Catching up

While the previous post was the first actual "content" in the past five months or so, this is the semi-obligatory "Holy cow, I haven't written in ages!" catching-up post. A lot has happened since last November, but even as I type this, I'm still evaluating how much of the goings-on of the past five months to share in this space. Hmmm...

Work-wise, most of my time was spent supervising a BOZ Christmas special which is slated for release later this year. In the middle of that, I had an opportunity to help with our portion of animation on TMNT. In the end I only animated one shot, which is probably why my name was omitted from the credits, but it was fun all the same. I was also able to contribute a little bit to the cinematics for the upcoming Transformers video game. Animation-wise, it was only one shot (again), but I actually appear -- in silhouette form, anyway -- in one scene of the game.

There's been a bit of a break recently in BOZ video production, so I've had the opportunity to animate on some other projects. Recently we've been doing a number of promotional bits for Shrek the Third -- TV commercials for product tie-ins, character interviews, etc. -- and earlier today I put the finishing touches on a rather long (25-second) shot of Puss in Boots. The model is nicely rigged and was fun to animate, although it was strange looking at the fur-less version of Puss and wondering how the poses I made would appear in the final render. Anyway, I saved out a number of videos showing the progress of the clip from start to finish, and once I have my hands on a rendered version, I'll post the collection to the Animation page of my site.

An interesting non-character animation opportunity arose while working on a shot for one of the commercials. I probably shouldn't give the details away until the commercials airs, so for now I'll just say that it involved animating a number of cylindrical objects bouncing and spinning on a tabletop. Hand keying all that spinning action in a believable way would have been a huge pain, but luckily I was able to draw upon the work I'd done roughly six years ago for an Animation:Master rig experiment and build my own rig for the objects that made the spinning animation SO much easier. I was even able to add an element missing from my original A:M rig that automatically offsets the contact point as the object tilts, which makes the spinning action more realistic. There have been times when I've questioned the value of those old non-character animation experiments, so being able to go back and draw upon one of them to get a job done was a fun sort of validation. Unfortunately there's still a hitch in the Maya version of the rig that I wasn't able to overcome due to my limited understanding of Maya's constraints, but working around it for the purpose of getting the shot done was fairly easy. Once I figure it out, I'm thinking of constructing an auto-rigger and sharing it on the MEL scripts page of my main site. No guarantees, but it'll probably happen...eventually...

That's about all the time I have for updates at this point. I'll try to be more active with this crazy blog thingamabob as time permits. As with the auto-rigger mentioned above, though, there are no guarantees, but it'll probably happen...eventually. :)

Thoughts on studying animation

Wow...first post since November? Yikes! Well, I'm lazy...and busy. Mostly busy, I think, but laziness certainly can't be discounted. Anyway, I had an e-mail conversation recently that I thought was worth sharing, and was further encouraged to share it here after sharing it with my current Animation Mentor class in our Q&A earlier this evening.

I was contacted not long ago by a former AM student who was taking some time off, and was planning on studying a lot of classic animation (Disney, Warner Bros., etc.) during his break from school. In part of his message, he asked if I had any "tips for studying these clips frame by frame." Initially I couldn't think of anything specific that I do that's terribly different from what most people do...study poses, arcs, overlap, breakdowns, etc. But then a new method of studying animation occurred to me, and my reply went as follows:

I rarely have/take the time to break down clips frame by frame any more. I know I should, but I'm either busy with other things, or when the opportunity arises, I kinda breeze through a single shot, see some interesting stuff, log it away, and move on to something else.

Anyway, I think it's cool to pick out things like arcs, line of action, poses, etc. when studying a clip, and I'll often focus on those myself. However, one thing that I haven't yet done -- and that I would really like to try some time -- is to fully dissect a clip I want to study. By "fully dissect," I mean start clear back at the beginning, treating it like it were an assignment that I were receiving to animate myself.

For starters, take a step back and look at what's happening in the story. Look at the surrounding shots for context. Where is the character coming from, and where is he going to? Track the path of his emotional arc and figure out where he is emotionally at that given moment. Also take some time to figure out the character's personality (if you don't already know it). Is the character easy-going? Uptight? Aggressive? Passive? Whatever it is, work it out. Then ignoring the finished animation for a moment, look at the shot and identify the vital action bits...what does the character need to accomplish in the shot? Perhaps Wile E Coyote is pushing a cannon to the edge of a cliff, so the pushing of the cannon to the edge is the needed action.

With that, you have pretty much everything the original animator had when they animated the shot initially. You know the context of the shot within the larger story, you know the character's emotional state, the character's personality, and the needed bits of action. Let those settle and gel for a bit, and then start examining what the animator did with that information to turn those raw facts into a piece of entertainment. Let's say it's Wile E pushing the cannon. What did the animator do with Wile E as he pushed the cannon? Does he push the cannon directly to the edge? Does he stop and catch his breath along the way? Do his feet have perfect traction, or do they slip? Is this the first time he's pushing it, or the tenth time, and how does that affect his performance? How does his personality come through in the action of pushing the cannon? How is he affected by earlier bits of the story? Are there any obstacles in his way that he must overcome to get the cannon in position? If so, how does he overcome them, and how is THAT action tainted by his personality, emotional state, etc? Is this a key shot in the scene, or is it secondary, and based on that, how did the animator massage the performance based on that understanding? In other words, ask yourself all the same questions that you would if the shot were yours to animate. Then observe what the animator did to answer those questions, and notice how those answers led to specific poses, and timing, and spacing, etc.

It's easy to approach the process of studying classic animation in terms of breaking it down into the mechanical components...arcs, overlap, poses, etc. And while that stuff is important, the decisions made by the animator in creating the performance of the character are equally important (if not more so) because of the influence they had upon those mechanical bits. However, they're not always as carefully considered as the mechanics and technical princples, largely (I feel) because we can't directly see the animator's decisions. We only see the results of their decisions. It takes much more effort to reverse-engineer the thought process that led to the performance than it does to reverse-engineer the mechanics of that performance, but both are equally valuable when studying animation.

Thanks and stuff

Happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating the holiday this weekend! It's been a while since I've posted a significant update here, so I figured it was about time to crank through a few different things.

First off, The Very First Noel is going to be airing on DirecTV beginning Friday, November 24th, and running through December 31st. It'll be on channel 103, with the first show at 7:30 am, and repeats popping up every two hours after that.

More candy ballistics tests are on the way. Shortly after the first installment with Smarties, Steve and friends ran another test with Starburst. How on earth did they manage to get Starburst down the barrel of Steve's gun? What happened to it once it was fired from said weapon? Stay tuned for more candy gun fun...

Some questions have come up regarding further updates to the tweenMachine. I still have plans to add additional features, and even started working on some of them shortly after releasing 2.02. However, those efforts were short-lived, as I was just a little too burnt from the big push I made to get the updated TM released. Things were complicated further when the motherboard on my home box died and I had to get a new machine. My old hard drive survived, thankfully, but I haven't yet re-installed Maya (and to make a long story short, Alias doesn't make that very easy). Anyway, I do plan on picking up the torch again one of these days, but at the moment I'm working on a totally different scripting project that will likely keep me busy 'til the year is out.

And finally, on a more personal note, some of you will be receiving notification of a new e-mail address for me in the near future. While our spam filter does a great job of setting aside junk mail, the ratio of spam to real mail has taken a dramatic leap in the last couple months (about 10:1 at this stage...even worse on my wife's account). If you don't receive a note with the new addy and start getting bounces from my current address, just use the handy-dandy contact form to get in touch with me. (Sadly, even that has needed an update or two recently to deal with form-spammers. Just sick-n-wrong.....)

There are a couple other things I want to talk about, but they're a bit more involved, so they'll be coming later in their own topics.

Disney rips off Chinese culture?

I'm only joking, but that's one thought that came to mind when seeing the hairstyle on this Chinese artifact. (More info about the piece)

Ah, the things that amuse you when you're sick over the holidays.

Blog tweaks

Just migrated to the new Blogger beta, and I'm also switching my blog host to Blogspot instead of hosting on my own server. The look of the blog won't change (i.e. it should still mesh nicely with the rest of my site), but I believe that the hosting switch means that those who are tracking the RSS feed will have to point to the new location: http://justinanimator.blogspot.com/ . That said, it's possible I'll be moving it back to my site if I decide to install Wordpress, but I haven't made up my mind yet.

To pilfer a phrase from the inimitable John Berry, catch ya on the flip side! (Okay, so maybe it's not a John original, but he sure says it a lot...)

Fun at work: Smarties Ballistics Tests

Steve Kolbe, who is head of layout and asset management for BOZ, has a modified Nerf gun that he constantly likes to "test". It has much greater air pressure than the off-the-shelf model, and an added tube allows it to shoot the smaller Velcro-tipped darts as well as the larger missile-style rockets it was originally designed to launch.

Most of Steve's tests lately have been attempts to shoot the small darts at my desk, which is on the opposite side of the studio from his, but this past Friday, someone brought in a bunch of Smarties rolls, and it was suggested that Steve shoot one of those from his gun. I didn't have my camera ready for the initial test, but it ended about how you'd expect. The Smarties lost big-time.

Steve's next attempt was with two Smarties packs at the same time, and this time I was ready with my camera. The white dot on the target wall is the impact point from the first test.



A final test later in the afternoon involved a repeat of the shotgun test, but shot inside the studio (in the back, where there's large, mostly-empty space). However, I wasn't aware of this test until I heard the gun go off, then the sound of Smarties raining down on filing cabinets, old monitors, etc. Fun stuff. :)

The Very First Noel

We just wrapped production on a really sweet project: The Very First Noel. I animated a few shots on the side from my main work, and had a great time. It's definitely going to DVD, but the directors are pushing to get it on TV as well. Anyway, check it out and get ready for the holidays!

NFB puts 50 animated shorts online

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I watched a lot of Canadian TV, and was exposed here and there to some of the great animated work done through the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). When a DVD was released of some their top animated shorts, I jumped on it. While it's not all character animation, even their experimental stuff intrigues me. Recently I also learned of the release of a DVD cataloging the work of one of their more popular animators, Norman McLaren, and I'll jump on that when I get the dough. And now I find that the NFB has put fifty of their animated short films on their web site! Sweet!!!

Everyone's Hero clips

Just posted a couple Everyone's Hero clips on the animation page. One is from the film, the other is a fun test from pre-production.

And yes, I know this note is redundant considering that I posted the same note to the front page of my site, but that page doesn't have an RSS feed. One of these days that front page will be this blog...or this blog will be the front page...or something...

Everyone's Hero, Part 2...sort of

I'd originally planned to post this part closer on the heels of the first one, and ideally before the film was released. Now that the film has been out for a short stretch, it probably won't mean as much, but here it is in a nutshell...

I'd heard/read several comments prior to the film's release about how the first trailer gave away the plot of the film, and people were less interested in seeing it if they already knew the ending. True, it did reveal a lot about the begininng and end of the film. What it didn't reveal much, though, was the middle...the journey.

You see, if films were about nothing more than beginnings and endings, they'd be dull. A lot of what makes them interesting and appealing is the journey in the middle...the experiences the characters go through on the way from the beginning to the end, and how those experiences change and influence them. While the end of a film is certainly important, it is nothing without the journey. So while we may say we go to a film to see how it ends, I have a hunch we're really going for the journey. It's the journey that gives the ending its power.

Now, while the journey in Everyone's Hero may not be earth-shattering or mind-blowing in its depth and complexity, it most certainly has an impact on the end, and there are some fun things that happen during that journey that make the end more meaningful. So even though you may know how the film ends, I think it's worth seeing for the journey.

Everyone's Hero, Part 1

My involvement with Everyone's Hero has a bit of an odd twist to it. It started when I was working as the lead animator at DPS, which was/is a sub-company of IDT. Somewhere during late 2003/early 2004, we got word that the head of IDT, Howard Jonas, had written a story called Yankee Irving that he wanted to have made into a feature film. At first, all I knew was that the title character was a young boy, and the story had something to do with baseball. Next we heard that Christopher Reeve was going to be directing it, and he even came through the DPS office at one point (I saw his bald forehead as he rolled down the aisle on the other side of my cubicle wall and into the editing suite for a meeting). Before I left DPS in the spring of '04, modeling had begun on a Yankee and the baseball, Screwie, but I still didn't know anything more about the story. After leaving DPS, I freelanced for Reel FX before they hired me full-time in the summer of '04.

Fast-forward to the late fall of 2005. I'm walking past one of the Reel FX conference rooms, and as I glance in, I catch a glimpse of an animatic that's being projected on the wall. My eye latches onto the lower part of the image, where I read "Property of IDT Entertainment." That made me stop and look more closely at the animatic drawings, and I saw that they were of a boy and a baseball. Was this Yankee Irving? I checked with my sup, and sure enough it was. We were bidding to help with animation and lighting on a project that I almost worked on at my previous job. How weird is that!

Not long after that, we started getting the character rigs to play with, and by late January of this year, we had started animating the first shots out of of roughly 20 minutes of footage that we were assigned from the film. A short while later, we got word that the name of the film had changed to Everyone's Hero, and about that same time I had to shift gears as I was starting to take over as animation supervisor for the BOZ video series. In the end, I only animated five shots for the film, and I'm probably only going to post one of those on the animation page of my site once the film comes out. Despite my short time on the project, I'm pretty happy with how my shots turned out, and I'm grateful for the things I learned in the process.

I was going to write more tonight, but I gotta crash. In Part 2, I'll be responding to a comment/complaint I've heard about the film's trailer...

tweenMachine v2.02

Didn't announce 2.01, so I'll cover that and 2.02 in this little update...

For v2.01, which was posted a couple weeks back, the major update was to make the tweenMachine play well with character sets. Now you can easily key character set data with it, using one of two methods. You can create a custom character set group (using a special menu item) that will key the active character set, or you can import your character sets into the tweenMachine.

2.02 just got posted, and adds the ability for those using Maya 7 and higher to toggle the use of Maya's "special" tick color for keys created using the tweenMachine.

tweenMachine v2.00 is ready!

Yep, it's approaching 5:00 in the morning. And I'm gonna get an earful from my wife for staying up so late. But at this point, I really don't care. I've felt this crazy urgency to get v2 of the tweenMachine assembled ever since all the upgrade ideas came to me late last month, and this is the final push to get it out there for people to use. There are still some "icing" features to add, but those will come more slowly. For now, I'm happy with the "cake" I was able to assemble during the last month or so, and hope it tastes good to the folks out there.

In releasing this beastie that has taken so much of my free time and brain power lately, I must first and foremost give thanks to God for giving me the capacity to make this tool and share it with the animation community. Thanks to the folks on my "beta team" for their patience and willingness to take it for a spin in the early stages of development, and for helping me work out various display issues and bugs that cropped up. Thanks for the notes of enthusiasm I've received, in reference to both the original version and the beta of v2. It makes me feel good to know that it's helping folks with their animation process. I'm especially grateful for comments I've received from folks making the transition from 2D to 3D, expressing how the tweenMachine has helped make the shift easier.

All right, off to bed wit' me. Enjoy!

tweenMachine v2 in the works

While a tiny UI with one slider that operates on selected objects is useful, it's also extremely limited. I'm in the early stages of development on v2.0 of the tweenMachine, and wanted to let folks know what's coming. This will be a major update with a number of new features, including:

Sets: Users will be able to create custom sliders that affect a specific set of controls. With this feature, you can more easily sculpt the start of a breakdown pose without selecting a single object. For example, make a slider that affects the entire body, another that only affects the spine, one for the left arm, etc. Controls can be assigned to any number of sets.

Groups: Any number of set sliders can be organized into collapsable named groups. For example, you could create a group for each character in your scene.

Save with scene: Data for groups and sets is saved with your scene file. When you reload your scene and start the tweenMachine, it will read the existing data and rebuild the UI automatically.

Load/Save: Save data for all groups and sets to a text file, and load it into another scene.

Import: Import specific sets or groups from a saved data file.

Timeline ticks: Enable/disable ticks on the timeline for any set or group, so you can see where your poses are without having to select anything.

Stay tuned for more!

New animation software: Reflex

Work buddy Bryan Engram just shared some info he found about a new animation package being developed by some CG animation industry vets. Gotta keep a close eye on this puppy...

tweenMachine Update

Updated the tweenMachine tool last night (a.k.a. early this morning). Now it recognizes when channels are selected in Maya's channel box, and only operates on those channels. This allows you to easily favor specific channels in different ways, which should make it a lot easier to block out arcs, overlap, and other things I probably haven't even considered. I've been wanting to add this feature for some time now, and finally got the "oomph" after reading a post on an Animation Mentor forum from David Martinez that he was looking forward to it. Ask and ye shall receive and all that. ;)

La Linea

La Linea! It's online! I remember watching these cool little animated shorts when I was a kid. A student on AnimationMentor.com posted a link (found on the Drawn blog) to this site that has 50 of the shorts online. Now here's the funny part...I remember watching them on American TV, they're of Italian origin, and now a French site is hosting a bunch of them. Gotta love it!

EDIT: Apologies to Justin Weg for not properly crediting him as the source of the post on AM.

Trailer for Everyone's Hero

The first trailer for Everyone's Hero is up on the film site. Kinda small, though. Oh well...it's up!

"The Myth of Talent"

Found a link on a photography forum to this really cool article called "The Myth of Talent". Very inspiring read!

Site up for Everyone's Hero

The official site is up for Everyone's Hero, a film we're helping with at Reel FX. We just finished animating about 20-odd minutes of footage, and we're lighting a good chunk more than that. The characters were very fun to work with, and the story's got some heart to it. I only animated about five shots on it before I had to back out and focus on supervising the next BOZ video. It would've been fun to do more. Here's hoping I'll be free when the next one comes along...