Responsive Studio Brief 1: Individual Practice

We have just started our new module Responsive. In the first actual lesson for this subject our class was split in half and we were put in a room with some illustrators. The Responsive module is basically about how we as individuals dissect briefs and go about tackling them. Now at the start this sounded pretty simple to me. But after this lesson I realised that when I personally am set a brief I usually just skim over it and go right into it without fully understanding what it is exactly the brief wants from me. We were given two examples of briefs we as animators or illustrators could be set...

Then we were asked to work in a group and figure out the following...

 As you can see my sheet is rather lacking. I feel his is partially down to the briefs themselves. They were not good, in particular, the BBC brief. The brief set by the WPP seemed very ethical as it was with the purpose of trying to get 33 million girls into school whereas the BBC seemed to be setting us a brief that was just about promoting themselves to young people aged 15 to 24. Either way they both were not briefs I would pick myself but still I felt the session was very informative because these two briefs took a lot of reading and re-reading to actually discover what it was  they were asking of us and showed me that the briefs we are set by the uni have actually been far simplified down compared to other briefs you might get in the business. 

The Potential and Limitations of 3D Modelling and Animation Technologies and Techniques: Part 4

Okay I've talked about Pixar before and where they went wrong in the past, now I want to talk about their future. Pixar as an animation studio have done an incredible job at combining realism with fiction. For example the textures and landscapes have only become more evolved over the years becoming more and more visually stunning and realistic. Whereas the characters have remained at a visually unrealistic level. Now my fear about upcoming Pixar films is that as the technology evolves and the worlds these characters live in look more an more realistic, the characters themselves could end up sticking out like a sore thumb. At the moment with their last film Inside Out I feel we are at a really nice level...



So the textures of the clothes the characters wear looks incredibly realistic as does their hair and surroundings yet their physicality is unrealistic...



Riley's head is hugely out of proportion as are her eyes for example. But that's fine because that disconnect between reality and fiction is an essential part of ever Pixar film's appeal.

But I did recently see the trailer for their upcoming film The Good Dinosaur...







Now the visual style did slightly worry me. For me I felt that although the landscapes in the trailer looked visually stunning, the characters didn't quite seem to fit in with the world their living in quite as easily as in past Pixar films. The dinosaur and the boy look almost too cartoony to fit in with the world, but that's where we reach a major conundrum. If the characters looked more realistic, e.g. more features and smaller eyes they might lose a bit of that connection with the audiences. From watching the trailer it was clear who we as the audience are going to root for due to the nice simple character design but then to me there's also a bit of a problem with them standing out too much.

I only watched a two minute trailer, it could be, and I truly hope that when it comes to watching the actual film I'll have forgotten about this within the first five minutes of the film and will have been completely emerged but right no this issue, that could just be my opinion alone in thinking it, does worry me.

The Potential and Limitations of 3D Modelling and Animation Technologies and Techniques: Part 3

Okay so in the previous blog posts about the limitations and possibilities a common thought of mine is that using motion capture to create humans hasn't been as successful as when its been used to create creatures. Although, that being said when motion capture has been used to create humans often it has made these characters more emotionally relatable than if they had just been animated without it. A key example for me is the Grand Theft Auto video game series.


So when I played Grand Theft Auto Four, the main protagonist had been created without motion capture and although I really liked playing as the character there was an emotional disconnect of which I had fully realised until playing the fifth in the series.





And then the fifth game in the series came along that had been created with using motion capture and I completely noticed the difference. There is now so much more emotion in the characters and they feel so much more life like and personally I found I could connect with them far easier.









(Above: The real life actors who portray the three GTA5 protagonists Trevor, Franklin and Michael)

Now these characters because of the motion capture technology are easier to relate to and we as the player feel we can relate to them easier. That being said, playing the game I still find there is a disconnect to reality which in the case of playing a Grand Theft Auto game I feel is great and one of the games strong points. The reason for this is that for one some of what these characters do in the game is pretty appalling, their are many causalities and a lot of destruction is caused, destruction we the player are responsible for. But it doesn't matter because we know what we're playing isn't real, it's a fiction, they look realistic but we know their not real which is very important. I personally feel if the characters did just look like real human beings the player would not be comfortable carrying out any of the actions that take place in the game. Now whether this is a limitation or a potential to me is slightly unclear, I feel it's neither. I feel the Grand Theft Auto franchise has met a nice point to stay at regarding it's animation in Grand Theft Auto Five.

The Potential and Limitations of 3D Modelling and Animation Technologies and Techniques: Part 2

I was thinking about how to structure these five blog posts where I can touch on both the limitations and potential of 3D technologies in equal measure. So I decided that since I started by talking about the limitations I will now talk about the potential of 3D technologies and basically take it in turns. Now, if we're talking about the potential of 3D modelling and Animation Technologies, for example Motion Capture, there is a man who I simply cannot fail to mention, if you know of Motion Capture you should definitely know who he is...



(It's Andy Serkis by the way)

This man has worked heavily in bringing our (the audiences) attention to motion capture with some of the biggest movie franchises of all time. Starting with his portrayal of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy...



Then King Kong...



And more recently in the Planet of the Apes movies...



Now I know they way we think of motion capture today is not all down to this man, but he is a key example of how an actor can give these characters, entirely created by CGI real emotion that audiences can connect to. For example, in King Kong, the audience feels for Kong even though he never talks. This is down to us seeing emotion in his facial features. That raw emotion he gives to all these creations have made him the go-to-man for most big budget films that use motion capture. They even came to him when they needed close up shots of Godzilla in the latest film...



Okay not the screenshot I was looking for but their is a scene in which Godzilla is wounded and we see a close up on his face and we can see from the facial expressions that he is in pain and we feel for him which is incredibly hard to accomplish when he looks like that (above).

Why I feel there is potential in Andy Serkis and what he is doing with the motion capture technology is because personally I think using motion capture to animate humans has many limitations, but when it's used to animate animals and other things that aren't human, it works far more successfully.

Now a lot of this is praising Serkis, but he himself has not entirely escaped the uncanny valley himself...



The Steven Spielberg film The Adventures of Tintin was met with positive reviews although it waas also met with criticisms, mostly directed at the uncanny valley in the film. 'Too human and not human at all' was what Steve Rose of The Guardian wrote regarding the film which of course is the key problem with making characters look too realistic.

But as I've said before, to me what hasn't worked so well on humans is working very successfully on other beings that aren't human.



Now when I see these apes, I basically feel like I am looking at real apes.

Telling Tales: Storyboarding

So Matt and I did create this storyboard as a first draft for our animation but since then things have changed, but here is where we got up to anyway...

So basically Matt and I had a sit down with tutor Mat and he felt that even though we had a good overall idea for our animation, the scope of it was simply far too large and there was simply far too much to establish within a minute. So we then decided to shape our narrative into something slightly different, far less complicated and far easier to establish within a minute run time. Even though basically everything Matt and I wanted to do with the animation still exists in the new concept we have had to basically re-script the whole thing which means of course we will have to re-storyboard everything as well. 

Telling Tales: Concept Work

I've stated in the past that I really struggle with the early idea generation side of animation. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate how important it is. But when I get an idea in my head that I like I tend to just want to start animating straight away. But I can't really do that, especially when I'm working in a group and both Matt and I have our own ideas on where we want to take the animation.



Since writing is definitely not my strong suite I felt I needed to present my ideas visually. to get inspiration I had a flick through my own 'Art of Pixar's Inside Out' book to gain inspiration. I was amazed at just how much concept work goes into every film.







And I know that's a given as Pixar films have hundreds of animators working on them. But what surprised me was just how much time is spent on creating concept work before making the actual film. It is obviously a very important part because everyone has ideas of their own and through creating all this concept work and presenting it to each other eventually the film forms from that.

And although on a far smaller scale, the same applies to Matt and I. So even though creating concept work is important to my own development it is also essential for Matt as well so he can gain a better understanding as to what I want to go for with the animation and the same applies the other way round.

I find it very difficult to represent the mood of something like an animation in just line drawings. I find colour plays a very important role in representing the mood and tone of what I'm going for. So I created the above image of concept art in Photoshop. I didn't include any outlines or character emotions because I just wanted to convey the mood of the animation in colour.

The inspiration to create something in this style came from two artists that feature heavily in the Art of Pixar's Inside Out book, Teddy Newton...

And Lou Romano...

What I love about how these artists work is that in much of their concept work for Pixar films, their drawings involve no outlines and often no visible character features whatsoever and yet the mood or tone the artist has gone for is conveyed perfectly. It's just a really nice way of working different from my own that I wanted to give a try. Furthermore the feedback from my partner was very positive and gave him a good idea of what I wanted to go for with the animation and it also revealed to me that he was thinking in a pretty similar way.

Taking Inspiration: Mood Board

Too much inspiration?

When it came to putting our ideas onto paper for what we wanted to do with our animation, I feel Matt and I wanted very similar things. We both have a lot of shared interests anyway in the kind of things we watch so that made things a lot easier anyway. But still I felt it would be useful to put everything I personally took inspiration from to develop this animation on a page not only for my own benefit to to also help him understand what kind of tone would be good for the animation in my opinion and he can do the same for me.

As you can see my mood board covers a wide range of different things but I feel each and every one can relate to our animation in some way. For example I really wanted to go for the same tone as Waiting for Godot. And I felt like the characters in our animation would be experiencing emotions and situations similar to characters in films such as Source Code and 1984 where a character feels trapped and are controlled by people on TV screens. But then The Wizard of Oz, although an entirely different movie with it's tone and characters can relate to our animation as well. It centres on three characters who have become comfortable in their own lives yet are still unfulfilled and desire a greater meaning to their lives.

Taking Inspiration: Waiting For Godot

A big Inspiration for me with Matt and I's animation now titled 'The Void: Leap of Faith' is the play/book Waiting For Godot. The story of Waiting For Godot is centred around two homeless characters that are basically waiting for the character of Godot to arrive. Godot has often been thought of as a god-like figure due to the name and his absence in the entire play. Godot never actually shows up so the moral of the story is if you just wait for your life to get better and amazing things to happen, it is never going to happen.

That I feel is basically the point of our animation. The characters in our animation 54 and 1 are essentially waiting for their lives to get better and something to happen because apart from themselves they basically have nothing, not even any meaning to their lives. 1 thinks 'Rendering' is coming, something he himself knows nothing about apart from it could be everything both these characters have ever wanted. But 54 is more sceptical. And just like Waiting for Godot, like Godot, Rendering is never going to come. The animators controlling the world they are stuck in are basically incompetent and are never going to complete the animation 54 and 1 are apart of.

Maybe this concept is too complicated for a minute long animation but that is just the way Matt and I work. If we are going to be passionate about something it's going to have a complicated meaning and a heck of a lot of thought put into the back story. But whether audiences will grasp the concept and spot the nod towards Waiting For Godot is another thing entirely.

The Potential and Limitations of 3D Modelling and Animation Technologies and Techniques: Part 1

The Uncanny Valley is that bizarre gap that separates the realistic from the fictitious. What I mean by this is purely in a visual sense. When a character is created, a good animator will try to avoid the uncanny valley. For example, Pixar films are visually incredibly technically advanced what with their amazing landscape designs and texturing...







And yet the characters featuring in Pixar films have remained consistently visually unrealistic and cartoony...







This was not by accident. This was always entirely planned by all the animators at Pixar. The characters look visually cartoony yet their physical characteristics and personalities are very realistic. Therefore every film maintains a nice balance where the audience can easily connect with a character without becoming alienated if a character looks too realistic to the point of creepy.

But Pixar themselves cannot say they've never entered the uncanny valley...



One of their first shorts Tin Toy featured a baby that truly looks like the stuff nightmares are made of. That is when they tried to go down the route of making their characters look as realistic as possible. And, for obvious reasons, this didn't stick and they never made the above mistake again.

Creating a Skeleton

Creating a Skeleton for my Personal Character Model in Maya was far easier than actually modelling the character. It was basically a case of building a virtual skeleton so when it came to animating the character it would simply be a case of moving the joints, not the model itself. I rather enjoyed this process compared to the others and was amazed at how fleshed out my character is starting to look. The tricky part of this step was naming and grouping everything together.

I feel I do now know how necessary it is to name and group everything as I go along, even if little things like naming the joints in each finger seem to dull to care about. There was just one little issue I didn't notice when constructing the armature and that was that part of the left arm was disconnected but I solved that by rebuilding.

UV Mapping

UV Mapping is where I ran into trouble. I had no trouble separating the limbs but when it came to unfolding my mesh that is when my mistakes were revealed to me. I was following Mat's tutorial and I could see that my net looked nothing like his, I had gone wrong somewhere. Luckily these errors were relatively easy to fix once I had found the errors but I did find actually figuring out where the errors lay was the hardest part.

As you can see the above image basically looks like a cut out of a character, and that is essentially what it is. Even though the process of unfolding my character was tricky and incredibly intricate I was amazed at what this software could do. Once I had my net I imported it onto Photoshop and that was where I could pretty much draw whatever I wanted onto it to give the character an interesting design.

Once that was finished and I was happy with my design I could then import this newly decorated net back into Maya to be printed on top of my model.

I did have some trouble importing my image onto my model initially as I wanted the actor Steve Buscemi's (featured in the above image) face printed on the models face. but this ended up looking blurring and just plain wrong. This could be down to how neatly I modelled the face in the first place. Therefore I decided to instead print the image on the character's stomach.  

Finishing the Construction of my Personal Maya Model

It was a struggle but I have completed my Personal Maya Model. I mean, it hasn't been rigged yet but it is a fully formed 3D character and to me that is pretty cool. Looking at the finished model, the idea of creating a character that could fit into a Pixar film for example does not seem entirely unrealistic. This program is where it all starts. And even though I would definitely not be able to say I could just whip out a Buzz Lightyear in a day on it, I do now see that with a huge amount of time learning the craft and honing the skills on the software these things are entirely possible for anyone to do, they are not just unrealistic dreams.





When it came to be the day before we had to have completed our Maya model I completely underestimated the time it would take to finish. Where I had thought it would take maybe three hours tops to complete it ended up taking me ten hours straight to get it finished. This is to many things, I feel I am a slow learner, particularly at anything that requires a great deal of technical intricacy.

It also became quite intimidating to look around at other people who were were many steps ahead of me on the Maya model construction. I know my slowness was on me and I should have planned my time more effectively, especially on something I knew I would struggle with. Towards the end of the models construction I began to find myself becoming impatient with how long it was taking. If I ever would make a really small mistake, my attitude was just to move on and not dwell on it, then hope it wouldn't matter later. How wrong I was. These mistakes did end up catching up to me and when it came to UV mapping, that is where I had truly tripped myself up. There were vertacies where they shouldn't be and other multiple eras that might appear small but matter just as much as any mistake that was more visible. In the end I did end up having to receive a lot of help to undo these errors which turned out to be very time consuming. Basically the lesson was, don't rush. Lesson learnt.