Maya Block Interaction

I did the maya animation of the block interaction, the idea beginning that a small cube is like the baby and the bigger cube is a parent. They are walking next to each other and the small cube is getting tired so the big cube gives it a piggyback ride.

I found using the scale tool was easy and the overall animation was simple, I am planning to do this in stop motion on Wednesday. I have already created the bar sheet for this.

Update :

I have now done the stop motion of this, I found that I had to change the jumping to tilting as I have no way to make the cube jump at this stage. The hardest part of the animation was making the cubes rotate as they moved as the rotation made them move further away from each other. I have noted that you can noticed this as well as a singe frame that is out of place when the cube it tilting.

Update:

I presented my interaction animation to the class and the story behind the interaction was guessed immediately so I think that I connoted the story successfully.

Making of Character

I have completed the turn around of my demon character. The basic backstory that I have so far is that because his lack of ‘demon-ness’ he is considered not a real demon and has been made the janitor, the lowest job in hell. He is the underdog of the story. I’d imagine his personality as a self-reliant and resilient. However, he would stride for something better to do with his life, he doesn’t want to be like the other demons. I think he could be for a younger audience but depending on what type of interactions he has, he could also be for a mature audience.

I haven’t chosen his name yet, but it will either be Stan, Damien or Nevil.

 

I did some colour variations as well.

Most of them as little colour changes but I also did a major colour change one but I think that makes it the character less demon-looking and so less fitting to the brief.

Animation 101

I have been experimenting with the spider rig in maya and have created a small animation. I just found it strange that it only had one pivot point, in the future I might add joints to the spider to make it move more independently and realistically.

Pixilation Animation

We did pixilation animation today, we split into teams of about 5 and got a camera to try to create our own pixilation animation, the captain of our group already had a plan. The basic idea of the plan was to have people crawl into a box and the box would be like a portal to the outside. This process reminds me of stop motion animation as you take frames to create an animation.

Here is some of the process images:

I had the job to record the processes of animation, here are some clips of the making.

This is the final outcome.

Overall I found this experience enjoyable as it has a level of humour and creativeness to it that makes it fun to do and watch. I have found other examples of pixilation animation. Here is one that is an advert for Amazon Kindle (Ithyle Griffiths, 2010).

Ithyle Griffiths (2010) Amazon Kindle Commercial 3 (official) . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6wWy9DwgPQ [accessed 26th October].

Animation Context Presentation

I presented my presentation of the phase ‘Double Bind’, along with the artwork I did with it. I think I did well as I explained it, gave examples, my own thoughts and the sources. It was kinda funny watching the other presentations, some of them presented more of a act. One instance was naming a square ‘Pete’, who was them killed.

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Intro to Making of

Today was my first lesson of making of, I had missed the last lesson of it so this was the first. We are making characters based on the theme ‘Demons and Devils’, previously the task that was set was to make a mood board and 10 thumbnails of characters to fit this. I did this to catch up while in the lesson. Now the task is to have a turnaround of the characters, with a animation turn as well. Here is the mood board I created.

Where I have circled is key areas I have taken to reference and take as inspiration. Horns are used to show the evil, the demonic nature of demons, we associate something with horns as being evil, so we recognised something as a demon when it has them. So I feel that my character need to have this characteristic. Also, I have noted that demons are mostly based on a human shape, some more than others, but others have them looking completely human. I thought that could actually be more terrifying, having a demon look enough human to blend in, so that you wouldn’t know?

Anyway these are the sketches I did from this,

The left side of the page is designs I would considered could have a younger audience rather than mature, they aren’t very graphic and are more comedy than scary. The character I want to develop more is the janitor design, I think it would be more unique of an idea form the demon characters.

Pendulum Attempt 2

Today we went through how to do the pendulum in Maya properly, learning that the way I did it before was inconvenient, that there is a much easier way. Moving the pivot point to the middle so that you only have to rotate one axis. The way I was doing it made it so I had to translate on the x and z which made the whole thing appear un-arch-like. Using this new technique I redid the Maya animation and I am more happy with this version.

 

Update :

I also did the pendulum in stop motion, I found this one harder as I couldn’t figure out a good way to use my ruler to make a smooth arch, however I think the motion is there even if the movement isn’t smooth.

Green Screen

To catch up on missed workshops I did the green screen workshop myself, to do this I created an animation which had a green screen in the background. I decided to create the animation in a 3D animation program called Source Film Maker using a character from a game, Overwatch which belongs to Blizzard. I created the animation and then using After Effects added a background from the game as well, finally adding an explosion effect that I got from Youtube, I also got the explosion sound effect from the Youtube Audio Library. In After Effects I used the Keying effect, selecting the green screen in the background and adding the background image into the composition, doing this again for the explosion clip and placing in the timeline along with the sound effect. In total, the animation took 4 hours to make.

In industry green screen in vastly used in film and animation, a good example of the use of green screen in a film on a massive scale is in The Avengers, (Movieclips Extras, 2013). Using green screen to make the actual landscape of New York, projecting CGI on the green screen. Filming this in real life would have cost much more and taken a lot longer.

Movieclips Extras (2013) The Avengers Featurette – Industrial Light & Magic (2012) – Joss Whedon Movie HD .  Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji3IDa0sewk [accessed 20th October].

Pendulum with Maya

I also tried to do the pendulum animation in Maya, I found this harder than the anticipation. Trying to get the motion of the curve was harder and fitting it down to a couple of seconds made it worse. Overall, I think this is a start. It has got the motions of the pendulum but I think that it’s too jerky, and to do this I think I need more frames too work with. I will ask the question if we can go over more than 4 seconds later in the week so that I can retry this.

Anticipation Animation

I have done the anticipation animation with Maya so that I can reference it for the stop motion I will do tomorrow. For the anticipation the cube rolls back twice, I did this so that I could test out having the cubes do rotations. Then the cube pulls back before shooting forward, coming to a abrupt halt and tilting forward with the follow through.

This is the bar sheet depicting what happens for each frame. 

And here is the actual animation.

I think this is a good attempt at anticipation and follow through, it’s not jerky and I tried to make the tilting accurate. If I were to do it again that’s the only thing I would work on.

Update:

I now have done this in stop motion. I found the anticipation animation very easy and did it very quick compared with the previous animations, the only problems I have with it is that the animation didn’t end up being centred in the shot and that I would make the sliding forward of the cube quicker.