More Life Drawing

About one year ago my busy life got a lot busier. In between then and now I wrote two parts of an intended 5 part tutorial on walk cycles which became quite popular at this site, got promoted to the lead position in my department, and held down my old job while simultaneously working my new job.

I am not about to claim that all of this has all been accomplished in top form. I will claim that I am still standing.

Something that I have managed to do is continue with life drawing studies thanks to the Fine Arts department at my school.

5-Minute Walk Cycle

Behold the power of the black Sharpie marker.

I needed to demo capturing into Flipbook for a student yesterday. It was an opportunity to show how fast and easy Flipbook is at timing out your work. One problem, I didn't have any hand drawn animation with me, and worse, no punched paper.

So, in about one minute, I improvised an alternative registration system and five minutes after that I had a sequence of drawings created with a black, fine point Sharpie on scrap paper. I think that's the shortest amount of time I've ever used to create a walk cycle.

-e

Quick Pencil Test

Just playing around with various 2D capture setups at home. I decided to animate something, and unlike what I have been preaching for a while, I decided to just improvise and see what came up.














A little improvised waiting sequence with change of focus at the end.

I have a little reversal here. I'm playing with how to keep a simple pose alive while making sure that the small repetitive head scratch has a little texture.

I know its only a quick, rough pencil test but boy do I need to get back into life drawing sessions.

-e

Neglect

image "borrowed" from this photo log created by someone named Jeff.

It's only been since Friday that I posted most recently and yet I feel as though I have neglected this blog. Strange.

I've been spending way too much time hanging out on other people's blogs, making a complete and utter nuisance of myself... opinionatedness all over the place. Soon there will be installment two of Beautiful Silhouettes and I have several other posts in the works.

In the meantime for you fellow history lovers check out:

Beautiful Silhouettes, part 1 regarding the early work of Lotte Reiniger.

Or check out the small but fascinating online archive of Ken Harris' work.

Or take a trip in the way-back-machine to watch a cool sample of Buster Keaton's work and read some thoughts on learning from this master of movement and performance.

For those of you curious about my work:

We have glacial movement in my acting performance work.

Some performance improvement through a good critique that forces the issue of timing and spacing.

Some animation tests geared towards what I teach.

And completion of my second animation test for the same.

Or just some life drawing examples from this spring.


And definitely check out this awesome "video" tutorial on the meaning of COPYRIGHT and fair use put together by Eric Faden.


All of my commenting on other peoples blogs seems to be driving more people to this location. I'm getting hits from places like Brazil, England, Germany, France, India, Romania, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Japan just to name a few. Thank you to everyone who bothers to stop by and check out this spot. Very flattering to think in what distant locations my musing are traveling. Stay tuned. I have plenty more to come including more samples of my own work current and past.

-e

Test Jump

Well, I've done a little polishing on my test jump exercise using the 'aniBody' rig with which I've been tinkering. The movement is about as good as it is going to get considering that I'm using a bare-bones FK Spine setup. The arcs are working to my satisfaction and I have developed all the required elements of anticipation, action, reaction with a minimum of effort. It is no great achievement for the art of animation... just an exercise.

If I am proud of anything it is how quickly this came together and how well organized the work has been while it progressed. Accept of my students, I won't bother anyone with what the Dope Sheet editor or the Graph Editor look like for this example but it is something worth geeking out over for you Maya users. Very clean and organized.

Speaking of organized keyframe animation...











On the subject of process/technology versus art/animation there has been a great series of articles posted by Keith Lango. Check out The Fool's Errand, part 1, The Fool's Errand, part 2, The Fool's Errand, part 3. In this series Lango describes in heart breaking detail an ill-fated adventure he took into producing a personal animated short. Lots of great discussion in the comments as well.

Ok, that's it for now. Lot's of big, scary stuff to get started on.

-e

Rigging Anybody?

I have been working on a template character for teaching the fundamentals of rigging *and* the fundamentals of animation in a course I'm likely to be teaching this fall. I don't yet know how much I'm going to need to cover in terms of basics, although I'm pretty certain that these students know at least a little about animation. More on that later.

Here is the segmented version of the character. I call him/her/it aniBody.



















aniBody borrows some important concepts from other rigs designed for teaching students the fundamentals of animation. Primarily, I am pulling from the folks at Animation Mentor who provide their students with 1) a bouncing ball w/tail rig named Taylor 2) a walking-ball rig, 3) a segmented character named Stewie, as well as 4) a high-res Stewie setup which is a complete single mesh character.

Animation Mentor is an 'animation only' online school that is pretty much kicking asses and taking names on the subject of teaching character animation. Any college program of animation instruction that does not pay close attention to what Animation Mentor teaches is most likely cheating their students and probably headed for folly. But, like I stated, they teach character animation only (which is a lot) but nothing else that relates to the subject of character animation.

In my personal opinion, the majority of college programs teaching in animation should not be 'animation only' in their curriculum. If they were, who would write stories? board said stories? design characters? model and texture said characters? rig said characters? model environments? texture and light said environments? create special effects? render? composite? and so on... ?

...you get my point. Animation Mentor absolutely depends on there being other types of schools out there that are more comprehensive in terms of curriculum. AM graduates would have nothing to animate if it weren't for the other animation programs out there.

But, getting back to the subject... aniBody.

The design of aniBody uses some of the ideas behind setups such as those provided by Animation Mentor with a few basic differences; 1) aniBody is intended to serve as a basic model for learning rigging as well 2) aniBody is intended to be rigged and animated in stages: first hips/legs as in walking ball, then add spine/head, and finally entire character including face arms and hands 3) aniBody does not have cartoony proportions exaggerated such as Stewie's scary, over sized eyeballs and 4) aniBody is designed so that students can swap out the original head with their own designs if they choose to do so at a later time.

Rigging can be very tedious and unrewarding process for students who are not inclined to pursue the subject further. This character rig-and-animate approach is intended to give all students quicker rewards by allowing them to animate between stages of rigging. It is also designed to introduce the complexities of animating in gradual increments. A full-on character animation class (or two, or three, or... ) should follow with no time spent on such technical matters.

I do what I teach pure-and-simple. If I teach others to rig, I rig. If I teach others to animate... its because I animate. Anyone pushing the idiotic thesis that those who can do, and those who can't teach is itching for a ugly encounter with me.

You can't teach others what you don't do... therefore, I do and I teach.

Below are a few of my resent test run-thrus for rigging *and* animating. First, the hips/legs setup with a generic walk-cycle:


click to play

It's basic and it works. And then after rigging the spine, neck, and head I created a simple jump exercise:


click to play

The animation above is only in a rough-blocking stage... currently this sequence is in linear tangents (for those who care) and has been animated primarily on '2s'. With only a few hours in creation it still needs work, but I'll polish this one later. Meanwhile something funny happened when preparing this for my blog.

For those who think people familiar with the complexities of 3D rigging are lacking in artistic sensibilities, here is something that spawned from the creation of this post. While rendering the stills above with a little After Effects trickery I noticed something familiar. The still for my generic walk-cycle looked like Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp.
























And then I noticed that my jump exercise vaguely resembled the effect used by the masterful experimental animator Norman McLaren in his work Pas de Deux. Along with George Dunning and Grant Munro, the work of Norman McLaren has served as inspiration to me in the past so I decided to render out what I had. Its not brilliant, but it gives me ideas.


click to play

In the mean time, for those who mistake art for not knowing how to make things work, watch what a truly masterful command of technical matters can produce.



I know, it looks more like film making and compositing than it does animation. First of all, animation is film making; and second of all, there was a time before contemporary digital compositing techniques when this kind of work easily fit in the category of experimental animation. Besides, aren't contemporary, digital compositors working primarily in the animation industry?

Hope you find this as amazing as do I. Meanwhile I'm going to continue working on my rigging so that I have a complete version of aniBody for the next test animation.

-e

Timing and Spacing

"Animation, it's all in the timing and the spacing."

I read that passage in The Animator's Survival Kit years ago. Richard Williams was quoting Grim Natwick (pictured above), former Fleischer/Disney/Fleischer/UPA animator and "officially" uncredited designer of Betty Boop. It all seemed so clear when I read it years ago. I preach this approach to my students constantly because its what I strive to practice in my own work. After my Glacial Movement post I received a critique from Kate. She had a problem with my revised blocking example.

After playing it over and over she decided that the problem was about three and a half seconds in, during the transition between when the character finishes describing his body being a vehicle for his brain and what kind of ride that vehicle should provide. Its a setup for the punch line about his brain deserving a smooth, luxurious ride. According to Kate I have him moving too much (i. e. continuously) between the setup and the punch line and therefore watering down the effect of both. Instead she stated I should hold on the moment when he states, "...caries my brain around." This would help emphasise what quality of ride his brain deserves. Much texting back and forth ensued. She was on to something, and yet her advise was to change something I believed was communicating an essential quality in my character; the position of his hands and head as he has made his initial remark about the relationship of brain to body:

brain = a truly glorious thing















body = mere device towards which he doesn't feel connected















I spent a lot of time acting this piece out until I felt comfortable with the attitude behind the character's statements. I then constructed for myself this persons psychology/world view. I ask myself, 'what attitude justifies this kind of statement being made in this manner?' Thumb-nailing for me is an early stage of design that is partially based on my own movement and performance, and partially based on crafting a pleasing performance with animation technique; line-of-action, flow lines, staging, counter angles, arcs, overlapping action, squash and stretch, and the list goes on. Its a tricky balance. While I have a serious soft spot for experimental animation, I strive not to animate by accident. In my character work, things are where then are for a reason... usually a combination of reasons. This attitude about craft and creativity has been with me a long time and was partially honed while working in graphic design. Kate was now stopping around on my good efforts and telling me not to be so "mechanical" in my approach. The problem wasn't mechanics... the problem was balancing her legitimate observations with all the other things I figured out about this performance so far.

So, how do I preserve a single pose I believe is working when it is watering down my animation? In comes the Dope Sheet Editor to the rescue...















In my best attempts to use Kate's advise regrading a hold between the setup and the punch line, I found that a simple change in timing gave me a lot of what was needed. Then I noticed that my arcs were off, and so I started tweaking the spacing of the hand movements leading up to the pose in question (pictured above). I added a slight settle to help ease into the pose since I'm hitting it faster, while concentrating on the movement of the nose through the gesture, into the pose, and then the settle. And what do you know?... the settle adds more appropriate attitude. I then made another slight fix in timing by speeding up the flicking gesture he makes out of the top of his head on, "...and my brain". Previously, I had the accent on the vowel in "brain", now it happens before "brain" providing a stronger, 'felt' accent on the word. All of this came together very quickly and I feel much better about moving forward with this piece. And this is the first direct experience I've had with improving the emotional performance with small changes in timing and spacing. For comparison the newly re-timed version as opposed to the earlier version that lacked adequate separation between setup and punch line.

"Animation, it's all in the timing and the spacing."

Thanks Grim. Thanks Kate.

-e

PS. For more on Grim Natwick here he is interviewed by David Johnson.

Glacial Movement

I've returned to working my two current and unfinished animation projects lately. The first is a heavy lift that I needed some expert advice regarding the technical aspects of competitive power lifting. That project appears to be back on track. The other pictured above is a dialog (or rather monologue) piece that I started 6 months ago and then put aside.

I'm still at a very rough blocking stage with this one and I am working on adding a few more subtle movements, trying to add some counter movement, small timing fixes, and cleaning up my arcs. The gestures around "my body is just a vehicle..." are still too big and sloppy.

Audio is John Lithgow from 3rd Rock from the Sun and the character model/setup is called Alfred created by, or rather adapted by, Rodri Torres from the Lowman rig by Miguel G. Viñe.

Post a comment if you care to and tell me what it needs.

-e