Still no I-dent (sorry)

It only seems like five minutes ago that I was last doing this; the week has flown by, so apologies if I am a little vague this week.

After my little rant last week I have had time to sit back and reflect and have come to the conclusion that I still hate Maya and wouldn’t want to touch it with a barge pole. That said the fact that it has effectively beaten me is constantly at the back of my mind so I might end up doing the tutorials again when I get some free time.

I really like the new project(s), and think we have a good group for the library brief, despite the odd clash of egos. Pete has come up with a really good idea of giving us all our own little bit to come up with, which allows us some degree of creative freedom and will hopefully give the finished film an interesting feel as it changes between the different styles, although we will have to be careful that these changes don’t confuse the audience. I am also responsible for designing the environment; which I am trying to keep as simple as possible, to fit the overall feel of the film as well as making the 3D modelling of it as quick and simple as possible. I am also coming up with lighting schemes, which I haven’t really thought about and am advising on the camera angles, although I think everyone else’s ideas on that front are better than mine.

And finally, my little pet project, which I am still not going to say what it is about, except it is going to be stop motion, is tottering along nicely. I have read Peter Lord’s and Brian Sibley’s Cracking Animation, which is really useful, I have some very rough character designs and a sript(ish) as well as recruiting some 3D design people to help build sets and props and a textiles person to make little miniature clothes. However, this is likely to ground to a halt during this project and probably wont be resurrected till next year.

Maya Has Broken Me

I think that it would be very easy for me to just slag of Maya for the entirety of this entry but I shall try to restrain myself and be a little bit constructive. Right, as you may have guessed, I have not got on particularly well with Maya this week, just as the ole’ flour sack thing seemed to be chugging along smoothly and I was on the verge of becoming a convert, a huge great dirty spanner was thrown in the works and completely buggered up everything as the anchor point things suddenly decided to go forth and multiply. After wasting a day bodging everything back together I encountered another little gem; for some reason whenever I move something to animate it, everything that has already been animated moves too, despite it being keyed. At this stage I don’t know if I these problems are a result of something that I have done or something that Maya has done. So to cut a long story short I have thrown the towel in and given up – Maya has broken me.

What have I learnt, well, apart from the fact that I never want to animate in Maya again and fail to see why anyone else would (I salute anyone who can though). It can be a surprisingly amusing programme to use whilst half drunk, although the chances of producing anything worthwhile are slim. Also, in the right hands (clearly not mine) I grudgingly acknowledge that you can do some interesting camera work and the like, but I am still not overly keen on the whole 3D environment that you can create.

Where from here then…bring on stop motion I cry! I have started work on my little pet project (sketches and so on and so forth) and plan to raid the library tomorrow to learn how to do things. Updates next week.

And finally, to conclude, my little review of A Scanner Darkly, mentioned last week. In terms of plot the film was OK if a tad curfuzzeling but it normally takes me a couple of attempts to understand most things. The rotoscoping was interesting, highlighting for me actions that animation can’t or doesn’t capture and also showing what animation can bring to a storey. At first I didn’t see what the rotoscoping brought to the storey but Rosie (correct me if I’m wrong Rosie) pointed out that the way that the characters ‘floated’ about (which I put down to dodgy rotoscoping) was meant to enhance the whole stoner mindset in the film.

Next week I will revisit Maya when I have had time to cool off and have a better look at my experience with it.

Learning to Love Maya (slowely)

Once again I have completely forgotten to post the I-dent so apologies for that, not exactly sure what to write this week as all I have been doing is the Maya stuff so I will try and wing it and see what happens.

I suppose the logical place to start is Maya, which I have a sort of love hate relationship with, mostly hate. However, the tutorials have really helped and I can sort of get my head round the graph editor now, which when you know how, I will grudgingly admit, is quite useful. I have spent most of this week on the bowling ball which I am quite happy with. Peter Bailey’s talk was very useful in getting a lot of the movement right. I started the table tennis ball but wasn’t really trying so it looks a bit crap; the rotation is all wrong, which in turn messes up the stretch and squash and I can not for the life of me work out how to put locators on. That said, unless you watch it on wire frame you can not actually tell that it is rotating that much, if I have time tomorrow or Saturday I will try and fix it but through some perverse need to punish myself I have decided to try and model a football tomorrow so it may have to stay as it is. I am quite looking forward to the character animation, mainly because it is a bit more interesting than a ball, although I can see it getting stupidly complicated very quickly.

That’s just about the extent of anything remotely interesting that I had to say, so I am off to go watch Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006) I don’t know if its any good but it looks like it has all been rotoscoped, so I shall update you next week sports fans!

Easter stooff

First blog since Easter so it might take me a while to get back into the swing of things. I still have not posted the I-dent but I suppose that’s a bit irrelevant now.

Will kick things off by talking about this week and returning to my most favourite thing in the whole wide world, Maya; to say I found animating the ball frustrating would be a bit of an understatement, but I have gone through some of the tutorials since then and I have found those really useful so hopefully I will have more success with the other tasks in future. I’m hoping I can get my head round it, especially the modelling side of it as I think having a 3D environment to work in lends itself better to my ideas as it is easier to work out things like camera angles and lighting. I’m not overly keen on the whole 3D finish though, so I might look into how the giant was textured in Iron Giant, where cell shading was used to make the character look like it was 2D.

I found the Easter project really good fun, I did keep putting off the script though as I had never done something like that and was a bit wary of it but once I started it I really liked it. For the storyboard I really tried to bring something else to the script by tweaking the odd bit here and there and utilising what I have learned about cinematography. How successful that has been and weather or not I would be aloud to do that in a professional situation, I do not know. The script was heavily influenced by Roman Klochkov’s Administrators, (I can’t find a version of it on the internet so this is just a link to his myspace) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. I also recycled quite a lot of research that I did for a project last year, it is mostly newspaper cuttings which where really useful for getting inspiration as well as some sketches of some stuff I got given in a police station, although my script dose not deal with this police equipment the memories evoked by the sketches and the odd scribbled note, reminded me of how hard it was to get the stuff and what happened while I was there, which also served as inspiration.

Uber blog (I went a bit overboard this week)

First of all, apologies for not putting my I-dent up, it completely slipped my mind, if I remember I will put it up tomorrow when I am in the studio. I also completely forgot about Andy’s comment last week so I shall try and write about that this week as I think it will offer some more insight into my I-dent.

To start though I thought I might talk about our new project which looks really good. The whole script writing thing has been something that I have been looking forward to for a while and the brief has got my creative juices flowing, I have gone into geek mode and started researching it already. I am a bit apprehensive as I have never written a script before, everything I have done in the past has gone straight to storyboards and they where never particularly clear as I was working by myself and knew what I wanted to do, I have also never attempted anything with dialogue (I know we don’t have to do that for this project but I think I should stop putting it off), so I hope it will be an interesting experience.

I have also started to get some ideas for the storyboard project and I am hoping that I can put some of the theories that I have learnt from Herbert Zettl’s Sight Sound Motion, Applied Media Aesthetics to good use but I think I will need to re-read my notes from that first.

Right, another quick bit on the I-dent:

Although I used Flash to animate the I-dent so that I could use puppets, making everything a bit easier and less time consuming to animate (which it was) I found that the stuff I drew by hand looked the most effective and fluid. This doesn’t mean that I want to stop using Flash but I think I need to look into using some of the tools in it more subtly, and mixing them with the traditional animation function.

This all brings me conveniently round to an article that I read in the March 2008 issue of Animation Magazine; Watch Out For That Tree…Again! George of the Jungle swings back into action. By Ryan Ball, which talks about the remake of Jay Ward’s 1967 animation series George of the Jungle by Bullwinkle Studios and Studio B Productions, in which Even Baily of Classic Media (Bullwinkle studios) states that despite the series being animated in Flash it was “…important that the new George didn’t come off looking like a Flash Show… great Flash animation looks like great traditional animation…”

Having said all of that I think Harold’s moonwalk looked quite good and that was animated using a puppet; there where a lot of messy edges and the animation was a tad jerky but I think that was more down to my own mistakes than anything else and with a bit more time I probably could have cleaned up that sequence.

As I mentioned last week I think my main fault was that I was too ambitious in a lot of areas; in terms of what I was capable of producing, what could be conveyed in the time restrictions of the I-dent and the limitations of Flash. Despite this I think that the editing helped to bring together the bits that did work and with a bit of re-jigging in the order and repeating other bits I hope I was able to make something that was understandable. Editing was something that I found quite fun and is another area that I want to look into in the future.

Bells whistles and shiny sparkley bits!

This week I thought that I would try and talk through my thought process behind my I-dent as I have only really covered the style that I used (I would have a copy of my final version here but I forgot to render it out in the correct format so I will stick it in next week). My original idea for the I-dent was inspired by various characters and ideas that I had before the project which where adapted to suit the brief. The characters, Dorice, Harold and Cheesy Dave,(pictured) where inspired by a range of sources, chief amongst them were Monty Python’s Pepperpot sketches and I had planned to produce a similar sort of sketch for my I-dent.

However, as the project progressed and I started to do line tests the story changed to Harold’s dance which at the time I thought would be more manageable then a full blown sketch due to there being fewer characters and no dialogue. Cheesy Dave was dropped and for a short period of time Harold’s pigeons where going to make an appearance but they where later dropped. As I started to pursue this idea I wanted to use a ‘funk/hip-hop’ style soundtrack and looked at a lot of videos for inspiration, I ended up taking a lot of Harold’s dance moves from them .The most useful where Run DMC’s It’s Like That and Soul Sonic Force’s Renegades of Funk, the Rage Against the Machine cover was also useful. This theme was later replaced by a sort of technoish type track, as it seemed to fit better with what I had in mind, which I got off one of Andy’s CDs (Kids R Cool – which I think says it all).

When storyboarding I think I was a bit too ambitious in terms of what I was capable of achieving in the time constraints and what Flash could do. Several scenes where never actually animated because I ran out of time, others had to be animated traditionally by hand and then bought into Flash and I had to cut others because the illusion of camera movement that I wanted to create just did not work. It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because the I-dent ran over by three or so seconds even with out the deleted scenes. This problem was solved by making rapid cuts from one scene to the next which I do not think would have worked had the I-dent been slower paced but I think the music supports the plot do a degree that the audience still know what is going on.

The ole I-dent has not gone terribly well this week, I just haven’t been able to get into the swing of things, it did pick up a bit this afternoon but I still have not decided for definite on a style for the whole thing which means that I still do not have a design bible, instead I have a verity of different styles that I have tried out and animation tests, a lot of which are half complete because I decided I did not like them and stopped doing them. So far my favourite style is inspired by the German animator Koto Ezawa who uses simple blocks of colour to reconstruct film and news segments. I have messed about with this a bit to try and make it a bit more original but I am still not sure that I have done enough to set my work apart from his.

I also still need to decide how I am going to animate everything, my plan was to use Flash but I tried to do some stuff in it yesterday but it was just too complicated. Today I redid it by hand and my plan is to scan that into Photoshop so that I can neaten it up and paint over it. From their I might put it into Flash because there are still some bits that I think I can animate using puppets or just do everything by hand and render it out in After-effects.

The green-screen workshop today was interesting, I did not really do too much on it because I wanted to get on with the I-dent but I do have some ideas for stuff that I want to try out when I get the time.