Walk Cycle, pre-polish

Animation, comp tests, the usual stuff

Lately, I completed a few shots for The Magpie and test composited them. Here are the results:

And here are a few other shots I've been working on:

Here's a composition test for the opening shot. The camera movements aren't prefect yet, but the technique seems to produce something quite nice. Note the layered movement of the clouds in the background!

Animation Update

Composition development

In between animation, I've been supervising Jake's 3D work. One issue that was raised was the look of the park, an area Jake's still working on, and so we looked for relevant autumnal scenes to draw inspiration from. The picture below was a strikingly appropriate example, complete with bench and usable colour palette:

I took the main colours from this picture, and started plotting out how things in the park should look in terms of colour, tone and composition. The picture I'm particularly pleased with is this one:

As you can see, the colours are much more washed out than in the source image, and as the camera angle only consists of things in the mid-to-far background, the purple-ish mist is much more dominant. It looks suitably autumnal, though, and as long as I can get a bit more oranges and yellows into the shots, presumably when things are meant to be nearer the camera, things won't be too purple overall.

The Twinings' adverts have provided some inspiration, come to think of it...

Angry Man progress

A big massive update

Hello again.

I've been so busy, I've neglected my blog a bit. But at least there's plenty to post! I've been animating, for both Estelle's film and my own film, supervised the slow but accelerating progress of my film's 3D elements, worked on my dissertation and did some paid animation work to keep me stocked up with coffee and biscuits (vital animator fuel).

A shot for Pups. I animated Jenny, and keyed out Pup to make it easier for Patrycja to animate. I'm particularly proud of my mastery of coat toggle physics - it gives so much life to the performance but requires the least concentration to animate.

More Jenny animation. Estelle's set her film tighter deadlines than I set myself, so against my better judgement I've found myself animating substantially more Pups stuff than Magpie stuff. I've been striving to change this though, by adopting the economic methods I've had to develop for Pups and applying them to The Magpie. Work speed has improved as a result.

Magpie stuff! This is one of my favourite shots; I enjoyed animating the subtle transition from the rediscovered child in the man back to the self-centred drone he was at the beginning. The bird poo on his shoulder, the final punchline, is kind of his ultimate punishment for shrugging off his whimsical side so quickly.

After a period of exhaustion, I returned to form and animated this weirdly appropriate shot for Estelle. Working on Pups has really helped me develop a flowing style to my animation; Jenny's hair and her coat toggles are veritable playgrounds for a perfectionist animator with a penchant for physics.

A shot I started recently. I could feel myself channeling earlier work, namely animating Cave Johnson and Basil Fawlty, when I started depicting this simmering fury. I really, really like animating people on the verge of mental breakdowns. Funny that!

The Magpie: animation and experiments in composition

Compositing was always something I had intended to do especially right when it came to the final cut, as it has such a large effect on the general aesthetic and the audience's perception of the film. I went into After Effects with what was then the only fully animated shot of the film, and played around with masks and effects until I found a combination of tools that accurately recreated the look I was going for.

I used this lighting and filtering test, created in Photoshop, as a visual target while tinkering in After Effects.

For this film, it's important for me that the flash animation doesn't stand out too much from the backgrounds. There's always going to be a certain degree of separation as they're starkly different mediums from each other, but the animated characters have to nevertheless look like they belong to the world they've been placed over.

Also, I've been getting a fair chunk of animation done. Having concentrated on Estelle's project, Pups, lately, I've been striving to redress the balance in my workload. Shot 4 of my film, the shot where the man encounters the bird for the first time, is a long shot to animate and so I took a break from that and concentrated on a shot from later on in my production schedule, just to keep things interesting. In this next shot, shot 17, the man is sitting on the park bench and prepares to eat his lunch. However, just before taking a bite from the sandwich, paranoia suddenly sets in and he looks suspiciously around to see if that mischievous magpie's around. He's clearly still sore from the handkerchief fiasco from earlier on.