Week 12- Progress Reel!

Ahh time has flown and class one of Animation Mentor is officially over! Our only assignment this last week was to put together a progress reel of all our assignments from this class, so I went back and did final revisions on all of them based on the last notes Mike gave me- here it is!

I was kind of sad leaving our last live Q & A session this week because I've really enjoyed working with Mike. He's been really honest and straightforward, not only about our assignments but also about working in the industry. We spent probably a good hour just asking him questions and it seemed nothing was off limits. He was willing to answer anything we had for him and offered to keep in touch with us and told us we can always send him stuff for his opinion. I'm sure he will be invaluable to my future career. He also gave us all final overall feedback from the class and I was really happy with what he told me. He said my previous experience really showed as I came into class with a solid workflow. He said I had very thorough explorations of the pose assignments which will definitely help me in later acting classes. He also said I have uniqueness to my work and I have that "x factor". That made me really happy! For areas of improvement he said that I should continue to practice restraint because the few times that my shots started to get away from me was when I was trying to do too much. I think that's really solid advice and he is absolutely right. I'll keep that in mind moving forward. It was perfect timing on the very last day of the semester, one of the films Mike worked on- Pixar's "Inside Out" premiered and I loved it! It felt really cool knowing that the guy who's been mentoring me for 3 months and even went to this school where I am now, was an animator on this awesome film. It felt very inspiring and I am extremely excited to move forward with classes. Week have one week off and then I'll be back to discuss class two!

Week 11- Assignment #10 Part 2

The pose assignment for this week was "balance". I really liked this one because there were a lot of things to explore, like break dancing, gymnastics, yoga, ballet. I looked up reference images and got a lot of interesting ideas. Here's what my sketches look like

I really liked the ballerina pose, I thought it was different and made an interesting silhouette. This is how it looked in Maya.

Mike seemed to really like my pose this week and thought it was cool that we can see both the back and the face of the character. The only note he had was to open up the pose a little bit and give it some more negative space, because right now if it was in silhouette mode the center would look like a big mass. Here's his suggestion

So here's my final render

Week 11- Assignment #10 Part 1

The assignment this week was to refine our personality walks based on the notes from our mentor. I was not expecting this to be so hard because I felt like Mike's notes from last week seemed pretty simple. However, because I had already changed the animation from stepped mode to splined mode, it was really hard to go back in and change up the timing. Mike said he had been there many times where you have to decide whether to start over from stepped mode or to keep going and fight it. I think I made the wrong choice in deciding to keep going with what I had because I ended up wasting hours trying to fix this thing and it didn't really turn out how I wanted. This is what my revision looked like...

Mike could definitely tell that this wasn't what I was going for. He said I did a nice job breaking up the rhythm but I changed the timing too much to where I lost a bit of clarity, and now the foot timing is a little bit more like a sneak now than a really feminine walk. This happened because the foot eases too much before hitting the ground. He said for the happy stylin' walk I was going for, I should snap the foot down faster and instead just get to the foot up position faster and hold it for a few frames. This was our last opportunity to hand in the assignment but I did go back and address his notes for the progress reel for next week. This time I decided to just start back from what I had originally and it made it a lot easier and faster.

Week 10- Assignment #9 Part 2

The pose assignment for this week was "exhaustion". I thought for sure this one would be easy because I'm exhausted a lot, especially after work performing in a parade. But again, it was hard to come up with something that wasn't cliche.

Mike made a good point in saying that if you don't push the pose far enough it just looks like relaxation but if you push it too far it can look like passed out drunk. So this is another one that borders a fine line. He went through my sketches and gave me ideas on how I could push them further. This is the one I ended up choosing...

Mike liked the pose but thought it was leaning more towards relaxed and if it wasn't for the dangling arm it would like this person was just kicking back. The feet propped up like they are takes too much strength for this to really feel like exhaustion. So he suggested that I make the table smaller to have the feet lower and cheat the chair out a bit to support more of the body. 

And this is what I ended up with...

Week 10- Assignment #9 Part 1

This week our final revision of the vanilla walk was due. I took Mike's notes from last week and marked where my knees were on every frame and that really helped me visualize the spacing.

Mike said he could tell I spent a lot of time fixing the knees so they weren't so poppy, however he also said that in making sure the spacing was even, I lost something when the foot is planted. The foot no longer feels like it's really taking the weight of the body because by the time the foot is on the ground the knee is longer over it. He also gave me a small tweak on the passing pose. The foot seems really stretched for too long so all I would have to do is make the foot start rolling up a little sooner. I addressed these fixes in my end progress reel.

The really tough assignment started this week and that is the personality walk. Whereas the vanilla walk was kind of spelled out for us which poses were supposed to happen on which frames, the personality walk had to be different and completely up to us. Adding "personality" to a character's walk can mean that just the timing and the spacing of the movements are different, or maybe there's a bounce in his step, or maybe the movements are just really exaggerated to look happy or cartoony. Sometimes you can really tell a lot about a character's personality by the way they walk. Since I'm the only female in the class I decided to a really feminine walk. I definitely had to shoot reference of myself doing it so I could get a sense of how long it took for the feet to flick up or come down and to see exactly what the hips would be doing. Then we had to sketch out our planning so I took mine from my reference video.

Here's my first pass...

Mike really liked my walk and said it had a really nice character to it. The note he gave me was to change up the timing a little bit so it wasn't just a steady and even beat on every step. He suggested that before the foot plants to keep it up in the air a little longer so it breaks up the timing of the step. He also said that in this case, keeping the ball at a steady translate forward the whole time like in the vanilla walk is actually working against me. He said I should hold it back a little bit while the foot is still up in the air and have it rip forward as soon as the foot plants. I'll fix that in my revision.

Week 9- Assignment #8 Part 2

The second part of our assignment this week was to sketch out poses that convey concern. This was another tough one this week because a lot of these poses can be misunderstood as something else. Even as Mike said in his critique it's hard because it kind of borders the line between concern and depression, and some of my drawings did look more like depression.

Mike made a great point that usually a more relaxed body posture reads as depressed, whereas when you are concerned your body is more tense. Mike actually liked number 2 a lot out of my sketches but I didn't pick it because I didn't think it was interesting enough, but I agree that it reads more as concerned than a lot of the others. I picked number 3 because out of my drawings I thought it was the most clear and looked the least like it could be bordering depression. So here's what I did

Mike suggested that I take the curve out of his body and create more of a straight line of action to create more tension.

So here is my final render...

Week 9- Assignment #8 Part 1

Part 1 of our assignment this week was to start refining the vanilla walk and change the curves from stepped to spline. Now we're starting to get more detailed and adding in-betweens.

Mike really liked the overlap on the root but had some tweaks he wants me to make on the legs. For example, when the leg goes straight for the contact pose, it needs to be straight for two frames and not just one because if you have a leg that goes from bent to straight to bent it can read as a pop and you don't really see the straight leg, which is what we want. He also gave me a great idea for tracking where the knees are at all times. He told me to take the grease pencil tool in Maya and draw on the screen where the knees were at each frame so I can fix the spacing and they won't look like they're popping.

Week 8- Assignment #7 Part 2

The second part of this week's assignment was to sketch poses that convey physical strength and then choose one to pose out in 3D. Every week that we have a pose assignment I think I'm going to get all these great ideas that are great poses and completely unique. Every week I realize that it's much harder than that. I feel like I get a great idea and then see that someone else has already done that same thing. So I sketched out as many different things that I could.

As most weeks, I still wasn't completely satisfied with my poses and decided to pick one but see what I could do with it once I had it in Maya. I ended up changing it quite a bit...

Mike liked the pose but gave me some ideas on how to push it further. For one thing he said the body has too many axes working at the same time and I could unify them by twisting the hips toward camera more, lifting the head forward, and making the arms more in line. This was his suggestion

And this is my final pose

Week 8- Assignment #7 Part 1

Week 8 was a bit more challenging because on top of revising our Tailor assignment we also had to plan and block out our vanilla walk assignment and create a new pose with Stu. I was excited to start walks though! This week we had to do a vanilla walk with the character Ballie, which means it has no personality, it is just a plain old walk. Normally a character would have some sort of personality or a different beat of steps but this assignment is just to learn the basics of a walk. Luckily the vanilla walk was kind of spelled out for us- there's specific poses that are supposed to be happening at specific frames, which we learned in the lecture. A normal step takes one second, or 24 frames, so we had to break it down by extreme poses, extreme down poses, passing poses, and extreme up poses, which are shown here in my planning.

Here the ball acts as the root/hips of the character. We need to keep in mind what the hips are doing when we walk and how and when they rotate. Even though the walk was pretty straight forward, executing it Maya was still a little difficult. You have to make sure you balance the root in between the feet just right, because if the stride is too far or too short you are going to get messed up later in the walk. I did end up encountering this problem.

Here is my blocking pass for the walk in stepped mode. What this means is that just the main poses I had drawn in my planning are blocked in and so that's why it is a little jagged. So in the graph editor, where we can see all of our animation represented by lines or curves, they look like little steps. Once we go in and refine the animation we switch to spline mode and the curves are more of an S shape so the animation is more flowy and we can tweak it more specifically and add in betweens. Mike gave me some good feedback for moving forward and helped adjust some of my key poses. For instance, he said I needed to tweak my down pose by making the knee go more over the foot, showing that the foot is really taking the weight of the step. Getting these poses right are key because that's what makes the weight and balance of the character more believable. He did notice I was counter-animating the root because, as I said earlier, the distance in my stride was too large and as I got further in the animation the root became less and less balance so the feet were getting away from it. I made sure to address that in the following week!

Week 7- Assignment # 6

Ok so it's been a really long time since I've updated my blog since I got really busy so hopefully I can remember all of my thoughts on these assignments! Luckily for week 7 our only assignment was our first revision of the Tailor assignment, so I really had the chance to focus on making it better. Here's my revision...

Overall, Mike was really happy with this assignment. He thought concentrating on just one character was definitely the right move and allowed me to really push the unique personality I added to the character. We did have another opportunity to revise the assignment so he gave me some more great notes on pushing some shapes in the tail and making some fixes to the spacing of the ball. The end of the shot was really difficult for me to get looking right so he also gave me some things I could change to make that look better, like having the ball start to rotate back sooner and bring down the stretch at the top of the arc like the other jumps. Here's what I ended up doing for the following week's revision...

I'm really happy with how it turned out. Mike just gave me a few more little tweaks to make to the tail shapes and the ending. He gave me some good feedback on filling in the rest of the arc with the tail shape since we can't see the ball anymore once it goes offscreen. But he said this was an excellent example of the assignment so that was definitely encouraging and I went back and made those fixes for the final progress reel which you will see later!