amanda

In the module of 'Storytelling for Animation', we were allocated six sessions with Frankie, our lecturer for 'Cinematography'. After consulting with our second year peers and watching some of their cinematography final pieces, my group and I came to a realisation that most of the themes were horror and we didn't really want to tap into that.

After pitching our idea of a drunk lad coming home and somehow ending up playing a tensed up game of Jenga with a teddy bear, Frankie said he liked it a lot as it seemed like we were pitching a "Say No To Drugs" campaign. Honestly, that seemed like a good way to go about the project.

This was our final piece:



We had such an amazing lead actor in this project and we were truly grateful to him as he was so cooperative with us throughout the entire filming session. The major issues of this project was trying to handle the teddy bear. We had one of our team members to move the bear but also not have their hand in the shot. The scene where the bear slams the Jenga stack out of frustration... we only had that one chance and thankfully we did 'warm up' shots before leading up to that one sole scene.

Overall, it was a good experience and also the post-production team definitely had fun editing and compiling the footage and also had fun with the effects that they could mess about with. Hopefully you feel the intensity of this cinematography project!

Have a nice day!

Just going to be upfront and admit that hearing the entire process of constraints and how it worked, really made me need a moment to breathe. But! I watched some tutorials online, which is definitely somewhat different than what Georg has taught us all. However, we're all supposed to make our own decisions when it comes to stuff like that, and to try things out before actually admitting we're absolutely deep in a rut.

AND I MANAGED TO DO IT! Well, it's not A+ worthy, but this is the proudest 3D piece that I've done, even though it took me a mere... 7 hours... to complete it. I may or may not have forgotten to blink during the process of completing this Herc rig. Nevertheless, I like it!




Added a little flair to this little rig, didn't I?

And that wraps some of the basics of 3D up for the first study block! I'll most probably go back and work on the basics as the foundations are really important.

Have a nice day!

After the attempt on Monty's jazzy walk, this week's task was to play around with a rig called Mery! I thought we had to do only one pose, but in face, we had to do 6 key poses with the Mery rig. Honestly, compared to the Monty task... this was so much easier and so much fun.


Brief through:

1) I referenced a picture of a figurine that was holding an umbrella. I'll just put out a guess and say that the figurine was probably trying to touch rain or something.

2) This pose definitely reminded me of The Exorcist. I still laugh so much at that scene, it's great.

3) Mery's attempt at tai-chi, reaching for the inner peace within herself... kidding. Just fooling around with tai-chi, as you do.




Brief through:

1) Mery portraying a posh boss of a big company. You know what I'm most happy about of this picture? Not the pose, but the squashed ball. (Yes, I'm weird.)

2) Mery trying to be an airplane, probably to some kids at the nursery.

3) "WHY?!" (basically what my friend described this pose to be.) This is Mery expressing "why don't you love me" to an imaginary floofy doggo.



I tried referring to some pictures for these 3 sitting ones, but I ended up just messing around with the rig and creating my own poses. Georg did recommend to do some sitting poses instead of all of them being standing poses.

Overall, this post has given you insight to what goes on in my mind while doing random key poses after a huge intake of caffeine and sugar. Classic animation student I am.

Hopefully Mery's poses have entertained you in some way.

Have a nice day!

ATTACK OF THE PUGGO!:
Now that I've gained your attention with a mischievous pug, a.k.a., mission accomplished! Today's post is going to be about water splashes. Ta-da!

Just imagine those bottles of shampoo/soap that the puggo went super ruff at plopping into the tub full of water. What happens? The water goes splash.

Before I actually started animating it on TVPaint, I did some sketches for it.



So, here's my attempt at making an animated splash:



To be honest, this is my proudest work out of all my 2D stuffs because:
1) look how smooth the animation looks
2) the colour scheme


I felt that the little blobs of droplets of water were the ones that made the splash seem more of a splash. Without it, it's just some weird jelly sculpture that's floating on some blue blob of stuff. I'm really, really, really, really, really happy with how this turned out!

Have a nice day!

Here we go again with a weekly task in 3D!! Much excitement (I'm kidding). It just gets trickier and trickier, week after week. Well, in the previous week, we had to animate a fox rig jumping about with the effect of 'overlap and follow through'. This week however... we had to animate a Mike Wazowski doppelganger (also known as Monty) walking. -cues dramatic music-

I'll be really honest with you, this took me such a darn long time to animate. You know why? Cause every single time I tried animating Mr Monty here, he ends up doing a very terrible skiing movement that is very nonhuman-like (not like Monty is a human, but I'm not assuming his species).

Here you go, and I hope you like the end bit:



It definitely looks like Monty is doing a forced gravitational walk in an anti-gravitational space. Nevertheless, I liked that little touch of sass of walk confidence that I added at the end. Overall, I felt this was a much higher improvement that I've made over the other Montys that I animated the walk (or slide) for. This actually looked like a walk! -sprinkles confetti of pride over achieved task-



Have a nice day!

I personally feel that stop-motion requires more time and effort into making just one second of footage work well. Taking into account that it took me at least half an hour just to check the armature of the puppets, tightening and loosening the joints to make sure it will work properly for a single action.

I'm not gonna lie, but the puppets have started to become a little... well, not in a very good shape as probably it has been shared amongst so many students and that it has been used for the last decade or so.

The toe touch that we did before this exercise was just on level 1 of things. Stop-framing a throw however, is not level 1 nor 2, but it's definitely level 3. We had to put in some anticipation, followed by a follow-through, just to make the action believable.

Here we go:




I am just gonna be straight up honest and tell you that this is one of my most disappointing attempt at a throw and I definitely am going to re-do it because did you even see the start of it? IT WAS PAINFULLY JERKY AND SLOW.

I'll tell you one thing that I like though: it's the last bit where she looks at how far the ball went– that went smoothly.

Have a nice day!

I've always been hearing people talk about walk cycles, blablabla. In my opinion, walk cycles are also a main bit in animation because you can determine or recognise a certain character or their emotions just by their walk itself. If you look hard enough, every single one of us has a specific walk cycle when we're at ease or when we're tired. No one walk cycle is the exact same, unless you're clones or some sort.

Here's my little man doing a walk.



Before even animating a walk cycle, I didn't even know that our heads would bob up and down. I doubt anyone ever notices it when you're constantly walking all the time– until you have to animate it. This particular walk cycle took me a massively insane amount of time, I have no idea why.

Also, I really love the colours that I've used in this walk cycle. Pastel colours are the best!

Have a nice day!

Going into stop-motion classes in the beginning of the term was more of constantly asking ourselves on when will we be actually having hands on sessions with the puppets. Soon, our prayers have been answered. Not gonna lie, the puppets for us beginners were a little creepy looking... but, hey, who doesn't love a creepy looking puppet? Maybe for some people, but I definitely liked how quirky looking they all were.

So, the first task we had to do was to do a toe touch.


Unlike the talented Patrick, the puppets aren't as flexible as this starfish. To be honest, I was pretty nervous when it came to handling the puppet as I didn't want to break it at my first attempt. I mean, how much of a bad luck would that be?

There we go:



This was actually my second attempt. I definitely didn't like how the puppet ended up tilted a little sideways when she was getting back up from the toe touch. What I'm really proud of was the attention to the detail of the hair. (hehehe). This got me excited for more stop-motion exercises, to experiment around with the puppets!

Have a wonderful day!

It's a weekly thing of me going into a 3D session trying to process whatever that is going on in the big screen. After the session, I leave the studio with a head full of positivity of "I-so-know-how-to-do-it-and-I-can't-wait-to-animate-it-later". Then when the time comes for me to sit down and actually start up Maya to animate the rigs... that's when I feel like a fish out of water.

This time, we learnt about overlap and follow through. During the session, we did a trial run on making a tail have that overlap and follow through effect when it swooshes from side to side. As a task, we were given a very adorable rig to animate with. We had to make it jump onto some polygons, while having the application of 'overlap and follow through'.

So, here goes my attempt of making a fox hop onto a block.



Oddly enough, I found this exercise much easier and exciting than the others. Maybe it's because we had a real character rig to play around with after all the exercises of squishing and stretching balls. I definitely liked my timing on this exercise as it seemed smooth. I will point out that my fox's tail didn't feel like a tail but more of a swooshing of a sting. I mean, who said foxes can't have stings instead of tails?

Have a nice day!

I like how animation is a medium that manages to catch the tiniest details and bring it to life. For example, a head turn. I mean, come to think of it, we turn our heads on a daily basis, watch cartoons where most head turns happen as well. When it comes to animating them, it just gets broken down into parts.

What I really liked about this exercise was that we could design our own characters, which was cool. This exercise also showed that arcs were very useful as our head 'dips' down a little while we turn our heads. And if you were trying to turn your head several times after that sentence to test whether that statement is true or not... you deserve a star sticker!




Trust me when I say that this took me at least a solid three hours to do. One thing that I struggled the MOST was trying to keep my character looking consistent. As you can see from the video, my bug eyed human bean definitely looks different in each keyframe, which annoys me a whole lot. Definitely have to work on my consistency, or maybe do sketches of the character from different angles first before actually animating it.

LATEST ATTEMPT: <click here to view>

Until the next time- have a nice day!

As animators, we are living, breathing, walking video cameras with an ability to analyse things. We have an eye to observe how different people walk, express themselves, or even observe nature, like how the wind has effect on trees. So, what do we do with that information? We process it and then we animate it (if we can). Even itty bitty details like animating a balloon falling will bring a certain animation to life.

"Animating a balloon? Hah! Easy peasy!" -coughs- Well, I can honestly tell you, it's not a one hit wonder for me to animate a balloon floating down in stop-motion.




I definitely had fun modeling the balloon out of plasticine (I'm still keeping it). Basically, animating a balloon floating down is like animating several pendulums in an entire sequence. I had a struggle trying to get the timings right in the first place but after observing a balloon falling, which we had one for experimentation sessions in the studio, and also watching videos of balloons falling, it pretty much gave me an idea of how a balloon should realistically float downwards and have that little bounce at the end when it hits the ground.

Another exercise that was completely different to the balloon exercise is actually animating a heavy ball. I chose a cannonball and this is how it came out to be:



Even this took me several tries, but thanks to the power of the internet and the loop button on the keypad, you get to see mistakes clearly after several rounds of replaying.

Until then, have a nice day!

Maya has always been a challenge for me, to be honest. All the curves and keys and things you have to click? But after you get the gist of it, everything is fine... until the next exercise. (plays dramatic music)

So, under the theme of "squash-and-stretch", we were asked to animate a bouncing ball in a room in Maya. Sounds easy, doesn't it? It's just key framing the bounces, then squashing the ball afterwards, right? Easy peasy!!


Here's my very terrible attempt at trying to make a ball not look like a faulty-produced ball that's bouncing about.




I would say, I like the end bit where the ball has a light bounce and then stops. To me, that actually seems like a genuine bounce. The starting bit however, it was kind of jerky. Again, I might say it's an issue with the timing that I've set, or maybe it was way over-squashed.

Have a nice day!

So, what comes next after drawing tons and tons of circular objects? Boxed humans. Technically, it's a lot easier to draw the forms as simple as it is to get the action right- before drawing complex things like an actual realistic human being. After all, if the foundation is weak... not much bibbidi-bobbidi-boo can happen.

Before actually doing some digital magic on TVPaint, I drew out some sketches of how the box man should look like during each key frame of the leap. One thing I noticed was that, when we had to build up the anticipation of the character before the tiny jump, I had absolutely no trouble drawing my purple human box looking to the right, but I had a weird trouble with drawing it looking to the left.

If you've seen me constantly doing a weird thing in the studio a.k.a. turning my body left and right like some chicken doing a weird dance, that was me trying to get a sense of how the character should turn to the left and right... accurately.

Anyway-

Here's my little purple human box taking a leap of faith over a very non-existential gap. Originally, I drew expressions onto it but I removed it since the main point of this exercise was to look at the squash and stretch of the block form of a human while it's acting out certain stuffs like jumping.


Is it just me or do the colours look aesthetically pleasing to the eye? Again, I definitely screwed up on the timing. If it got slowed down a little, it would be perfect. However, I'm happy with the anticipation and reaction of my little purple being.

Have a nice day!

I've loved stop-motion since about a year ago when I was working on a stop-motion project with a group of my course mates in our foundation year. It sort of came about when the final edit was completed and we viewed it the entire video together with our lecturer and also with course mates from the entire year of that foundation course.

[-sneaks in a little self-promo-]
Not gonna lie, the process was tedious, tiring and frustrating, especially when you look through each frame and find that you should have added another frame in, and you had to try to mimic the set-up just to get that extra shot, in order for things to look more smooth-sailing.

[That plane is me/the entire project when one frame goes wrong.]

I thought we'd be able to mess around with puppets on our first assignment, but we had to do two stop-motion tasks of two pendulums instead. I guess, the foundation/basics are always more important before heading towards the big stuffs.

Here we go:

1) Free swinging pendulum:


2) Mechanical pendulum (a.k.a. in a grandfather clock):

I made a silly mistake of forgetting to bring my USB flash drive to class as I really wanted Ann to give some feedback on the pendulum swings. Overall, I found that being able to use the stop-motion bay with the right equipment and not having to rely on your phone being tied onto a block of wood, it's a great feeling. 
I like how we had to analyse grandfather clocks through videos as the free swinging pendulums can be found anywhere in the Internet universe. Thanks to <Jamie>, who shared with me a particular video which showed the movement of the pendulum in a grandfather clock. I can't seem to locate it in the YouTube-sphere... sorry about that! On a bright side of things, it gave me an insight as to how wide the points were to be apart of each other within each frame.

Have a nice day!

Ah, the 21st century filled with never-ending technology goodness and more empty pockets. I feel like most first year students would agree with me that we were all pretty excited to test out the giant Wacom Cintiq that the university has a few of in studios. [P.S.: IT IS GREAT!]

Before our first practice session on 2D, our lecturer gave us some links to learn TVPaint's interface before the practice session commenced on that week. I couldn't go through the entirety of <this video> because the voiceover was way too difficult to understand. He also told us to watch another <video> which was documented by Aaron Blaise (he used to work as an animator/supervising animator on 'Mulan', 'Pocahontas', 'The Lion King', and more) which gives us a quick start overview on TVPaint 11, and yes, I went through the entire 54 minutes of it.

After our first 2D practice session with Georg, we were given two tasks:
1) animate a bouncing ball (with no squash and stretch), following arcs.
2) animate a bouncing ball bouncing around a 3D room (with no squash and stretch)

So... here goes:

1) Bouncing ball with arcs (no squash and stretch):


2) Bouncing ball bouncing around a 3D room (no squash and stretch -internally screaming-):


Until the next bouncing ball assignment then!

Have a lovely day!

*whispers*: 3D Animation.
-world goes into chaos-

That kinda-sorta-maybe happened in my head when I realised I had to learn to animate in 3D. I mean, maybe it's just me– but, when someone requests for a flat drawing, it's easy. When they request for something to be drawn in 3-dimensional, that's when walls have holes in them and floors get flooded with tears.

Okay, for a second there I made it sound really awful, didn't I? The great thing about Falmouth University is that they actually teach you from scratch, which is fantastic (especially for me)! It didn't matter if you had top notch experience with 3D softwares or even better– if you have zero experience at all.

Before the practice session began, Georg gave us some links to some tutorials to learn about the Maya interface beforehand to save time on the practice sessions. The video that I found really helpful was on <Lynda> and it's a video called 'Maya 2017 Essential Training' by George Maestri. I can't seem to link the entire video here, but if you have access to Lynda, do try checking that video out. Apparently, the video didn't really appeal to some people that I talked about it to but for me, I felt really at ease George Maestri did the voiceovers as he explained the steps along with the interface rather clearly. Adding to that, the transcript section that is placed below the video helped in catching up with some of the stuffs that I've missed from the video.

So, when we had our very first 3D practice session with Georg, I was pretty excited. Why? Partly because I was going to learn something very new and also possibly try to appreciate the existence of 3D models that people go through lengths to create. Also, seeing a few third years making such complex and detailed 3D human models on the Cintiq in the studios make me wonder if I'll ever get to that stage of appreciating 3D modelling that much.

Anyway! Our first task was to animate two bouncing balls. One of which was the bounce of a light ball and the other was the bounce of a heavy ball. Here goes:


It seemed alright when I completed it at that time (which was about a week ago). Now, looking back at the video, the ball doesn't really feel like a ball, if you get what I mean. It feels like a floating balloon that has been forced to act like a ball.

I seem to have a problem with giving bouncing balls their natural rhythm, which to me, makes it very odd-looking. It's probably to do with the timing... I wonder. I'll have to do some test runs until I eventually get that Eureka moment. Until then,



Heavy ball bounce:


Definitely feels much better than my first attempt! So, so happy with this.

Have a nice day!

This has been long overdue (by long overdue, I actually meant like a week overdue), but we had a lecture on the module of Animation Principles a week ago. At the end of the session, our lecturer with his funky boots, Georg, told us to take some footage of us tossing any ball (ping-pong ball, tennis ball, basketball, etc..) and watch it frame by frame in Adobe Premiere Pro.

We were told to look at the distance that the ball has moved in between frames and also the timing of the bouncing ball. From there, we also were encouraged to look at the arcs that have been formed from the bouncing movement.

My friends and I recorded ourselves throwing a ping-pong ball on the table at the library (ooh, what rebels) and later used the rotoscoping method on Photoshop. Needless to say, I spent a good five hours sat at the studio trying to rotoscope 198 frames and the result was... okay, I guess? You can be the judge of that. In my personal opinion, I could have done better at the rotoscoping part of the video.

Here we go:


I know it's fairly unpolished and somewhat jerky, or you may have thought you wasted 13 seconds of your life. Guess what? Think of the beautiful arcs you have witnessed– it isn't all thaaaat bad, right?

I'd never thought I would actually be sat in the studio using the ellipse tool, tracing over a ping-pong ball, following it through 198 frames. There's always a first time, right? On that note, thanks to <this> tutorial that I found on YouTube, I managed to get through the entire process of rotoscoping with Photoshop without physically smashing my head on the table.

Another video that we were told to try out and observe the movements was the walking human. My friends and I filmed each other walking around the library past midnight... let's just say that I hope the video never lands on anybody's hands.

Have a nice day!

The following 12 principles of animation were introduced by the 'old men' of Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s and later printed in their book called, "The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation" in 1981.

So, the 12 principles are as follows:

• Squash and stretch
• Anticipation
• Staging
• Straight ahead and pose-to-pose
• Follow through and overlapping action
• Slow-in and slow-out
• Arcs
• Secondary action
• Timing
• Exaggeration
• Solid drawing
• Appeal

Here's a little clip that I came across while looking at some materials online. Italian illustrator, <Cento Lodigiani>, created this clip to help people further understand the topic of the 12 principles of animation by applying it to a very simple subject a.k.a., a cube.





In my personal opinion, almost all of the principles that have been listed out above give a certain breath of life towards animation. I definitely disagree on having 'appeal' as part of the list as different strokes for different folks. Having the idea of making sure everything is aesthetically appealing is somehow narrow-minded as most media nowadays be it animation, music videos or even paintings in general, rely on strange or even grotesque art forms to portray a certain setting or mood.

One of which would be the Czech surrealist filmmaker and artist, Jan Švankmajer, who directed an animated short film called "Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti Dialogu)", which is split into three parts:

1) Eternal conversation (Dialog věcný):
- Arcimboldo-like heads reducing themselves from large complicated objects into finely-chopped copies of themselves.

2) Passionate discourse (Dialog vášnivý):
- A clay man and clay woman dissolving into one another sexually, then quarrel then reducing themselves into some sort of clay mess.

3) Exhaustive discussion (Dialog vyčerpávající):
- Two elderly playheads extrude various objects on their tongues (toothbrush and toothpaste, shoes and shoelaces, pencil and sharpener etc..) and mixes them in various... odd combinations.




To wrap things up, I would say that new mediums have arisen since the era of when "The 12 Principles of Animation" was introduced. Alongside with new mediums, new rules are formed. Also, with us living in the 21st century, rules are made to be broken– hence, animated films are continuing to push boundaries into new territory (which, if I might add, is awesome).

Have a nice day!

Hello! Welcome to my first ever animation-slash-art-slash-university blog. This blog has been created to follow up with the daily progress that I have and am about to make as an Animation & Visual Effects student at Falmouth University.
theanimatingpanda is no doubt a work in progress, so, I sincerely apologise for whatsoever mistakes that I am about to make. I would very much like to make this blog a little more personal, such as just posting things that have inspired me or maybe some personal work along the way.






Well... that's it for now when it comes to theanimatingpanda! Enjoy the journeys of the animating panda!