Still on the job search since my layoff at the end of March. It’s been quite a rough year for animators! In service of that work seeking effort, I decided to make some quick blocking plus animations in an RPG gameplay style, to help attract attention and have more animation samples to show. These are not final polished samples. The idea was to get timing and energy figured out for these animations. I really like this Thor character! I’ll be implementing these animations into Unreal engine pretty sometime soon.
Polished a sweet little shot from 2018!
I’m a work in progress, and I want to always be learning about animation, no matter how far I advance in my career. May I always have a student’s eyes and heart! In the spirit of that, I decided to polish a shot that I am fond of from a 2018 Animation Collaborative class. At the time, I felt that I had a good story and clear acting, but it needed body mechanics polish and much more attention to the facial animation. I decided that I wanted to keep this shot in my demo reel, so I beefed up the exaggeration, the facial animation, the polish, and reworked some of the mechanics. The end result is something that I feel is much more refined, more true to the meaning of the shot!
Hero is Coming - A Run Cycle
I've wanted to animate the Marco rig from Animschool for a while, such an appealing rig. For this first test, I gave him a run cycle - the mood and action is that he is the hero, and is running to save a kid that is up in a burning building. I also wanted to try out a new workflow method to create this cycle. I like it. Did this run cycle in half the time that it normally takes me! Will be trying this out on some other action tests.
Sample "In-Game" action mock ups
I decided to create some physical gameplay-style actions as samples. The lower video is a punching jab, going from an idle loop animation, to punch, back to idle. For the upper video, I continued with my creating gameplay samples, creating a mockup for a 3-combo punch with rough visual effects. The animation is set up for easy review, and can also be easily switched to an implementation-ready state where engineers control the translation and timing of visual effects. These are not based on a real game.
"That's My Song!" Dance - and “Ew, so OLD!” - Getting Better at Layered Animation workflow!
I’ve had kind of a break from doing more full animation, but having come across this Miosha rig, I felt inspired again. I happened to be listening to this song when studying the rig, and I saw her dancing in my head and was compelled to animate that. I also decided to do the entire animation pretty much in a layered animation approach, and gosh did it work! I feel like I understand this workflow a lot better now, and getting good body mechanics and an overall “feeling” came to me much quicker. I had a lot of fun with this, and made this first pass in basically a quarter of the time it would have normally taken me. It was nice to see that I have gotten faster. More to come as I explore the layered animation approach. Watch with audio turned ON. The Dialogue animation went quicker for me as well. I think I am starting to like this layered approach!
More Body Mechanics exploration - Excited Jump - Blocking
I wanted to explore a bit more of a cartoony timing and posing here, so I decided to work on an excited jump. His neice has just won her competition. Stay tuned for the splining!
Honing my polishing skills!
After taking a course online at Animschool Winter 2022 term, and then later getting to work on a special IP with Origami Dollar ( I will post that work as soon as I am allowed), I realized that my polishing and posing got better. What a nice year of growth. So I decided to go back and polish this lip sync animation with my new skills. It feels much more organic to me and I can feel the polish. To learning!
Animschool Body Mechanics Winter 2022 work
I decided to take a class with AnimSchool this year, revisiting body mechanics to get a stronger foundation in weight, mechanics, timing and spacing. Instructor was the fantastic Masha Juergens. Here are the three assignments I did: a Run Jump, a Wall Climb Obtacle/Parkour, and a Dog Walk to learn quadruped locomotion. Throwing myself into the various challenges of the clas paid off as Animschool even made a post about my calling out my Obstacle Wall climb animation on their Twitter and Instagram feeds on Aprill 11th! Animschool Twitter Post
Playing with Tilt, Rhythm and Twist in my posing →
I recently took a class with Disney Feature’s Malcon Pierce focused on posing, and what an amazing class that was! He really broke down some concepts into manageable information, and I gotta say I learned a great deal, mind blown! Putting these tools and ideas into action, I started on a pose, then found some dialogue to test, and before I knew it, I started to envision a little moment and began to block it out. Here is that blocking. I’m having fun with this and to be honest, animating this is kinda letting out some of my own frustrations and steam!
Arrived at a Blocking Plus Work in progress I am happy about - Fearful Kid
For me, this shot has really been a true work in progress. I learned a great deal with this shot, especially with acting and performance, clarity, specificity, posing, timing/spacing, energy, phrasing, wrangling eye lines, weight, drawing. It took a lot of effort, frustration, trial and error to explore and finally uncover a performance that was genuine. As time passed, and the pandemic came, I lost a ton of motivation and artistic motivation. I almost didn’t come back to my shot, to be honest. Little by little though, i pulled myself together and came back to this shot. Things started to click more, and I could really get the animation in my head out and onto the screen to show us a scared boy, hiding, trying his best to make it out of this situation unharmed. It is a tense kind of animation that I do not normally create, and it was a refreshing and wonderful journey exploring this. I hope you enjoy the progress from initial exercise to full blow work in progress story shot, below.
Blocking Plus WIP:
Original Idea Exercise blocking:
Showtime Lipsync complete!
Here is he completed, and polished, version of this latest lip sync animation I worked on. This exercise proved to be a turning point for me - I had so many moments of clarity and discovery along the way, such as how muscles in the face fire and their specific timing and feeling, how to automatically get pretty good arcs by focusing on natural motion based on solid body mechanics, putting into play mouth lip sync lessons learned from a Chalk Talks workshop I took with Disney Feature’s Malcon Pierce, and in general, how to focus on the feeling of animation and energy, and sell it with my choices. I feel like I have set a new normal for myself, and can continue to learn and get better! I feel a lot more confident animating in 3D space now, and it will only get better and more specific!
Another lipsync in Stepped blocking - testing techniques and mouth shapes spacing/timing
Another lip sync practice as I work with mouth shapes and new techniques. I did not animate the body past the neck for this, focusing mostly on the mouth.
Lip Sync progression, new technique for me!
I have been spending some time working on specific exercises to help me tune my animation timing and spacing, and lip sync animation seemed to be a great way to do this, as I also am a little weak in my 3D lip sync skills. I am grateful to my instructor Malcon Pierce for teaching me a new method and things to consider when creating lip sync animation. In this example, I wanted to show a progression of my idea, from initial posing and jaw open/close timing and energy to a first pass blocking that shows my idea in full and the energy being clear. This is still not fully animated but I think the idea is coming across and it's been a great learning exercise!
8 Hour Challenge #1 - Kid Reaches For A Ball Or Toy
This was an 8 hour challenge that a wonderful animator friend of mine suggested we do, recently. The goal was to animate whatever we could get done in 8 hours, The animation had to be under 10 seconds, no dialogue, minimal set and props, with a camera change if needed to sell the idea. Additionally, we assigned each other’s theme, we did not chose our own. That made for really fresh and new and also allowed little time to obsess over the idea. Then we hit the ground running, blind, having to come up with a scenario, the acting, everything. 8 hours! In the end, this is what I chose for the theme of " Boy reaches for a ball or toy". The idea came together within minutes as I did some thumbnail sketching for ideas. Once I drew a kid cowering behind a sofa, it spoke to me as something to go after. Violence and danger is not usually what I animate, so it was refreshing to try something new. Yeah, there are a good many poses I could push, and a lot of small technical mistakes, but overall I feel happy with how this came out, and I may even finish it! Learned so much on this one!
Work process through Splines for Actor Emulation assignment - Anim Collaborative Fall 2018 - Advanced Acting
Whose Fault Is that?! - Splined, sans lip-sync v01
This is the splined version of my last assignment for Advanced Acting for Animation, Animation Collaborative Fall 2018 term. The goal of the assignment was to take an actor and character and emulate them in a scenario of our choosing. I settled on actress Frances Conroy, playing Ruth Fisher, from HBO’s Six Feet Under. What I loved about that actor’s performance is how restrained and tight she was, usually bottling up tense emotions, but every now and then those emotions just burst out uncontrollably, and it rattled her body, hands shaking, mouth working….yet, even in those moments, she would hide her eyes, shutting them at powerful moments. So I took that reference and made up a story of my own involving a fledgling romance between a hard working nurse and a doctor that happened to go abruptly south for some unknown reason (at least to her). He doesn’t know if she might still accept him if she only knew… When I started this shot I had a terrible camera - the characters were placed at awkward positions to camera and it felt just weird. Plus, even though I had a fair idea of what the nurse was feeling, I had yet to really get into the Doctor’s head and I needed to get really specific and simpler with both characters and their motivations and wants. As the blocking and revisions went on, I simplified their story, from a pretty detailed story of their relationship and the activities that had happened to get them to this scene, to whittling this down to just their raw emotions and simpler internal monologues. When I did that, I felt I knew my character and was able to give them choices that made sense and were specific. I was able to feel the tingling rigid anger flow through the nurse, and how it would flow and get contained…I could feel the doctor’s timidness and uncertainty. The nurse wanted to strike out at him for hurting her, for his crazy disapearance when things were going so well. She also wants to not have this conversation now bc this is her first time as a nurse and she can’t screw this up. The doctor wants to be accepted for who he is, flaws and all, however serious. I learned a ton working on this assignment, having a lot of fun dissecting an actor and applying what worked from the acts and also creating my own nuances and beats. I have yet to lip sync the characters, and the background hospital is rudimentary at the moment, but will fix all this soon!
Rough blocking Works in Progress for Actor Emulation shot. Versions 41 and 69
In these rough blocking passes, I am emulating Ruth Fisher from HBO's series Six Feet Under, applying that actress’s mannerisms to my nurse character. In version 41, I was not quite sold on the acting for either, so I took it back to reblocking. I honed in on their subtext and internal monologues with more clarity, and I feel that lead to more specificity in the acting choices in version 69. Still some timing and mechanics to revise, but I like the choices better in 69. The doctor is only blocked out through his line of dialogue, FYI.
WIP Motivated Head Turn for Advanced Acting AnimC class
For my first assignment for Advanced Acting 2018 at Animation Collaborative, I was assigned a motivated head turn. No more than 100 frames of animation, a close-up camera, with a focus on the head turn and why the head turns the way it does, the speed, timing, etc. I chose a dad that has broken a promise to his young son, and the son is pretty angry/hurt. Needing to polish my spine offsets and overlapping action through spine and shoulders/ arms. Also might hone the energy a touch, especially with the head throw/leading action of his angry “I hate you” pout.
Penultimate shot for Intro to Acting, Spring 2018 at Animation Collaborative
For this shot, I settled on a conflict between brother and sister. Brother has been a carefree, rather irresponsible guy most his life, and the sister has had t be the grown up and take care of most the family responsibilities. We enter the scene at the family home, after the death of their aunt, and now is not the time or place for argument or getting into "the issues". This is still a work in progress, so check back for updates!
More Intro to Acting work! Hiding your frustration, I'm FINE
In these progression shots, I picked some dialogue that sounded niced and stressed and halting, with the character shutting it all down and just saying "I'm fine" (leave me alone/you can;t help/gotta keep up happy face). This is all work in progress, but I may or may not finish this one. there is some thinking to work out here to get MORE specific with his mental state, and some reposing and timing needs to happen. Curious your thoughts!
Another Shot progression for Intro to Acting, Anim Collab Spring 2018!
For this shot, I wanted to try out a little lie, between 2 close female friends, and really push myself on acting honesty and clarity. I worked hard to figure out who these characters were regarding their history, the character traits, studying the art of lying, and in general asking a lot of folks for feedback on lying, men and women alike. Interesting to note how the face has trouble hiding emotions, as they kinda pop onto the face and then get suppressed. That is something I tried to get specific on, from sneers and disgust that show up, to the blink patters, to the little lying negation of the head shake at the end and the small shoulder shrug. I think all the effort I put in paid off! Still some body mechanics to polish but I feel pretty good about the acting, and how much I learned from this shot!