New website.

Well this project is over, but in the meantime I would like to introduce my new website:

www.jamesstone.co.uk

Please visit it for more work from James Stone.

Uploads and Promotion...

Seeing as I'm happy with the result I thought publishing my work would be a good idea, to not only get feedback but also promote my name and website. The following links are places where you can see my piece or places where I have received feedback:

AniBoom - http://www.aniboom.com/Player.aspx?v=5581

Trouble TV - http://www.troublehomegrown.co.uk/play/15554/

BBC - Comedy Soup - http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/comedysoup/A18854607

3D-TVU - WIP Thread - http://www.3d-tvu.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=194&start=0

3D-TVU - Finished Thread - http://www.3d-tvu.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=240

YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjAOqCmmxDk

Portfolio - http://mrjames.cgsociety.org/gallery/

CGTalk - http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=154&t=450201

Animation Complete

Worked hard over the past few days polishing my animation. Its been hectic but I feel happy with the results.

By far the most useful thing to help me has been the video reference. Those key studies I completed after I first recorded the audio have really helped convey emotion and are really great for adding life to the character, especially the eyes.

I will post the final result shortly along with links to all the places I have managed to get my piece featured.

Although I'm happy with the end result I would have liked to spend more time improving the secondary motion with the earrings and necklace, especially the arms and legs. I had the controls in my rig to do this but just ran out of time. I decided to prioritise and felt that the facial animation was far more important.

Rigging Finished

Rigging is now finished.. took longer than I had originally anticipated. We are all stations go now. The rig has a few nifty features including; clusters for secondary motion, joint chains on the arms and legs and a simple U.I. to speed up animating. All in all its a robust rig that should prove useful when it comes to animating... I'm going away over the christmas so will have to leave animating until I get back in the new year. Although I would have liked to devote more time to the animation I think 5 days solid will be enough to cover evrything to the standard I would like. Time will tell...

Refinement and Rigging

I've spent the last few days working on the things I discussed in the last post. Heres the latest set, It looks good but its still not 100%, but I'm getting there! Hopefully tommorrow will bring more feedback....

In the meantime I've set myself the goal to get the rig done by the weekend and everything else ready to animate come Monday (28th). Below is a screengrab of the rig, I've done a few tests with various bits and bobs, the only thing set in stone so far is this little eye gizmo I have created. It should make the eyes a breeze to animate with. Essentially it focuses around the 'E'. Wherever that is pointing is where the spider will look, also parented to the 'E' are two sliders. Moving these sliders effects two blendshapes, One for blinking and one for a wide eyed scared look. All of this saves poking around the channel box for blendshapes and should make animating more intuitive, time will tell.

Feedback

Recieved my marks for the presentation (86%), I'm pleased with the result. I also recieved feedback from my tutors Carol and Jane regarding my character below. Generally it was recieved well, the follwoing are points that came up.

- Audio, the main problem which I had failed to notice while building my set was the fact that there is a continuous hum in the background. This however can be played to my advantage if I build a new set. I can use this sound and play off it in the form of an extractor fan or similar device and this will possibly lead to comedy with the fly in the background. I'll have to think about this over the next week or so and come up with a new set.

- The only other concern was in the form of the spiders legs. They are curved so to animate them could be an issue. Joe however came up with a great idea of using blendshapes on the backlegs to create a wiggling motion, When I come to rigging next week I'll look into this some more.

On the whole today was a positive and generated some fresh ideas to keep the project flowing.

Spider enters 3D!

Haven't updated in a while, so unfortunatley this blog has slipped a bit. I'm going to try and update more regularly in future.

Between now and the presentation I have started taking my concept and working on it in 3D. As you can see (above) the transition has gone quite well. Its still not a final image but I'm pleased at how this is going so far. I'm thinking of adding some foilage to break up the shot a bit. In the time since my last post I have made several sets and haven't been able to find a balance with any of them, this one, so far, seems to suit the mood best.

I have set up a thread (URL below) on the university forums to obtain critiques and advice on my work from peers.

http://www.3d-tvu.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=194

So far the critiques have been informative and encouraging. The next stage is to rig my model and brush up on any visual elements that may need tweaking before I continue. Then it will be time to animate.

I'm pleased with my current progress and look forward to having a nice clean piece of animation by the end of it.

Presentation

A bit late to post this, but I did my presentation the other day. It went really well, hopefully I get some good feedback and most importantly a good mark :). I'm really happy with all the pre-production so far so I'm ready to get stuck in and start modeling! I'm running a little behind, but nothing to worry about yet.

Concept

This is one of the concepts I've done, I'll post the rest later. I think this is going to be the character I end up with. Unless I think of anything else to change or add. I like this one better than the rest, its surprsingly hard to make a spider look feminine. I really wanted to avoid big lips with lipstick on, I mean the pearls are a bit stereotypical but I didn't want the spider to look like a drag queen.

Dope Sheet

Completed the dope sheet this morning. I pray that it is as useful as I hope it is... If not, I will be dissapointed as it was unbelievabley tedious and after doing 825 frames worth I was shattered. Regardless its done now, time to finish my concept art for the main character.

Acting and Recording

For reference I've recorded my girlfriend acting out the clip. This is going to help me with eye movements and gestures that I may not have noticed or done when animating myself, obviously I'm going to interpret the animation in my own way, but this will serve as a good basis to build on. We took about 14 takes, and this was the most successful one, it was a lot harder to do thatn I thought it would be. Please excuse the poor quality of the clip, I haven't had much time to play around with compression settings. I may upload another version in time. Needless to say the original is a lot more readable and you can see her eye movements and such.

EDIT: Also the sound is incredibly low, I'll upload a better version soon.

The clip is here.

Script Done!

The audio has now been converted into script form and I've added a few unique bits and bobs in there to add more of a story to the piece rather than just an exercise in lip sync. The character has also changed again in my mind to a spider, yes I said I was fickle. Going to give the script to my girlfriend who is a bit of an actress for her to act it out for me on Friday, embarassing videos to follow. The script is below (Excuse the formatting, this blog compresses it a bit):

Likes and Dislikes

by

James Stone

INT. GARDEN - DAY

SPIDER is sitting on a chair being interviewed; she is looking intently into the camera.

SPIDER

Yes, I like to play tennis.

A fly flies into shot and distracts SPIDER mildly.

SPIDER (CONT’D)

Erm, I like to...

The fly continues to hover around. SPIDER slowly tracks the fly with her eyes. SPIDER now focuses her attention on the camera.

SPIDER (CONT’D)

Erm, go to the gym. Erm, I like to play music, and I like to paint, and to knit and sow...

SPIDER giggles to herself.

SPIDER (CONT’D)

And I love swimming.

SPIDER pauses and giggles slightly. Fly lands on some droppings in the background.

SPIDER

To be honest I hate wasps, I hate bees. Erm...

SPIDER looks at fly and then turns to face the camera again slightly angered.

SPIDER (CONT’D)

I hate dirty flies...Especially flies from London, they’re particularly viscous...

SPIDER looks over shoulder at fly and then turns to face the camera again.

SPIDER (CONT’D)

And they just, you know, they just don’t get the hint we don’t want them round.

Fickleness...

Being the fickle person I am, the thought of rigging and animating a charcter with 8 legs has scared me a bit. I think I'm now going to lean towards something like a ladybird. Hopeullfy I'm going to sketch tommorrow and see what comes up.

Permission Gained

Obtained official written permission today from the actress Laoise O'Hanlon today! So with the audio in the bag I can continue to act out and storyboard my animation.

Mixed Audio

I played around with the audio clip some more to no avail, my audio knowledge isn't the best. Luckily my housemates boyfriend (Paul Juggins) came round earlier to help me. Hes a professional sound engineer, so I think the audio is about as good as its going to get for now. Once I storyboard the animation I'll probably add some more foley sounds.

The clip is here

Inspiration

Copyright Aardman Animations

Watched the above animation earlier. Its great stuff! I love the mouth shapes that is such a trademark look of Aardman, I really want to try and incorperate it into my piece somehow, but without ripping it off. Well plenty of time to think about it.... The video is here I would recommend it! Reminds me of week 13/14!

First Draft - Audio

Copyright Aardman Animations

This is my first attempt at the audio for my animation, some comments would be good. Nothing is really set in stone yet, I have some other stuff to review but I'll most likely end up using this clip once I've cleaned up the audio. Click Me! (Audio)

Oh yeah and try and think of the character above when you are listening :) It's not mine but it could be a direction I'm going in.

Timetable

Still sorting out the audio, hopefully it will be done by the end of tonight... Apart from that I've just finished my timetable for the module, If I keep up with it I shouldn't have to stress out too much and hopefully get everything done well and in time. (Click the Image to expand)

Audio

Spent a few more hours sorting out my audio today. I also managed to persuade my girlfriends Irish friends to do an interview with me, hopefully all goes well and I'll have a lot of clips to choose from.

Busy Recording and Planning...

Ideas have been swimming around my head the past few days and I thought it productive to get some down on paper before I do much more. I used to do a lot of design work and found spider diagrams the best way to bash out ideas...

Click For Better Image

Hopefully with this I'll be able to get some kind of time plan going so I can keep on schedule. Its all horribly anal I know, but If I want to keep my hair by the end of this year I think it could be a good idea.

Everything is recorded now also, just got to trawl through all the hours of footage I've got. I'll make an individual post about that next...

Research and Questions

After thinking about the brief for a while I decided on a suitable idea to get started. My idea was to create a short 30sec animation in the style of 'Creature Comforts', an 'Aardman animation' piece.

Copyright Aardman Animations

After purchasing and watching the DVD I felt I had a better grasp for what I was after and what I was attempting. Although Aardman is clearly going to be a point of inspiration I didn't want to blatantly rip it off so with this in mind I will try to create my own unique style. The extras of the DVD were extremely useful and helped me find a starting point for the animation; audio.

The main task with getting audio is to find people who would speak to me in a natural way but at the same time capturing a slight unease along with attempts of political correctness that people give when they know they are being recorded. Hard to explain, but what I was after was audio that you might find when the public are interviewed for radio, possibly about a subject they know little about...

The questions will also be key. I've devised a list of questions that hopefully prove original and topical and also play up to the fact that an animal could be saying things quite contradictory to their enviroment. I was hoping for a good juxtaposition between the audio and the animal acting that would add to the humour.

Some of my questions and ideas:

How do you feel about global warming? - (A penguin on an ice cap)
What do you think of Jamie Oliver? - (Rat going through some bins in a playground)
How do you feel about insects? - (Ant eater afraid of ants)
Have you got any phobias? - (Bird afraid of heights)

The ideas around the questions are scenarios that would be great if they happened but until I finish recording and sit down with the footage I will never know what options are present.

I will record as much as I can this weekend when I visit Birmingham (There is something about the accent that I find appealing).

Introduction

The following blog is in place to document my work and methods towards the 'Advanced Character Animation' module at Thames Valley University. I plan to update this blog on a regular basis.

Unfortunatley at this current time the '10 sec Club' website is closed for a few weeks due to a virus. Hopefully this won't affect students too much....

Regardless, my first task is to get some of my ideas on paper for Assignment 1/2 and post them up here.... hopefully the site won't be down for too long...

A brief explanation of the assignments are as follows:-

Assignment 1 (15%):

Presentation of character project proposal (Also submitted as a written pitch)

Hand-in: Hard copy 500 words, illustrated.

Hand-in to Tutor after presentation

Week 4

Assignment 2 (45%):

Portfolio of character studies and up to 30 secs of character animation

Hand-in: Portfolio and DVD of film.

(students must have given demo in weeks 10 or 11)

TC308.

Week 12

Assignment 3 (40%):

Finished published artefact and documentation of production process and submission procedure for venue, with proof of submission

Hand-in: 500 words, hard copy. 10-30 secs animation with sound.

TC308.

Week 14 (at latest – could be evidenced earlier)