny clips and found these on youtube. Nothing wrong with them per se.



Fun references, right? Just to go ahead with planning? Yeah. So I did some sketches:

Here is the problem; I cheated, I didn't do them well enough! Breakdown positions weren't there! Worse; I didn't THINK about how the dance would transition from pose to pose. And even WORSE; I didn't really think of it in blocking either.

The result of this was that I made a first pass of blocking, noted all things I hadn't prepared well enough, had to start over and redo the blocking - just to find even more stuff that i should have thought of in the very beginning.  Highly frustrating when you KNOW that you could have avoided much of this by giving the whole thing a little more time in the planning stage!

The final clip looks like this, and I am NOT pleased with it. It lacks snappiness, feels slow and has not near enough "nerdiness" in it.  Because I was lost in all sorts of "redo it"-traps through the process and forgot about the big picture.



What can I say? A good learning experience, after all. :-)

Class 2 - Killing Stewie by weather

After Ballie the 2-legged poor bastard had been killed by getting crushed under a falling weight, the next in turn was Stewie - this time it was the armless version of Stewie we got to work on. A good thing really, it makes you concentrate on the hips and spine and learn to do that stuff before you get distracted with hands and arms. Smart thinking, AM.  :)

In this second assignment I wanted to let Stewie die in a horrible storm. (The actual title of the assignment was "walking in heavy wind". But I of course needed some death in there too, I have my theme of "horrible, unexpected deaths" to attend to.)

So this was my first scenario:

But as I timed out the scene it got a little too long... (we had to keep it under 200 frames)  so I simplified the whole thing and let him just blow off a cliff instead. Like this:

Our mentor, Leigh Rens, said his OK and three weeks later this was the result:





With a little grass waving hard in the wind and the occasional leaf flying by the illusion will be there, I think. Maybe I'll get back to those props and environment things if I ever get back to polishing this shot later on.

Soon I'll post the third assignment of this class. It's still not completely finished so you may have to wait a week or two for it.  Cheers!

Class 2 - psychology of body mechanics.

It's been a while since I updated anything, so now I thought that I would get my ass out of the wagon (don't know if that's understandable english but in swedish it's an often used expression) and show some of the latest stuff I have been working on at animation mentor.

By now we are getting into the final weeks of class 2, "psychology of body mechanics", and in this class we have been working on three different shots, all of them paying special attention to body mechanics.
I'll make a blog note on each of my three assignements, this is the first one, the other two will be coming up shortly.

So - when you are working on one piece for three weeks you might just as well make it fun and entertaining to yourself. Which is what i did. I decided to make my three pieces add up to a little series of "horrible, unexpected deaths".

The body mechanics assignment was to make a 180 degree turn. So I videotaped myself to get reference for the body mechanics stuff and made this planning sketch.

My mentor in this class, Leigh Rens (cool guy and awesome animator BTW!), liked the setup so I went ahead with this plan and for three weeks I worked on just this little piece.

But I needed a sudden death too, to keep my theme going. Some unexpected thing was what I wanted. It ended up looking like this:




If I get back to polishing this stuff I'll put a text on the weight saying: "property of Monty Python". LOL.

Class 1 is over and done !

This is my progressreel with the exercises and assignments from the first class of Animation Mentor. Only 5 more classes to go. - Jeez the time went by fast! :-)

sketches portraying "exhaustion"

I notice that the weeks are flying by here and it's getting harder and harder to keep up with this blog. School is keeping me pretty busy.

Not that I'm very surpsrised at all my missing updates, I have seen this thing happen to other AM students before me. Their blogs seems to be best updated just before class 1 starts and a couple of weeks into the school. Every second day there is a new update. Then - suddenly - there is a HUGE gap to the next post which usually is posted somewhere in class 3, half a year later... :-)


Well, I'm going to try and NOT let it get that far. I'll try and keep up!

Here are some recent sketches from an assignment where we are meant to catch the feeling of EXHAUSTION...

And this is the final Maya pose...

 ......'til next time..... so long.

Progress reel so far from class 1

These are some examples of what we have been up to so far in class 1 of animation mentor. There are a lot of bouncing balls here, as we are learning the fundamental principals of animation. SO... better keep it simple, stupid!  The "real" characters are coming up in a half year or so...  :-)

Slapstick on one leg

Another animation mentor exercise. We were supposed make the onelegger take one step. Only that.
Well, of course I couldn't resist...

Feels like I'm Alice in Wonderland.

This week in our Maya training we were given a model of a robotarm and our assignment was to pick up a green can with the arm and place it on the box on the right.

It looks simple when you see the finished version - but for any of you who, like me, are newbies to 3D animation, let me tell you that it's like falling down a rabbit hole when you start looking behind the pretty pictures and actually try to build a thing like this yourself in 3D.

This is what my finished assignment looked like:



But THIS is what it looks like on the inside:



All these curves represent movement of different objects and parts of objects in the animation. And the animator spends a lot of time looking at these curves when he is animating.

It's a little like this:



Which makes me feel like this!:


No wonder that I love animation! :-)
.

Two not very bouncy bouncing balls

The Maya springboard course is well on its way and I am learning new stuff every day. In this preparing course we only focus on the 3D tool itself - and I can tell you; there's points and dots and curves and tangents and a billion buttons and menus to get aquainted with - behind every simplest tiny little motion. I'm on a steep learning curve here. So I'm really happy to stick to these bouncing balls for another couple of months. :-)