Creature Performance Animatic

The other part of my personal project is the creature performance. As I said in my previous post that I have decided to use the Doberman dog rig/model. For this piece of animation performance, it will include the dog doing a walk cycle for a good 5-8 seconds. 

Then when the camera has completed a 360 turnaround of the Doberman dog walk cycle, a tennis ball bounces into the scene and the dog notices it and starts to chase it. The ball bounces towards the edge and bounces down a level and the Doberman dog jumps down and then starts to run after the bouncing ball. Here are all three of the animatics separately so I just need to work out how the in between will look like before I go into production stage.

1. Dog walk cycle.

2. Dog Jumps down

3. The Run 

Since it's that time of the year coming up, I will need to schedule my work load to finish off the other animatics for my collaborative projects. Which I will do over the holidays. 

 

Animatics for my Dialogue Pieces

Here are the final animatics for the two dialogue pieces. I'm really not a fan of doing animatics but the more practice I should improve my drawing skills.

1. Animatic for the 'Santa's Coming' Dialogue piece.

2. Here is the animatic for the 'Fail Big' dialogue piece. In the end with this animatic I had to rush it a little as I was really stuck on what animation piece to do with this dialogue. But hopefully it will be a good piece, but I will find out when I get started on the production stage.

Well that's it for now, I will now move onto doing animatics for my creature performance which I will be using a Doberman dog from a free on line source.

Dual Dialogue Clips

Finally! I have chosen my two dialogue clips for my personal projects for uni. For my Major Projects for my final year I have to around 80 seconds of animation. There are two sections of the project and those are Personal and Collaboration. I have chosen to split the 80 seconds into 2 parts. 40 seconds for personal and 40 seconds for collaborative.

For my personal project I have chosen 2 audio clips for my animation. First clip is from the film Elf, here is the audio. Santa's Coming - Elf  (It's the first 12 seconds) and the second audio clip is from the film Elizabethtown. Can't really find an exact clip from the film but it will be posted soon within the animatic. Now that I have got my audio clips chosen, I will now see what ideas I can come up with and hopefully post them up in a couple of days.

Cat Chase Project Animatic Update

So today I found out that the animatic for this project has slightly changed. It has been extended by a couple of shots. Nothing too major and that it has not effected any of the shots I have chosen. But since it has been extended by a couple of shots, I decided to take on animating another shot. The reason I decided to take on another shot is because I can recycle parts of the animation I will do in shot_01 and use it for shot_6 which is labelled in the animatic at the moment. This was just a small update on the Cat Chase and here is the updated animatic from the director.

Project Dance LAVS

Today we spent most of the afternoon recording LAVS (live action videos) for reference for Project Dance. Lets just say we all had fun recording ourselves, acting out the scenes so we can use them as references for pre-production and production. These will be the shots I have chosen to animate for this project.

The first shot I will be animating on is the slap scene.

The second shot is the dance scene.

I am very excited and nervous about animating the dance scene. The reason for this is because I have never animated two characters dancing. Even though the pace of the dance is slow, it will still be a challenge in which I am looking forward to.

Cat Chase Pre-Production Animatic

Today I managed to get some animatics done for some of the shots. These are only really, really rough ones as my drawing skills are still in need of improving big time.

Well we have scene from shot_04

Scene from shot_02

Scene from shot_01 Cat run cycle

Scene from shot_01 policeman run cycle

These animatics have been very roughly drawn to get the idea of how the characters in the scene will roughly look like, animation wise. I have also been given the production schedule for this project and I will try and see if it will fit nicely into my schedule. That there are no collisions with my other projects that I have going on. 

Cat Chase Pre-Production Research

Just an update from my last post for the Cat Chase Project. Today I have only collected research and I have yet to start doing rough animatics for my shots. But here are some of the research that I have collected for me to use in my pre-production and in my production stage.

Here are some internet images of cats in various jumping poses and angles. This will help be get a better understanding of how their body is positioned and structured when producing sketches and animatic for my shots. As well helpful when it comes to the production stage.

As well as collecting images I have also found videos from Youtube that will help me reference wise with Shot_04.

The drifting of the cats will help me get an idea on how they turn corners when they are running. Also the way the cats turn and are sliding across the floor gives it that cartoon look and style which is very helpful reference. Here are more videos that will also be helpful.

The next blog update for this project I should have by then a few rough animatics to show.

Cat Chase Project Director's Animatic

Today I have received the first rough animatic for one of the two collaboration projects that I will be working on throughout my 3rd year final major project. This project is called Cat Chase Project. I will be an animator on this project and will have 3 shots to animate. Here is the animatic for the Cat Chase piece;

I will be working with a small team who are mainly 3rd years that who are my course friends and know very well, We have 

• Alistair Hopkins - Director/Animator
• Natalie Knight - Generalist
• John Benson - Generalist
• Julia Britton - Artist
• Me - Animator

In this project I will be animating these 3 shots shown below;

Shot_01

Shot_02

Shot_04

These are the shots that I have chosen to animate on and I am looking forward to start animating on this project. The style of animation for this project is about it being cartoon style. More exaggerated and stretch poses/animation, it'll be the first time I'll be animating in a cartoon style so hopefully it'll go well.

Now I will go away and start my pre-production for this project by doing some research and some sketches and animatics for my shots. The next update for this project will hopefully have all the research/sketches/animatics ready to show.