Project 10 week 2

This week we did as a group project and we made an Ident and a storyboard. The storyboard was made to fit one of my ideas the “Danny the robot sweeper” idea.

Danny the sweeper robot

Danny is a sweeper robot, spends his days by sweeping his masters floors day in and day out.  This day he spots a dust bunny tumbling across the floor and he chases it. It flies out the open window and Danny becomes sad, but spots another one behind him. The end

Plot

The story begins with us seeing Danny rolling around on the living room floor doing his thing wondering how it all came to this. Why couldn’t he have gotten a better job, like sweeping the queen’s floors?  He stops he spots something in the distance, a dust bunny blowing around in the draft of the open windows. Giving it all he’s got, he heads over towards the dust bunny. Almost there and the dust bunny picks up speed. It’s almost like the dust bunny is alive. Danny ends up chasing the bunny all over the room back and forth. Suddenly the dust bunny heads towards one of the open windows and flies out. Danny stops below the window and becomes sad, turns around and slowly heads away from the window with a sad face. Another dust bunny then floats around in the other end of the room. His face lights up and he speeds towards it and the movie ends there.

Style

The style I have in mind for this movie is a bright colored living room with a lot of birch hardwood furniture. Other than that I would like to keep it simple with most focus being on the character and the dust bunnies. Plan is to keep the background blurred out so that all your focus is on the characters no matter what, but you still get some feel to what is there. The characters themselves I picture with somewhat of a Toy Story “look” to them.

Here are some pictures that shows what kinda of design the robot could have and what theme there would be in the living room.

Here is the storyboard

And here is the link to our Ident wich Christer did alot of the work on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8paP765G4U

The selfreflective part

When it comes to selling ideas and being able to choose your words correctly to make the best possible impression of the idea itself, im gonna have to say that I dont have to much experience on this matter. But I can say that trying to sell an idea among friends is no big deal really compared to what it would be like when your trying to sell this idea to someone that might end up being your boss if you sell it well. I can’t even imagine the amount of planning I would have to do in advance only to prepare for something like that, that being said I would love to try it some time. I would probably put of time into making a very strong 2-3 line pitch to start with, and really be carefull what I put in there just to make it as likeable as possible. And well if someone bites after the pitch I would have to have a solid and well structured story to back it up.

Project 10

Idea 1

Danny the sweeper robot

Danny is a sweeper robot, spends his days by sweeping his masters floors day in and day out.  This day he spots a dust bunny tumbling across the floor and he chases it. It flies out the open window and Danny becomes sad, but spots another one behind him. The end

Plot

The story begins with us seeing Danny rolling around on the living room floor doing his thing wondering how it all came to this. Why couldn’t he have gotten a better job, like sweeping the queen’s floors?  He stops he spots something in the distance, a dust bunny blowing around in the draft of the open windows. Giving it all he’s got, he heads over towards the dust bunny. Almost there and the dust bunny picks up speed. It’s almost like the dust bunny is alive. Danny ends up chasing the bunny all over the room back and forth. Suddenly the dust bunny heads towards one of the open windows and flies out. Danny stops below the window and becomes sad, turns around and slowly heads away from the window with a sad face. Another dust bunny then floats around in the other end of the room. His face lights up and he speeds towards it and the movie ends there.

Style

The style I have in mind for this movie is a bright colored living room with a lot of birch hardwood furniture. Other than that I would like to keep it simple with most focus being on the character and the dust bunnies. Plan is to keep the background blurred out so that all your focus is on the characters no matter what, but you still get some feel to what is there. The characters themselves I picture with somewhat of a Toy Story “look” to them.

Here are some pictures that shows what kinda of design the robot could have and what theme there would be in the living room.

Idea 2

The treat

About a dachshund named Rodney, and we follow him when he tries to get a hold of a dog treat ontop of the kitchen counter.

Plot

Rodney is on the kitchen floor stareing and smelling towards the kitchen counter, he knows there is a treat for him up there. And like most dachshunds would do he tries to find away to get to this treat. First off he tries to just jump as high as possible while standing on his backfeet, but after a few jumps he gives up on that idea. He then tries to get one of the footballs laying in the hallway to stand on while he jumps, but soon discovers that he can’t actually stand on the football at all. He walks out of the kitchen for abit then comes sprinting into the kitchen and tries to make a jump for the counter while running, but he just ends up crashing into the closet door. Being sad from not being able to get the treat his head sinks to the floor and he heads out the kitchen door again. Moments later a stool comes sliding into the kitchen with Rodney behind it using all his strength to push it over to the counter. The stool should be just high enough for him to jump on to. The stool hits the counter and he makes a jump for it and gets all the way up to the counter. The treat is finally his, wagging his tail like mad while munching all the treats up there, when suddenly he hears a door slam shut. He swiftly raises his head with a panic look on his face. The End.

Style

The style for this short I picture a normal kitchen not to modern but still not to old, and I see Rodney being a cartoon like version of a wire haired dachshund. I would like to keep the scene small and simple so that the audience don’t have to much to focus on and can focus more on the story being told and the character in the movie. Here are some pictures of how I picture it looking in my head.

Project 8

This project was to make a 3D pre-viz from our storyboard & animatic.  We chose to do our pre-viz from the last scene it’s about 70 seconds long and contains some of the most fun parts of the story. It’s hard to say what could have been improved with the pre-viz really, but that’s mostly due to the fact that we are all pretty fresh at this and this was the first time we did a project like this. But if I had to say something we could improve it would be to slow down the camera movement in some of the shots to make it abit less extreme but that’s about all I can think of at this time.

During this project we got to try out working with X-ref for the first time, and after abit of learning it really worked out nicely and we found it to be a really handy tool and a major time saver. Also made it easier to have an overview of each file used in the scene. And the fact that you didn’t have to worry about someone overwriting your work was pretty nice. When using the X-ref scene we set up a hierarchy so that there wouldn’t be to much looping of files. Here is a picture of how we would set it up.

 

When it comes to what shot is my favorite it think I would have to say i like the one where the dragon wakes up and knocks the girl down. The reason I like this one is because it I really think we got the camera angle right on that one. And the lighting makes it look kind of scary and dramatic. Another shot that I like is when the girl jumps up on the dragon to fly after they see an enemy fly over them towards the city. It was really fun being able to assign abit more specific tasks for everyone, i mostly did modelling and texturing together with Kjell Morten but we where all together working on the final camera pass.

 

-André

Project 7

In this project we sat down to make a 2D animatic of our storyboard.

As far as sound goes it really did help to have them there to both reduce the amount of shots you need to get the story out but also it gives out a clear message of what’s actually happening in the drawings.

We ended up doing the storyboard pretty mutch hand in hand with the animatic, so we could go over and improve the storyboard to make a better animatic as we went along. And really that worked out pretty well. alltho I would like to try making the animatic and storyboard more seperate in the future just to see if that works better.

After doing this animatic I can really see how much the editor has to think of when doing his work, I see that the importance of getting the timing right and being able to spot any pictures that needs to be added or removed to make the story flow  better. And that’s not allways an easy job.

When it comes to adding color to the animatic I would think that depends very much on what kind of story the animatic is for. Like if you could only get the message out there by having certain colors on thing then ofcourse it would be alot better to add color to it. But for our story I would not say that it would not have made that much of a differance other than making it’s apperance seem more complete.

All in all this was a very fun project that I learned alot from. And im looking forrward to trying it again at some point.

That’s all for this project.

-Andre

Project 6

In this project we where allowed to work as a group to make a storyboard from a treatment made in project 5, it didn’t take us long before we ended up as a group of 4 here in Stavanger. We sat down the first couple of days figuring out what treatment to base our storyboard on, and we ended up with Lars Kjetil’s treatment about a girl and her mechanical dragon.

After figuring out the treatment to use we sat down with 3 large whiteboards  writing the story into squares much like we would like to see it in the storyboard. We spent about 2 days figuring out how we wanted  to set up the storyboard, then we started drawing drafts for it and I think we ended up with something like 150+ drawings to work with. Here is 2 pictures showing you a bit of the process.

My tasks during this project have for the most part involved drawing and adding values to the final version of the storyboard. The first drawings where made on A5 paper and put on the wall in the order of the story, we spent about 4-5 days making the first draft of the drawings before we went over to doing the final drawings. As soon as all the final versions were done I started putting in values on them together with some of the others. All in all most of my time on this project has gone into drawing of some kind.

When figuring out the camera angles we tried to keep in mind the 180 degree rule as best we could. In our camera angles we try to give the viewer a clear view of what is actually happening in the scene. We try to keep the main event of each shot in focus at all times so that the story becomes easy to follow. Also we made sure to clearly show that when the character moves from one place to another the camera does not change position to drastically so that you get confused as to where the character actually is and what it’s doing. Also when the girl goes to the town she goes from left to right and oposite when moving out of town again. We made a couple of misstakes from time to time but i do think we corrected them all eventually.

When it comes to swaping out or editing shots if we had more time, I think I would go over and redo alot of the shots where she is making the dragon, maybe add a couple more shots of her testing the dragon, I would do theese changes to get the message out in a better way to get a better feeling of time passing.but at the current time I cant figure out anything else I would like to change. Maybe in a week or two I will notice something completely diffrent but right now I cant find anything else.

This project has been great fun, and im looking forrward to working more on the animatic for project 7.

Thats all from me for this project.

-André

Project 5

For this project we where asked to write a treatment for a story. I started it of by writing down a couple of different ideas with only a sentence or two.

After that I started to pick out the stories I likes best and going abit more in depth on them. I continued this untill I had one story that I wanted to write more on.

I chose a story about two friends going out for a fishing trip, making their fishing trip into a contest on who gets the largest fish.

I went on to writing the story down in abit more detail than before and it ended up being almost two pages in length, so I went over it a couple of times removing all the details that had nothing to say for the storys progress. After going over it a couple of times it ended up on one page. I then started going over it putting in CAPS words where I felt it was neccessary to have them. Like when introducing new characters or when stating where they where going etc. After spending a couple of hours on this I ended up being pretty happy with the result.

I didn’t really find any stories similar to my own in its structure to mine.

I can’t say I enjoyed this project a whole lot, mostly due to the fact that im not a big fan of writing:)

That’s about all I have to say on this project.

-André

Project 3 final update

It’s time for the last update of this animation project. I will be going through the project from beginning to end while trying to cover all that I did.

The project started the 11th of october, you could choose from either making a full body animation or to just make a lip-sync animation. I chose the lip-sync project myself because I found it more appealing.

Haven choosen what project i wanted to do i started to look around for the perfect soundclip. I think i ended up spending over a week finding the right one. What I was looking for in the sound clip was that it had a nice and slow pase to it, so that the actual lip movement was easier to see. I also wanted it to be a funny one, maybe one that people might have heard before. I used the site “The daily .wav” to find a soundclip I wanted to use. I started of by finding different TV-shows and movies that might have a clip I could use, then started eliminating them one by one. After having spent what felt like an eternity listening to sound clips, I had about 6 left to choose from. And after listening to them on my mp3 player over and over again for some hours I found the one I wanted to use. The clip i chose is from “That 70′s show” And it’s the character played by Kurtwood Smith with the name of Reginald “Red” Forman speaking. What he says in the clip is “Son, you don’t have bad luck. The reason that bad things happen to you is because you’re a dumbass”. I was pretty happy having found a soundclip to use. What I didnt realise was that there was already a example video using the exact same soundclip up on the class forums….. ahh well atleast I took the time to learn how to find a soundclip I was happy with.

First thing I did with the clip was to try and find out what episode of the series it was from, just so I could see what the character looked like when saying it. I found out that the clip was taken from episode 9 in the first season of the show. Not long after I had cut out that 9 second part from the episode and put it on loop in the mediaplayer. After spending some hours watching and listening to it I started to plan the animation. First of I watched a movie with some tips on how to make a lip-sync animation, I then went on to writing down the words that are being said. I sat infront of the mirror for a while saying the words, just to have a look at my mouth shape. I tried to follow the tips in the movie I watched first of,  but after a while I figured that it was easier to just find my own way of working, this was after I had written down open/closed and wide/narrow. After spending some time on this I started in 3ds max, I chose to use the max rig for the lip-sync just because I know that rig and I like how it works. Looked at a couple of other rigs but they didn’t really appeal to me all that much. When starting in max I started by going over the entire soundclip once and adding all the major open/closed movements, I then went over it again to see if I missed out on anything. After having most open/closed spots in I went over it again while adding wide/narrow but instead of only adding wide/narrow i also added alot of the other details like lips puffing and lips going in and out. After having gone over it once with this I went over it about 3 times more correcting everything that I felt was out of place and fixing some curves while I was at it. After doing this I chose to take a small break just so I could get back to it and maybe spot other things that needed fixing or adding. After getting back and finding some flaws I went over the entire thing once more trying to add all the u and o sounds. I started of by using the lips puff controller to add the u and o sounds, but then Mr. Lars Kjetil showed me the controller that was more or less made for making u and o sounds.. something that well… made the animation look ALOT better. Having added almost everything to the lip-sync itself I went back to start and started adding some headmovement on some words where I felt it was necessary so that it would sort of give the word a little push. After adding the head movement I added eyebrows, eye movement, blinking and shouldermovement. And that pretty much it as far as the animation goes.

When adding the camera to the scene I chose to put it infront of the character so that it looks like the camera might be the “Son” he’s talking to. I added a background that I felt gave the kind of feel that the show the soundclip is from gives. I also chose to add 2 lights. one infront and one to the left of the camera I turned down the strength of the left light to about half of what the front light had just to so I would’nt drown him to much in lights.

As far as animation principles goes I found myself adding anticipation to some of the animation, also I felt that I was able to add some weight to certain words as well. I also tried adding a certain amount of appeal to the character to make him seem serious.

I’ve tried to follow the work of Lars Kjetil on this project, and what I see is that his planning is amazing and I really see that compared to him I planned nothing. So really what I learned from him is that I should probably try to spend abit more time when planning. Both when it comes to writing and drawing. because I ended up with no drawings at all on this project, and yes I do regret that I didnt take the time to draw more. But hey you learn from your misstakes I guess.

Overall I really enjoyed lip-sync and I will do more lip-sync in the future for sure. Already started thinking about what to lip-sync next hehe.

Well that’s all from me for this project. Thanks for reading.

 

-André

Project 3 update

So what I want to do here is try to explain how I want my animation to look. I will try to explain it all in words to begin with and then I’ll try to add some pictures later on.

First of the entire soundclip lasts for about 9 seconds and goes like this.

“Son. You don’t have bad luck. The reason that bad things happen to you is because you’re a dumbass”

I want to start this out with the character having his head tilted down, he then raises his head and on the way up he says the word “Son”. He ends the word with a tiny hint of a smile on his mouth. There is then a small break for about 0.5-1 second where his head starts to tilt abit down again, after tilting just a little bit his head goes up as he starts to say “You don’t have bad luck.” as soon as he starts speaking his eyebrows go up and he looks straight forrward. When he gets to saing “bad luck” his head bobs abit. He ends this bit with the eyebrows down again and once again with a small smile on his face, the kind of smile that says “I love you but you’re abit stupid”. As he starts the next part he leans his head a tiny bit forrward while he says “The reason that bad things happen to you”, while saying this he does a small nod. He takes a small pause before he lifts his eyebrow and says “is because you’re a dumbass”, the animation ends with him pulling his head abit back and eyebrows going back down again.

This should cover most of the animation, but like I said there will be pictures up soon so you get a better understanding of the different looks I want to aim for.

That’s about it for today.

-André

Project 3

After a couple of weeks without any updates it time to tell you that I have started on project 3 now.

What im doing for this project is a lip-sync animation. So first of i had to find a souns clip that i would enjoy working with. After listening to hundreds of clip i found one that in my opinion was great.

The clip i chose is from “That 70′s show” And it’s the character played by Kurtwood Smith with the name of Reginald “Red” Forman. What he says in the clip is “Son, you don’t have bad luck. The reason that bad things happen to you is because you’re a dumbass”

Here is the clip:

http://www.dailywav.com/0600/dumbass.wav

The reason i liked this one is because of the speed that he talks in, he talks slow and that makes it easier to track the words, or it does for me atleast. With him talking slow it also might be easier to make the animation feel more real rather than if you had someone just rambling on in an insane speed. I also feel that there is alot of nice animation to do when he has the small pauses in what he says. And last but not least I find the clip to be funny.

At the moment im working out the timeline for the clip so that I can know better what word is being said when, and so i can start pointing out more detailed info on the mouths movement for every word. Also im going to be sitting infront of a mirror to get a better view of what it looks like. Today I will also try to get started on some drawings of the mouths movement during the clip. I will update here as soon as I have done more.

-André

Final update project 2

Project 2 has come to and end and in this post I will be going from start to finish on the project.

The project was to find a text from pre 1960′s  and be influenced by the text and design a character from it.  After spending about one day of thinking and looking for a text that was interresting enough to design a charater from, I ended up finding a piece of text on “The Rat Pack”.

Taken from Wikipedia.org:

“The fifties Rat Pack

The name “Rat Pack” was first used to refer to a group of friends in Hollywood, including the young Frank Sinatra.^[2][3] Several explanations have been offered for the famous name over the years. According to one version, the group’s original “Den Mother,” Lauren Bacall, after seeing her husband (Bogart) and his friends return from a night in Las Vegas, said words to the effect of “You look like a goddamn rat pack.”^[2] “Rat Pack” may also be a shortened version of “Holmby Hills Rat Pack,” a reference to the home of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall^[2][3] which served as a regular hangout.

The name may also refer to the belief that an established pack of rats will belligerently reject an outsider who tries to join them (“Never rat on a rat”).^[2] So called “visiting members” included Errol Flynn, Nat King Cole, Mickey Rooney and Cesar Romero, however.

According to Stephen Bogart, the original members of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack were Sinatra (pack master), Garland (first vice-president), Bacall (den mother), Sid Luft (cage master), Bogart (rat in charge of public relations), Swifty Lazar (recording secretary and treasurer), Nathaniel Benchley (historian), David Niven, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Cukor, Cary Grant, Rex Harrison, and Jimmy Van Heusen.^[2][3] In his autobiography The Moon’s a Balloon, Niven confirms that the Rat Pack originally included him but not Sammy Davis Jr. or Dean Martin.”

After reading this i went on to find some pictures and more info on this “Rat Pack”. I found several sites with info about this “gang” of entertainers. Here are some pictures that i picked out just to get a feeling of what they all looked like.

Looking at theese pictures I went on thinking about what I wanted my character to look like. Thinking about this for a while I came with the idea to take the name “Rat Pack” and actually litteraly make the character a rat, but a rat that is part of the actual “Rat Pack”. After this I started to write down som key info about the character to get somewhat of a profile on him.

Short character profile:

Wilbur Ratner, born 1948 Chicago Illinois. As a child Wilbut looked alot like your avarage rat on the outside, furry and abit nasty looking. At the age of 6 he moved from Chicago to pursue his dream of being in the entertainment buisness. He moved to Hollywood L.A having seen in the newspaper articles about hollywood and all the famous people that came from there. After living there for a year or two he had gotten a couple of good friends that had helped him out from day one. His friends introduced him to the show-business at a local bar where he got thrown on a stage and asked to sing. To say the least the audience never knew what hit them. Ever since that bar event he has preformed together with his friends both in Hollywood and Las Vegas. Other than entertaining he loves to sit down with a propper meal, preffer a well done porterhouse steak. After dinner he allways has a drinking og tomatin single malt scotch.

After writing down a couple of words on the character I started out with some scetches of what this rat would look like.

This was the first scetch I made, and as you can see the idea got onto paper with some ideas as to what accessories the character would own. But what I didn’t like about this version of the charater was the head, tail and legs. What I didn’t like about the head was the size of the snout and mouth area, the tail was abit to small and the legs just didn’t look right standing upright like that just didn’t make sense in my head. So I started drawing down another version of it.

So with this drawing I tried fixing the things I didn’t like with the previous one. But there was still something that didn’t quite fit what I had in mind. The things I didn’t wuite like about this on is the size of him. I feel like he should have abit more fat on his body so this one was really just to skinny. But other than that i was pretty happy with this one compared to the first one. Tried to add some color to him as well just to get somewhat of a feel to what he would look like what he was abit more done. Also scetched some accessories on this stage. The next drawing I tried to add some more weight to him.

As you can see I didn’t add to much weight on him here either even though that was what I wanted to change on the previous one. I did however draw him from the front view just to see what he would look like from the front like the final one is supposed to be. And really I was pretty happy with this one, but one thing i did not like about it was that I went back to abit smaller tail. And also I would like to see him with some more weight than this as well. I went from here to trying something completely different.

As you can see here i went for something different on the look, I went away from the small chubby rat to making it tall and skinny and also added a hat to him. And really I liked this one quite well. But there was something about him that just wasnt right and I felt like he ended looking more like a weasel rather than a rat, this was something I really did not want. So I went back to the third drawing and made that design abit better in the final drawing.

This is what that character ended up looking like. I am pretty happy with the result, and as you can see he has abit more weight on him as well as a big tail and same head as the third drawing. I also added an untied bowtie around his neck just to add abit more to him.

As far as accessories goes I knew from the start that one of them had to be some sort of footwear. Other than a piece of footwear I scetched down some other accessories like seen on some drawings above. I ended up with a some drawings of accessories that I would like to see made for him.

As you can see there are 4 accessories here but I ended up only choosing 3 of theese. I choose to make a whiskeyglass and a microphone in addition to the footwear, the footwear being a shoe. There is not really much to say about the accessories other than, if you read the character profile you should know why i chose theese items. I found some referance images that i could work with in 3Ds max when modelling the accessories.

From these pictures I made my 3 accessories.

Here are the 3 accessories finished.

That’s project 2 done from my part. I would like to say that it has been a pretty nice project to work on.

I feel that my character would be hard to figure out if you see him together with his accessories. Also I feel that my drawing style has evolved alot during theese 2+ weeks something that I think is great, and really shows that i have gotten something from this rather than just doing the project without anything learnt.

If I could change anything about this it would be to try doing it all digitally, the reason i did not do that now is that I wanted to get a tablet first so that I wouldn’t be stuck drawing with my mouse only so therefor I choose to do it all by hand for this project. (Needs to be said that I got mail from the store I ordered my tablet from on the last day that my tablet  had arrived, after 3 weeks of waiting).

Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoyed the read.

-André