Toke Jepsen

Moved this Blog!

2009-10-28T20:51:00.001Z

Have moved this blog to; http://tokejepsen.wordpress.com/

Back Again!

2009-10-20T18:09:00.003+01:00

Long summer... good summer:-)... last summer vacation, maybe the last one forever:-(

Sooo back I came back to Wales, for my third and final year of my course. Hoping for a great year...

The first three weeks we have been doing specialist animation. Which is doing animations in Maya instead of Max. This was quite a big thing for me to comprehend. Been working in Max since I began with CG some 4 or so years ago. Initially I hated the Maya controls and everything about it. But thats just the incompetance talking, so when I got into it more and adjusted a few hotkeys:-), the whole Maya experience softened up a lot more.
Though to Autodesk I have to say this;"Please please, make a hotkey transfer tool!" Would be so much easier to transfer between application if the hotkeys/navigation were the same.

The objectives for the project was to produce a canon ball and rubber ball animation, then move into bipedal. And here it is:-

I gotta say the whole lot of not very good. Been a looonggg while since Ive done any proper animating, so it was nice to get into it again, but I gotta work on my workflow. It got quite confusing in the end, when I had so many keys all over the time line.

Right so next project is the pre-production for our major project, which for me is gunna be a film again. Gunna be posting spare time stuff as well as some of the progression of the film.

Major Project - Short Film "Over The Hill"

2009-08-06T12:25:00.006+01:00

Finally I have the chance the upload and present my second year short film, which I have been working on for six months. The majority of time went onto the story, that got changed a lot since the initial concept. And also to present the story correct to be entertaining aswell as getting the storypoints across. Alright show first, then tell:-)

The preproduction lasted for the first two months of the six month period. The initial concept was the old man rolling down a hill getting a face lift/younger. So I had a long way from the concept to something interesting and entertaining to tell. The story were constantly worked on, and still after the preproduction, the story was still being reworked. In the preproduction I tried to design as much as possible, since I had a world to design around my character. The old man, Marvin, was the first element that had a finished-ish design. So in the preproduction I had to design a suitable world around Marvin. (Click the image to view more)

After a couple of weeks creating the Marvin and his rig, I went on to produce an animatic. Still the story got reworked from the storyboards.

Hope you enjoyed the film. Im hoping for a very productive and creative third and final year, with another short film.

Left Overs

2009-06-11T12:52:00.007+01:00

So while going through my drives and cleaning up, I found these animations from the 2008 Glammies production.
The first two animations made it into the show as part of the continous storyline. The others were stings that for various reasons didn't make into the show. The whole show played on the "Doctor Who" series, which is where the robots (darleks) come from. Also as a side note is that these are the raw animations with no postproduction, so it is not exactly as it appeared in the show.

I also found this animation, which I haven't posted on the blog yet.

Major Project

2009-02-21T20:19:00.003Z

Hey there...

So Im in the middle of the production of my film. And here is my character for the film; Marvin Edwards.

Turnarounds:-

Deformation:-

And here a demostration of the rig, that I created for the character. I have tried to make the rig as animation friendly as possible.

I don't have anymore to say:-) As I said in the previous blog, I cant talk too much about this film, but then most of you already know some of it:-)

Advanced Techniques - Week 9-15

2008-12-11T17:50:00.014Z

Hello there... This article isn't actually as boring as the title might suggest, got quite a bit to show.

So the project is three part; Poly Modelling, Rigging and Textures and Lighting. The project is about introducing us to advanced techniques within the three areas. First off the poly modelling. Here we had to do a class exercise of modelling a bug. A bug is usually pretty simple since most bugs have the skeleton on the outside and so have quite hard surfaces. This makes it ideal for working from simple geometric shapes. But as I decided to take this challenge a little bit further, and make a bug with character (the video below is the wireframe turnaround, which is why there is those lines all over the model):-

The reason why we have to the model in wireframe is for the tutor to see how we build the model. Its all about how clean lines look, and how many you are using. I dont wanna go into too much about the technical stuff about poly modelling, but a poly is basically the surface between the lines. Ideally you only want the lines to form squares, and not triangles or ngons (pentagons, hexagons, heptagons, etc.) The next bit was to model a hand, with the intend to animate it. When you model for animation, it is important not only to have quads (square polys) but also to think about edgeloops. Edgeloops are a string of lines, and you want those to run efficiently around the model. Good edgeloops helps deform the skin properly when you put a skeleton (rig) in. Bad egdeloops dont.... So heres my planning for the hand:-

And the turnaround of the final model in low poly, high poly, shaded and textured state:-

That's the first part of the project. The next is about rigging. The rigging process is very technical, and in my opinion there is not a lot creativity in this stage. That being said I still really enjoy the rigging part because I'M A NERD!:-)
Rigging is basically about putting in the skeleton, and telling the program how the skin (object/model) is gonna behave. This stage is crucial for the animation since a crappy rig can really slow down and limit your animation. So to show the rigging you do a deformation test, which is a video where you bend all the joint separately. Quite boring, but a necessary evil for the animation. Here the deformation tests of my bug and the hand:-

Another part of this project was the texturing. For this project we were only to generate procedural textures and not painted ones. The difference between the two is in the making. Procedural textures are generated from mathematical formulas, while painted ones is generated by.... ermmm painting. A more detailed explanation would require going into areas like UW mapping, which is extremely boring (unless you are a nerd:-) so Ill spare your brain this time around. For the project we had to do a realistic skin texture and some stylistic ones, so here they are (click the images to view a bigger one):-

The last part of the project is lighting. The job was to create a scene and light it for dawn, midday, dusk and midnight, with a focus on realism. So here's my planning(click the image below to view the planning):-

And this is what I got out of it(click the images to view a bigger one):-

The lighting of a scene or character can really make or break it. Lighting a scene is not just about illuminating, but more about creating a mood. For example if you had a room with a bed in it, you can then suggest a feeling about the bed. Light the room with harsh florescent lights, and you get the impression of a hospital bed. But if you light the room with yellow and red lights with soft shadows, then you might think its a normal bed. The point is that with the same model, you can suggest different feelings with the lighting.

That's it. I really tried not to make it a too technical article, but that's probably the same trying not to get wet while you swim:-s
Right so the future for me entails the major project, which in my case is gonna be a short film. The making of this is gonna span for the rest of the school year. So it might be a while before the next big update, but I will most likely give smaller updates of where I am in the process.

For now I will just wish everyone A MERRY CHRISTMAS and A SPLENDID NEW YEAR!!!!

Character Animation - Week 3-8

2008-11-16T17:24:00.012Z

As promised the next article... Character performance or acting is what this project is all about. Its our first real encounter with proper acting, and the techniques of acting. And goddamn its difficult...

So the project's objectives is to find an audio clip with someone speaking, develop a suitable character for the dialogue, and animate the character.

The first task of finding the audio clip was a bit more challenging than I initially expected. Although we had all forms of media to choose from, ei. radio, movie, audio book, interviews etc. The problem was in the specifications that we were recommended to follow. Firstly its a single character talking for 10ish seconds, which limits a lot of dialogue. Secondly it had to be interesting, and that's not interesting as in what the person is saying, but how its being said. We basically needed to find a character talking for ca. 10 seconds, whom experiences an emotional change expressed through the voice.
I finally found a piece of dialogue I was happy with. The audio clip is from a movie called "Boondock Saints" with Willem Dafoe playing a detective trying to solve some murder cases (there is only black screen, so you can hear the audio on its own):-

With the dialogue clip in place, I could proceed onto developing a suitable character for the performance. My initial idea for was a teacher. The setup would be the teacher having a go at a pupil. This idea I developed further with design sketches. Though when I had discussed the character with friends and mentors, I found the idea to be weak. It was too generic to just have a teacher. I then went back to the idea stage, and explored other ideas like a caveman, psychologist, priest, TV presenter (at Countdown or the danish "Lykkehjulet"), Jesus, judge. The one I found to be most promising was the idea of a priest. Then after some further exploring, I combined the two ideas to a sunday school teacher at a catholic church. The designs and the rest of the preproduction can be view here:-

Further in the this stage there is the figuring out who your character really is, like; his age, his name, his upbringing, sexual orientation, temperment etc. All this is never shown on camera, but it helps me to understand who this person is and how he might react in a certain situation.

The next thing to do is the acting. This is an extreme weak spot of mine, and my god I need to get better. Just need to practise I guess. After this project I have a much greater respect for actors/actresses for their performances on screen. Anyway here the best reference I did:-

As you can see I didn't give myself very much to go on. So the caricaturering and nice poses need to be created in the thumbnails. The thumbnails can be see in the flatwork at the end. To get a better understand about whether a pose or the whole sequence works, you need to make an animatic. An animatic is a simpel animation, usually drawn since its easier to draw a pose than having to pose a character. This stage is used to determine when, and how long a pose should read. The animatic can then later be used a blueprint for when you pose the character in a 3D application. Here's how my animatic looked:-

Since this is my first animatic, I learn a lot during the process which I can use the next time. One thing in particular is the level of detail I should but into the animatic, which is a lot more than I did for this one. One of my teachers alerted me to the second function of the animatics, which is for the directors. The director or superviser should be able to watch your animatic, and get a pretty good sense of how the final thing is gunna turn out. This way they can adjust the changes before the animator gets too stuck in the animation (even then they might change a lot of stuff). So for the next time I should be more descriptive in the animatic...

We can now move on to the blockout stage. Here I follow a well tested process of creating the animation, which originated from Keith Lango. In the blockout stage you focus on creating the keyposes and breakdowns, and more technically your animation jumps from pose to pose. This makes is easier to focus on just the poses, and not worry about inferior animation like lip-sync. Here my blockout:-

There is quite a difference between this and the final thing. The whole process is a working progress, and poses are constantly changing because of feedback from the director/audience. I had a quite a few people to look a the different stages, which provided me with incredibly important comments and changes. So if you are one of those people then I thank you for the awesome input and I'll most likely ask again for some feedback:-)

Alright so the next I want to show is the final thing, BUT before I do that I want to make sure that you might understand the amount of work that is put into this (6 weeks of my life:-s). The process of going from the blockout stage to the final thing is a big step, so I'll show you a screen recording of one hours worth of work. The video is fastforwarded about 20 times realtime:-

This is a really boring video to watch cause I don't do a lot. I just seem to fiddle about with the head/neck/eyes. But this is nearing the completion, so its a lot about adjusting small details, and not actually creating any poses. So I'll hopefully remember to make a more interesting timelapse the next time around, maybe early in the blockout stage where you can see the creation of each pose.

I think I have been ranting on a while now, so I'll just show the final rendered version:-

And now you might say; "You SPEND 6 week of you life on these measly 13 seconds of animation!?!?"..... but hopefully I have given you a bit of insight of what I have been doing with those 6 weeks. Apart from the animation, I have learnt a ton about acting and character performance. So I'll be able to make some more interesting animations from now on. Further I have been working on other personal projects, which I will be able to show at some point in the future (what a tease:-)

Hope you enjoyed the random brainjuice spilled onto this article, I will leave you with the original video clip from the "Boondock Saints":-

Storyboard - Week 1& 2

2008-10-29T23:14:00.015Z

Hello Hello, quite some time since I updated the blog. I the meantime I have started on the second year of my course. Currently I'm in the last phases of my minor project, this being the reason why I haven't updated my blog because I thought that I would get the minor project on the update as well. BUT I felt that I should give a little prelude and say that I'm still alive and animating:-)

So the first two week of in the brand new ATRiuM building (that's not a typo , that's apparently how its spelled), started with the storyboard project. Storyboards are thumbnail like images of the camera angles, shot sequence, action sequence, dialogue sequence and basically everything. In animation storyboards are one of the most important processes in the development of an animated sequence, as this stage can simply make or break the movie/animation.

To make any film sequence, live action or animation, interesting you need to have some dynamic shots, else the audience is gonna get bored very quickly. In live action you can just go out with your camera and find them, but in animation we have to build them. This is why the storyboard is immensely more important for animation than live action. If you can plan the shots before building them, you can save time and money.

For the protect we had to make two storyboards. The first was to storyboard an advert. Find any advert, live action or animated, analyze the shots/action and draw a storyboard based on the advert. This is the reverse of what a storyboard process is, but it was to get us into the concept of storyboarding and learn what the professionals do to make a shot interesting.
I chose an animated commercial from Framestore (http://www.framestore-cfc.com), that they did for the bank Abbey (http://www.abbey.com). Click the image below to view the advert:-

A simply gorgeous piece of animation from the makers of the polar bears in "The Golden Compass". Absolutely a dream workplace!!!!

As you can see the advert hasn't got that many shots (14 to be exact), but there is a ton of movement that needs description for the animators to follow. And so here is my attempt (click the images below, to view a larger version):-

The second part of the project was to storyboard to a script. The script was an episode to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. Now this was where the real fun comes in, when you sit and invent the shot on your own. It can easily go horribly wrong, but if you get into the thought process of camera angles, you can get quite creative with it. Before throwing one self over camera angles, you should read the script very carefully. We each got one page assigned, where mine was page 33:-

ronnie

I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

Donatello picks up a mobile phone, dials.

donatello

I know what I’m doing.
(a beat)
It’s ringing.

int. national phone switching network - night

The Globfather reacts.

globfather

So, those Turtles think they can tap into this network, do they? Well, they’ll soon regret it.

PUSH IN on the Globfather as his expression turns evil.

back in the turtle van

Donatello reacts as the Globfather’s face appears on his monitor screen.

globfather

You’ve dialed the wrong number, fool.

Suddenly the “fold out gun” drops down.

leonardo

He’s got control of our weapons! Get down!

Leonardo pushes Donatello to the deck as the gun fires, blows the opposite door off. Donatello rolls out. Leonardo grabs him, holds onto him as...

the two guns on the roof

suddenly aim upwards and fire, blowing...

a radio antenna

off the top of a building. It falls, crashing to...

the street

as the Turtle Van swerves, barely avoiding it.

The story before this is that the villian (Globfather) has stolen a protein computer, which he has used to hack into the National Phone Switching Network. This allow him to control all electrical equipment. Ronnie is the son of Professor Huxley, the inventor of the protein computer. The Professor is held hostage by the Globfather. That basically what you need to know now. The storyboard turned into this (click the images below, to view a larger version):-

If you wanna see who the professionals handled the same scene, then here's the link to the episode; http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2YmzW2NNyzY&feature=related, my scene is 3:06 into the video.
I my opinion I think my version of the scene is better:-)

Thats it for now, Ill be back soon with the minor project. Hope you enjoyed the post....

Summervacation stuff..

2008-08-27T18:16:00.011+01:00

Alrighty then. This is the last days in Denmark, before travelling back to the UK to start the new life in Cardiff!! I'm very excited about that, and simply have been all summer. But I had to get the time going somehow, so I have been practicing a bit.

First of all; drawing! I was ordered specificly to practise my drawing skills during the summer from my tutors. And as a good student I have been practising. I started on hands/feet (my own), but this got pretty boring very quickly. As naked people are hard to come by, I had to spent a lot of time in museums, drawing after sculptures.

As you might notice some of the sketches are freestyled. One of the doodles I did, I simply enjoyed so much that I had to try and do it in 3D:-

This is still a WIP (Work In Progress), and something work on when I feel like it. But here is the progress so far:-

My intention is to take this one into a sculpting program to do the fine detailing. A sculpting program basically allows you to add details like wrincles, vein and skin texture. I just need to get happy with the base first.
And now when we are on the subject of sculpting application then I have played around a little bit with Mudbox, a program we are going to use next year. Here are my doodles:-

I hope you can see that its a female and male back. Its really harder than it looks in the video tutorials, but its really fun. I struck a dead-end though, with my laptop and no tablet it kinda makes the process tedious and slow.

So other things I have done during the summer is a small assignment from a friend of mine; Henrik Bacher. As a progamming student he is making a small program that needed some illustration. Here they are:-

Lastly I kept my animation skills up by entering small competitions on; www.threedy.com. The first topic was wrestling move, where I basically tried to copy a move I researched:-

The second topic was fishing, where I went all out on trying my best:-

Well that was it for this time. I didn't talk a lot this time, but at least I had something to show:-) Next stop..... Cardiff!!!!!

Industrial Brief & Misc.

2008-07-08T22:52:00.009+01:00

Looonnnnggg time since I last updated this blog, and there is quite a few things to tell. First I would like to thank you for reading the blog and finding it interesting enough to read;-)

Lets start where we left off; THE GLAMMIES. The industrial brief, which counted as a project for next year grad vise, was the most exciting project of the year. I think the sole reason for this, was that we, for the first time, worked in teams just like in the industry. In this project you really see who's a team player and who's not.
My first taste of the Glammies was actually already during the last week of the Character Exploration project, when I was privileged to be chosen for the storyboard team. The teacher had already come up with the storyline, and then we "just" had to do the storyboard. This turned out be a bit more challenging than I first imagined. One thing is to imaging the scenes in your head, another thing is to figure out where everything compared to the camera. Further we had to consider the audience, and how they perceive the "mise-en-scene". Fortunately we had a great team, that pulled through and came out with a good and readable storyboard.
The next stage was to make the shots. The storyboard was divided into the three animation disciplines; Computer animation, 2D animation and 3D animation (stop-motion). In computer animation we got divided into animators and 3D artists, just like in the industry!! In the animators team, which I was a part of, the different shots got divided between us, and then it was just "ready, get set... animate!". I actually forgot a very important stage between the storyboard and animating; the previz! Previz or previsualization is where you make very rough animations to see how long the whole piece is, and where you need to short and where you might be able to prolong the shots. I cant stress how important this stage is. Not only does it help visualise the time of the shots, but further down the line, when the shots are getting made, you will be able to just slap the animations into the previz. The previz will then in the end become the final compiled version. This task kinda resulted in a teamleaderish position. Mark Nicolas and Sam Wright were the wonderful people, that got the burden and did a remarkable job on it!!
So now I just skip forward to the Glammies day, BUT that doesn't mean that the whole project went smoothly. There were some really hard working people on this one, cause unfortunately it's not everyone that has the same sense of responsibility for a team project. Despite that we pulled off a magnificent show!!!
The Glammies day came, and on that day we (the first years) are runners. Helping out with setting up the cinema for the show, welcoming industry people, managing tickets etc. Definitely not as hard as making the show, so it was a relaxing day. Personally I got nominated for "Most Promising First Year", but didn't get the award:-( The award went to James Hodges for his brilliant stop-motion Character Exploration project. You can have a look at all the nominees and winners at; http://www.glamfest.net/08_glam08movs.htm
To sum up the Glammies day, then its definitely something to look forward to every year!!!!

Right what else have I been up to?? Just before leaving Wales for summer vacation in Denmark, I joined in on a competition on www.threedy.com, which is a forum for 3d artist and animator to get feedback on works. Other than help, advice and feedback, they also hold monthly competition in digital sculpting, matte painting, speed painting, speed modelling and animation. I wanted to try out the animation challenge with the topic "Guitar Hero". The basic rules were to an minimum of 5 second of animation involving guitar hero or someone rocking out with an instrument. A pretty open topic, but good to let the imagination run free. Here is my stab at the competitions topic:-

I gotta say that I had some trouble getting use to not working with the biped. But the biggest mistake I did with this animation was a really rookie one, not doing enough PLANNING! I simply just jumped into animating, without doing anything thumbnails or a clear idea of what I was doing. This resulted in spending more time on figure out what the guy would be doing than actually looking at the animation. MISTAKE -> LEARN -> MOVE ON. Unfortunately I didn't win the challenge, but Ill just have a go at it in the next challenge with the topic "Wrestling Move".

The next big thing thats happened since the last post is my sister WEDDING!! The wedding was so beautiful. It could not be anymore perfect. It was held at Vindeholme Castle, which is a small castle with bedrooms as well; Vindeholme Castle. The reason I bring this event up on this blog is because I made an animation for the bride and groom along with a speech, as my wedding gift to them:-

The initial idea was developed and storyboarded 6 months ago, and then I have been spending some of my spare time on the project. I'm pretty happy with the result. The animation in it isn't anything to be proud of, but the somewhat seamless transition between the different objects was a bit harder than I initially thought it to be. In the whole piece there are 22 animations that needed to be fitting together so the audience doesn't get distracted by the transition from to the other. If I look at the animation only, I gotta say that the animation where the sperm cell transforms into the plastic scooter is the best one. You really feel the impact of the plastic scooter colliding with the ground. And if I look at the modelling only, I think the Ganesh model is one I'm proudest of.
As the animation was a personal gift to the wedding couple, I included a lot of things that is only understood by the wedding couple and close family/friends. So if the the whole piece doesn't make sense, you can just mail me for the whole interpretation. Its basically the wedding couples upbringing and how they meet, displayed through objects.

Well I think that was it. As some of you know I'm currently in Denmark, Ill remain here until the 2nd of September. A nice long vacation, where I plan on improving my drawing skills, learn some digital sculpting, do some animation, visit friends and family, and maybe relax a bit:-) I will most likely update the blog at least once before going back to Wales, so Ill just say have a nice SUMMER everyone and see ya later....

Character Exploration - Part 3 - Week 18 & 19

2008-05-12T20:37:00.005+01:00

Hello hello, everyone. The final project of the first year is DONE! There hasn't been a lot of changes since the last article, only the addition of the final performance of my character. The most difficult part of this project was to fit everything into 10 sec. which was our limit for the final performance. Well, I don't want to do a lot of talking on this, Ill show instead:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

If you are having trouble viewing the video above, try this clicking here.

I'm pretty happy with the final performance, I went very methodical about the process, focusing on thing at a time. This helped me to get a cleaner workflow, where I didn't confused about what to do. The only critique I have about my work is the thought process, and the facial expressions. The thought process being the thought process of Emlia. In my opinion she thinks too fast, I would love to go over the 10 sec. limit with more thought being displayed in her face. But there is always sacrifices to be made on a limited time schedule.
The facial expressions could be more "animated", she could have a more rubbery face. But thats something to practice on for next year.

The next three weeks we are going to work on the Glammies, which the annual award show. Looking forward to finally work in a group, and get a little feeling of it is to work in the industry. So next stop....................... THE GLAMMIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Character Exploration - Part 2 - Week 16 & 17

2008-04-25T19:51:00.022+01:00

There is is not a lot to say about the last couple of weeks, BUT there is definitely something to show. The last two week it's been about animating our character with a walk cycle and two traits.

If you haven't read the previous blogs then here the Golden procedure of animating; Research, research>Planning>Thumb nailing>Blocking in the key poses>Do the inbetween poses>Polish>DONE.

Actually the very first thing is to think about the walk/trait. Figuring out how the character moves and where it moves from and to. Then some do a rough thumbnail and then moves on to the video reference (acting it out). I found it better to act it out from the beginning. In any which way you do it, you have to have a clear idea of what is going to happen before recording your video reference. Here is some of my video reference:-

Heh.. The humiliations we have to suffer, all for the glory of animation:-) Allright, let's have a look at what that turned into. This is NOT the final animations. They are close, but they can undergo change before the deadline in two week:-

The copyright is reserved for University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Well that was it for this time. Next time it will be the final thing. Looking forward to it:-) Hope you enjoyed the reading and animations...

Character Exploration - Part 1 - Week 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15

2008-04-12T16:19:00.009+01:00

Final project of the school year, and probably the most important one as this one is the project thats is going to be send to the industry for judgement in the Glammies for the best first year student!!
In this project we have to design, model, rig, and animate our own character. The animation is going to be;

Walk cycle.
Traits
Lip-sync.
Performance.

The walk cycle does not have to be a vanilla walk (see figurative) or realistic, but suitable for the character. The traits are characteristics shown through a situation, and how the character reacts to the situation. The lip-sync. (lip-synchronization) is the synchronization of the characters lips to a monologue. And the performance is the acting to the same monologue.

My character is a 10 year old naughty angel called Emilia. Emilia find heaven incredibly boring, and wants to spice up the place with some pranks. The problem is that nothing goes unnoticed by God... Ill leave the rest up for the animation, cause that is our main purpose of this project To portray these characteristics through the design and animation.

The first week was spend on the idea and concept drawings. Nailing down the idea is the hardest part, cause of the number of character that has been made so far. Something truely original not only needs a good imagination, but also a lot of development after the initial idea. My initial idea had a feeling of realism instead of cartoony. When I pitched my initial idea to out teacher, Gareth Cavanagh (his blog), he pointed out that my idea was not suitable for the amount of modelling/animation that we are doing for this project. So I simplified the idea.
The first week of this project was the week before the easter holidays, so I had 3 weeks off to develop the concept of the character further.
This past week we have been modelling and setting up for the rig, so we are ready for animating the walk cycle next week.

My concept drawings developed alongside with the story of the character. So first I tried to nail down the gender of my character, then avanced to the head where I had to convey 10-year old girl to the audience. Lastly the body, which also had to say 10-year old, but still making the character interesting by playing around with the proportions.
When I finally had a clear idea of the character, I went on to the facial expressions and action poses. The whole process can be viewed here, by clicking the image below:-

After getting your character down with expressions and poses, its time for a model sheet. A model sheet is the character view from different angles, where the most common is a front and side view. As the purpose of the project is to animate rather than modeling character has to be split into simple shapes, and linked directly to the biped rig. This is visualized on the model sheet (click on the image, to view a bigger version):-

Now to the modelling, the part I really enjoy:-) I dont really want to comment on the modelling process, cause it gets quite technical, but if anyone has any questions they are welcome to ask.
After modelling comes the rigging, which was quite easy as it was linking the objects directly to the biped. Now comes the rush of the whole project, seing your character move for the very first time. Very additive to breathe life into something you made!!!
Unfortunately I have not got any animation to show, that will have to wait to the next time. But I got a beauty shot (a rendered pose, with nice lighting), and simple turn around animation (the halo got adding after I did the beauty shot):-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Well that was it for this time around. I am really looking forward to start animating Emilia. Hope you enjoy the reading, see ya next time....

Animals - Part 2; 4-Legged - Week 8, 9 & 10

2008-03-08T13:48:00.013Z

A human has two legs, and with just two legs there is a lot going on in the body when we are walking. Then multiply that with two, so you got 4 legs and "two" hips to control. There you have our project; animating a 4-legged animal.
As with the last bird-project we had to hit three motions:-

From rest to walk (start)
Walking (walk cycle)
From walk to rest (stop)

The first thing was to determine which animal to go for. Although our brief says 4-legged animal, it was not allowed to choose lizards, crocodiles and general reptilian animals, as these have a very different walk than a horse, cow, cat, dog etc. As I am very indecisive and I did not know which animal to go for, as they all are interesting to explore. I made a list of animals, I wanted to animate and draw one at random. Fate wanted me to animate a bison.

Then the decision has down, the research could begin. I was actually surprised of how much video reference, there is on the net, of bisons. If you did the same search, but a more common animal like a cow, there is a lot less material. But if you chose a cow, you should be able to get some first hand video reference. And that was actually my backup, if there wasn't enough material on the net, I could use the cows motion as reference.
To be honest I did not do as much research and studying as I did with the bird project. This might have been why the project didn't turn out great. The method of research and study of the motion was the same as always; research > study > thumbnail.

If anyone is interested in the research and planning, here is some videos and my flat-work:-

The research is down and done, now the fun starts; animating. I got to say that it is much easier to animate a grounded animal, than a flying one. The walk cycle went very fast; keys > passing position > inbetweens > done. As our walk cycle was one the spot (the animal is not moving forward) there was a lot of issues that I didn't encounter until the stop and start. One BIGGG issues was the way I had constructed the rig. The rig is basically a biped (see the Figurative project's pull and lift) that is posed bend down to walk on all fours. The problem was that I put the feet/hands on the bones right above the hooves. This meant that the pivot point of the feet/hands wasn't centered on the hooves, which messed up my curves in the workbench. Sorry for the very technical talk, but in the end I had to do a lot of bodging (local animators term of having to do a lot of work, like keying every frame). The messed up pivot point also meant a lot of sliding feet hence the bodging.
This project got really tiring in the end, because I felt that I wasn't animating but just adjusting all the time. Alright lets have a look a the labor for the last three weeks:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

In my opinion the is lots of stuff wrong with the whole animation. Some basic stuff is things like I didn't get enough weight in the movement. As the bison is such a heavy animal, you should REALLY feel when the animal steps and the weight balance is off-setting. I think my time could have been spend on improving the animation so much, if it hadn't been for the pivot point problem and sliding feet/hooves. I spend most of my time fighting against the rig, where we should have lived in harmony:-) But then that is a lesson to learn for the next time: make the rig properly!
I don't really have any wise words to say about this project. It kinda did the job, but I don't think I am going to sweep anyones feet away with this one.

The next project is going to be a long one; 6 weeks!! And we are getting into the easter holiday with 3 weeks off!!! So the next update to this blog lies quite a long way into the future. But maybe I will update it during the project, or maybe a surprise article... ehh, who knows, just a little head up on the time between this update and the next one.

I am all out of words now, and to be honest a bit hung over from my birthday, so I will rap it up here.

Animals - Part 1; 2-Winged - Week 5, 6 & 7

2008-02-18T21:05:00.009Z

If anyone thought it was/looked difficult to animate a human character, then try animating an animal..
Our assignment was to animate a bird, going through it's whole range of flight motion. This was split into 3 parts:

Take off
Flight cycle
Landing

As always the first thing is to determine which bird you are going for. As our bird had to be able to go through the whole flight motions, then our choises were somewhat restricted. E.g. we couldn't choose a orstritch or a penguin, as these are non-flying birds.

At first I did not have a clear idea of which bird I wanted to do, so I just started on researching random birds. In my research I stumbled apon a lot of video reference of doves in slow-motion. When I first saw that dove's way of flying, I was immidiately hook on that. The dove's flight is actually very graceful, therefore I don't want to try and describe it with my halfbaked vocabulary so I'll show you; http://corbismotion.com/Popups/ViewClipDetail.aspx?clipID=7fffab13-0000-d4ed-2b02-162b20291941.

The dove's wings has a very wide range of motion which I imnidiately found interesting, though this would actually be the ting that would be biting my behind later on.

The whole research stage was pretty straight forward; find video and still image references. On the net there is a lot of reference material for a dove in slow-motion. The primary websites I use is; http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/, http://www.corbismotion.com/, http://www.gettyimages.com/.
These are great for getting video/still images references of any kind of motion, and the material is royalty-free. The first week went with only doing the research part. In the Computer Animation class we were kind of forced to only do the research for the first week, as they didn't teach us how to rig our bird untill after the first week. In my opinion this was a good forced choise, as it forced us to do all the research and planning for both 1. and 2. part of this project. The second part is about 4-legged animals, but more on that in 3 weeks:-)

In the same week as the research we went to Bristol Zoo Gardens with our lifedrawing class, which was a great oppertunity to get some first hand references material. Unfortunately for me it waas hard to catch the dove they had on camera, though they had an outdoor cantine area which provided the oppertunity of catching some pigeons on camera. Whenever you cant the first hand reference, then expand to animals/motion thats near the one you are lookng for.

After the research there is the planning of the animation, and here there is no shortcuts. Get the best reference you have got and start drawing your keys (key-poses). Personally I get the best understanding of the motion, by analysing each key then analyze and write down the motion between the keys. This kind of relieves you from drawing the inbetweens, but you still have the motion down on paper which is easier to look at when sitting infront of the computer instead of shifting between programs.

If anyone is interested in the research and planning, click the image below:

With the research out of the way, we can start animating!!!! BUT no, we need a rig first. In this part of the project we are going to build our own rig from the bones in 3Ds max. For this stage it is extremely important to have some proper reference material of the proportions and the skeletal system of your bird/character.
Understanding how the bird's skeletal system is build is going to help you very much when making the rig. Not only do you then know the proportions of the birds wings, spine and legs, but you also know how each bone interacts with the next one.
I learn quite a bit from rigging this bird, and I now can seen how rigging as a specialisation could be fun as you decide how the character should be able to move.

Now for the animating. Nothing special to tell here except for the usual; pose the keys > do the inbetweens > space the keys > time out the animation > polishing > done:-)
Sounds easy enough doesn't it?? Well it would have been if I wasn't so stupid as to forget some basic stuff, like proper spacing of the keys. I tell ya, if I were training to be a ninja I would get a beating from the master for forgetting the basic stuff. Luckly I am only training to be a ninja animator, where it is up to yourself to beat yourself up for poor animation:-S
Well enough about the mental pressures of strugling animator, time to show the labour:

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

If you want to have a look at any of the tests, here is the link; http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-1148849394693293515

In my opinion the level of quality animation increases from take off to landing. The take off is far from getting my own recognision of a job well done. This is of course my own fault, and I know where the problem occured; in the research stage. I did not have good enough reference material for the take off motion.

The flight cycle is decent and I dont terribly mind handing that in for assesment, though there was a big problem here aswell. In this stage I did actually have the proper reference material, the problem lied in the speed of the wings flapping. If you time the wings of a dove/pigeon flapping, you will probably notice that a whole wing action is 4-5 frames or 1/6 of a second long. If I had to hold true to this, and make the wings complete it's motion in 4 frame, it would be so fast that you would only see a blur of motion where the wings should be. So I had to compromise and use 8+ frames for the wings flapping, though this still kind of works. It doesn't scream dove/pigeon, but more of a generalized bird flight.

The landing is the best animation that came out of the last three weeks. I wouldn't nesseceraly say that it screams dove/pigeon, but it comes quite close to the real thing. That is not so much for the landing, but more for the small step after the landing which gives the animation that extra touch. Definately going to remember that for part 2 of this project:-)

Well, thats was everything I had to say. Hope you enjoyed the reading, and Ill scribbling some words down in 3 weeks for part two of this project...

Figurative - Week 2, 3 & 4.

2008-01-26T15:46:00.001Z

Full on animation now!! Our first taste of animating humanish characters with arms, legs and spines. Our objective was split into three categories:-

Walking
Pushing/Pulling an object
Throwing/Lifting an object

The walking had to be a "vanilla" walk, which is a straight walk with no character like drunken walk/sad walk/happy walk and so on. Its actually really hard not to add any character to the walk. Further everyone in the world know how a walk should look like. They may not know about animation, but as everyone has seen people walking their whole life they immediately know if there is something wrong with the animation.
For the second and third objective we could choose between pushing/pulling and throwing/lifting. On both I put the responsebility of choosing to a coin. I figured that if I hated the decision I could blame the coin instead of myself:-) The coin decided that I had to do the pulling an object and lifting an object. There wasn't really any restictions on the two, only that it had to look realistic. So we could do cartoony pulling and lifting.

Before doing any work on the computers, you have to do the prober research and planning. Here the internet is a very good place to look for reference material. Especially places like BBC's motion gallery; http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/. But nothing beats doing the motion yourself and recording it, cause then you can get the exact angle and motion that you need. Personally I dont think I did the prober research for the walk, cause I relied too much on the stuff from the internet. I experienced on the pulling and lifting that I made it easier for myself to do the planning, by recording myself doing the motion. Here is some of the recordings we did of myself:-

The research for the pulling and lifting is a lot better than for the walk, in my opinion. We (Leon Roberts, Leon Dexter and I) set out one afternoon and did it all. When doing the research it is a lot better to be in a group. In a group there is more heads to get good ideas on how to do the action, more people to record and you look less silly if you are in a group:-)

The next step is to make the planning. This is done with simple thumbnails to illustrate the key poses. These key poses are also the ones that you use when making the animation. The planning stage is, if possible, more important than the research stage. The planning is basically what your animation is going to look like, so if you planning is crap then your animation is going to be crap. I found that the best work flow was to make the key poses, then describe what happens in between the key poses. In this way you will have the whole animation in front of you on paper, when working on the computer. Heres the thumbnail and planning I did for the three animations:-

The animations was a bit more work than I initially thought it would be. The best workflow I experienced was to make the key poses next to each other on the timeline, then do the poses in between. From there you space out your poses and work on the timing of the animations. Finally you start ajusting and polishing the animations. Since the walk was a "vanilla walk", there is kind of a formula that you can go by. You make two strides and loop it. Here you can get by with just 9 poses. So then you dont have too many poses to ajust. Where as my pulling and lifting had 32 and 27 poses. Still I found the walk to be the hardest one to animate, because the walk has to flow, where the pulling and lifting does not have to have this fluid motion. Allright wont bore you anymore with this animation talk. Ill bore you with the animations instead:-) Heres the product from the last three weeks:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

I liked the "rig" (Rigging/rigged, in computer animation, parts of a 3D model are rigged so that an animator can easily select and move parts of the model (such as an arm or leg) without having to painstakingly select every single vertex in the desired part. The rig also helps the animator with constraints and movement of other attached parts.) from the walk a lot, so I played around with it whenever I got bored with the walk. Heres some of the stuff I made, while playing around with the rig:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Well that was it for this round, hope you enjoyed the reading and animations, I did making them:-)......

Timing & Mechanics - Week 11,12 & 13

2007-12-15T10:56:00.001Z

Our longest project so far, and properly the funniest one. The project it self is like an avanced version of the Pacman project, in which the aim is to further our skills in animation and our understanding of timing within animation.
Our brief was split into three sections, which corresponded with the three weeks of project time:-

Single Objects
Linked Objects (Forward Kinetics)
Linked Objects with Inverse Kinetics

The first week we had to do a series of animations showing acceleration and deceleration. We were given a toy car to animate. It was good that they kept it simple for us, but they wanted us to animate the toy car like a real one which proved to quite a challenge. Though it gave me a good chance to really work with the timing in my animations. Further we got an introduction to the curveeditor within 3ds max, in which we can better control the timing and speed of our animations.
Two very important terms that we had to keep in mind was anticipation and followthrough. Anticipation is about showing a build up before an action, so in the car example the car would oves slightly backwards before accelerating forward. Followthrough is the action that extends the primary action, again in the car example the car would bounce forward when it stops harshly.
Heres a couple of examples of the car animations:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

In my opinion this part of the project wasthe most boring bit. Its very restricting to animate the toy car, because it lack movable parts. Now the second week was a lot more interesting, where we dealt with linked objects with forward kinetics. Forward kinetics is when you move each seperate part individually. In this week we had to put aerials on our cars, then move on to make a swinging pendulum and an swinging arm.
I really liked doing the aerials, which were all about the bounce from the followthrough. I learned that if you get one part of the aerial to work, the rest comes automaticly. The same kind of goes with the pendulum, which is basically an inversed aerial. Now the swinging arm was our first taste of figurative animation, sweeetttt.... The biggest challenge about the swinging arm was not to caricature the movement too much. In animation we have to caricature the movements a bit to get the message across to the audience, but it easily gets too much and controlling this balance is what makes the diffence between animators and NINJA animators (aka briliant animators).
Talky talky, now showy showy:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

I think the pendulum is the worst one of the three. We had to end the animation at some point within a reasanable time frame, and this makes it just a bit unbelievable because a pendulum would properly swinging for quite a long time. The arm is in my opnion a good start on the figurative animation. All ninjas need training before mastering the stuff:-)
Lastly the third week with objects linked with inverse kinetics. Inverse kinetics is when you only have to move the "master joint". In the case of a leg you would only have to move the foot or the torso and the knee would bend accordingly. Whereas compared to forward kinetics where you would have to bend the upper and lower leg to move the foot into the right position. if someone dont understand this stuff, I really wont blame them cause this stuff is even hard to explain as a tutor without showing it. Unfortunately I cant show you it because you have to sit infront of a computer with 3D Studio Max installed.
The character that we made and animated in the third week was a one legged egg with an aerial. Sounds a bit crazy, but heck its animation so you can do what-ever you want:-) Our objective was to animate the egg bouncing across the screen 3-5 times and coming to a stop. At first the IK (Inverse Kinetics) was a pain to animate with, and it still kind of is but Im begining to see the anvantages of it. Lets look at what came out of that week:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Dont pay tooo much attention to the second animation with the egg falling. It was done as a quick reminder of how fun animation can be, when I got a bit tired of the primary animation.
I think I pulled the bouncing off quite well, but the ending is definately something I will get questined on in the critique. I just a hard a really time figuring out how to stop the egg, then spend some time in my room jumping back and forward to get the feeling of the stop. I realised finally that when you have that amount of momentum in you action, you dont stop suddenly. The momentum from the bouncing pulls you forward and to stop you have to do the extra small jump.
The final handed-in video was a compiled version of the best animations, which you can view here:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

In other subjects we handed in our first essay and did our first proper presentation in Contectual Studies. The presentaiton did go that good because I totally ran out of time and hand to rush things a lot. The objectives of the essay was to pick a 40-60 second scene from a movie or animation, indentify the themes and mood and analysize the ways these and conveyed to the audience through the filmic language. I chose the live-action version of Aeon Flux as my film and the final scene in that. It was a good study to get us into the academic way of looking at movies.

I think Ill stop here, because I WANT HOLIDAY!! So these were the words for this time, I hope you enjoyed the reading... Ill continue again in the new year, where we start on figurative animation!!! wuuuuhhuuuu, looking forward to that...

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EVERYONE, AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Sound Sync. - Week 9 & 10

2007-11-24T23:42:00.001Z

In the two weeks that's past we have been doing sound syncronisation. This project should give us an understanding of syncronizing our animation to a piece of sound clip. First we got teamed up in groups of three and twos, where after we got a random piece of music-soundclip. Our objectives after that was to;-

Visually reprensent the dynamics and characteristics of the sound.
Create a short animation based on the an abstract soundtrack.

Work succesfully in a team situation.

As you can get from the brief this was our first team based project. The soundtrack was 30 seconds long, and we should split the 30 seconds between the group members. In our group we looked at the flow of the soundtrack and divided the soundtrack at the appropriate times. Luckly the flow of the soundtrack allowed us to split the sound into three parts with approximately 10 seconds each. After that we looked into the characteristics of the sound in our group, trying to find proper research areas and inspirations. With our sound we landed on a very simplified look, with inspiration in geometric shapes and bright contrasting colours. From there on it was every man for him self, with the occationally helping hand.

When I studied my part of the soundtrack (the last part) I somehow saw flashing light in my head. Fortunately I wasn't passing out or going insane, it actually worked for this piece of the soundtrack:-) So my inspiration would also come from neonlights aswell as the geometric shapes. With these things in mind, I continued to sketch down the idea that was forming in my head:-

And for those interested heres the research pages for the project:-

The first thing you have to do whenever you have a piece of sound you are doing an animation to, is to break it down. This is where we got introduced to barcharts. In the animation world barchart consists of bars in which you can indicate a sound, whether its music/beats or speech, on a frame by frame basis. Maybe a bit hard to understand, soo Ill just show it then:-

As you can see in the barcharts I had five beats to syncronize my animation to. I split the cube idea into those five beats, which you can see in the previous sketch. This was actually the hardest part of the project, in my opinion. From there is was just building the cube and setting up the lights and generally organizing my scene for the animation.
The animation part was really just a case of building the first animation then copy/pasting the animation to the appropriate places. This is where the reward comes in, if you did a good job on breaking down the sound. Because you can basically just look at your barcharts and copy/paste the animation in, according to your barchart.

I think this is more than enough talking, time to show the stuff. First video is my individual peice, and the second is the whole teams joint up animations:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

I think the project was really fun. Sure you get very tired of the sound that you got, but when you've successfully broken down the music and you do the animation and it actually syncs up is a great feeling. Though I properly got a bit too overexcited and work through last weekend, so I basically finshed my piece by tuesday. So I went on to start on a personal project of mine; reconstructing Calvin and Hobbes in 3D. Still working on this, and hopefully Ill finish it up soon so I can show it to you guys:-)

Well that was kind of it for this time. Hope you enjoyed the reading, looking forward to coming home for Christmas and New Year!!!

Character Design - Week 7 & 8

2007-11-10T14:48:00.001Z

The last couple of weeks we have been thrown into the world of character design. This process is very important for the industry. With this process helps the people working on a movie to get a feel of a character within the story. The brief for the two weeks was:-

Research, conceptualise and design a character for animation.
Construct and moel a three dimensional macquette from a set of design sheets.
To understeand the significance of character deisng and realisation in relation to the animation process.

A macquette is basically a sculptured model, made from steel wires (as the core), foam (polstering), and plastasine/clay on top.

The difference between our assignment and the industry's process is the purpose of the character. In the industry the character is made for a motion picture, and conceptualized from the story of the movie. While our character has no concept relation, except for our imagination. This turned out to be the biggest problem!!
To brainstorm an original character from nothing, is harder than you'd think. Actually the idea of a completely original character is impossible. The character will always have some kind of realation to something on this earth, cause this is where our inspiration comes from. The brainstorm consisted of listing columns of form, personality, profession, and time. After this the different elements from the columns gets stitched together randomly, eg. form=lamp, personality=depressive, profession=doorsalesman, time=present day. So that's a lamp that goes around trying to sell light bulbs to people, but cant because he's depressed and doesn't shine himself.
Now these random characters are just to spark some creativity, some do without this and just throws ideas around in a group. The next step is to determine wether the character works, and doing some first concept art on it. This is were my weakness comes in; drawing. Damn that hand-mind coordination, would love the one inventing a pencil you just plug into your mind. Enough selfpetty, practise instead!!
In the process of delevoping the character you'll have to do some research, which could be lamps and doorsales men. Along with the development and research, theres action-, expression-, model- and in situation sheets. All this can be viewed in the final presentation, click the picture to continue to the presentation:-

The design developement was mentally hard work. Creating a background for the character and understanding why the character acts the way he does. All the development work was done the first week, the second week was reserved for the macquette.
Doing the macquette was great fun!!! I really like the sculpting phase, and painting the macquette reminded me of the days when I used to paint Warhammer characters. Funny how all this takes me back to what I did as a child. The drawing, using my imagination, painting is all things I used to do when I was a child, and loved doing it. Though I lost my patience as I grew up, and lost interest in those things. Maybe I'm destined to this line of work, just had little detour of growing up?? Spooky stuff:-)
Aaaahhh, nostalgic and philosophical moments. Moving on to the macquette, heres some picture of finished model:-

Final thoughts on this project is properly that I learned how much I like sculpturing, and will properly invest in equipment to do personal sculptures in the future.

On others things the last two week i got to mention our lifedrawing class in week 8. The class was about artistic inspiration and expression. The teacher (Nick Price) brought music in, and played different genres for the class. Our assignment was to associate the music with our drawing of the model. This was the most fun lifedrawing class I done so far, and heres some of the best ones I did:-

That was the words for last couple of weeks, hope you enjoyed the reading...

Painting & Film - Week 5 & 6

2007-10-28T11:02:00.001Z

As an animator you will have to know how the camera moves. In the understanding of camera movement, you get a better overview of what you are trying to accomplish with your animation. For these last couple of weeks we have been studying camera movements and the way it effects the audience's perception of a piece of film.
The brief for the two weeks was to:-

Research, investigate, and interpret a painting
Demonstrate storyboarding skills

Convey thoughts and meaning through the use of cinematic language

For those that dont know what a storyboard is, here's the wikipedia description; "Storyboards are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of previsualizing a motion graphics or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity." We had to do a 1 minute film with the painting, where we pan/zoom/cut/etc. between different areas of the painting. And through the camera movement portray the meaning of the painting.

When we got the brief, my initial idea was to do some painting to the song "Pictures" by System of a Down, though the fixation of this song would come back to haunt me. The song has a military feel to it. For that reason I looked for civil war-like painting, those old ones where theres tons of stuff going on. I my search for my painting, I came upon a painter that had the style that I was looking for; John Singleton Copley. After a lot of searching through paintings by John S. Copley, I finally found the proper painting;-

The Death of Major Peirson

As you can see the painting glorifies the death of Major Peirson. Major Peirson was a young british major that stood against a french invasion of Jersey, though in reality he died before the battle started and so John S. Copley plays with the truth to emphazise that Major Peirson's death contributed to the defeat of the French.
Now if you hear the "Pictures" song and look at the picture, they dont actually fit together very well. I wanted to do something alternative, but this turned out to be too difficult. I worked on the storyboard for the film, with a lot of quick cuts/pans to fit with the song. In the storyboard process I realized that the song and the painting just didn't fit together. Though I liked the painting, so I trashed the song.
The painting is really staged, like a scene in a theater play. This lead me to search in cinematic soundtracks, where I found a song from the film "300". The song is "Immortals Battle" by Tyler Bates. The song has a nice glofying feel to it, which fitted perfectly with the painting. Further the song has a sudden change of pace, which I could use to portray the death of Major Peirson. Thats enough talk, now it time to show. Heres the pages from my polished storyboard:-

This is the final piece I handed in (Warning! There is sound on this video, just if you are a sound-sensitive enviroment):-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Though these two weeks projects have been a little painful because of the struggle with the music, is has been a good lesson in planning. I definately learned how important it is to do the research and planning properly. I must say that I'm happy with the result. I think it captures the feel and mood of the painting pretty well.

Could only get one anothers work, which is Leon Roberts;-

Those were the words for this time around... Hope you enjoyed it.

Tasters Week - Week 4

2007-10-08T22:16:00.001+01:00

2D-Animation...

To truely be an animator you will have to have some experience with 2D animation, or thats what the tutors say..

This week all the animation class gets moved around, so that everyone gets a taste of a different kind of animation. Us, the computer animation guys, have to give 2D animation a try, and the 2D guys have to try computer animation. The stop-motion group is doing computer animation aswell.

The brief (assignment) is to make an animation with a tennisball, canonball and a balloon. The animation needs to show the weight of the different balls, by drawing them falling down a staircase. I have never drawn so many drawings in a week before. Allthough the drawings wasn't anything but a circle most of the time, I most have drawn at least 200+ drawings. For a second of 2D animation you will have to draw 12 drawings, so thats means I'm never going to be 2D animator :-) Its such a lot of work, but when you put the drawings together and they start to move it's worth the trouble. As much fun as 2D animation is, I am still a Computer animator by heart.

The experience of 2D animation was really good. I thought it would be a pain to get through, but the resulting product was worth it ( said that twice now:-) In the future, the knowlegde of 2D workflow, is properly going to be beneficial for a career in 3D.

And thats enough talk about it. Time to show the products of the week, I must excuse the poor quality in the bottom-right hand corner:-

Tennis ball

Cannon ball

Balloon

All copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff school of Creative and Cutural Industries.

The best of the three is in my opinion the balloon animation, cause the timing and spacing of the frames comes pretty close a real balloons movements. The worst of the three is the cannon ball. I dont really know why I dont like that one, maybe it's because I haven't actually seen a cannon ball fall down a staircase. Yep, thats right. They didn't allow us to roll a cannon ball down the stairs. Jeez, the nerve of the tutors. And they expect us to do some proper research ;-)

On the other stuff that animation, I finally got the grant from the Danish government through. So at this point I dont have to worry to much about money, which frees a lot of "thinking" to focus on my animation.
Thats the words from the week, hope you found the reading a bit interesting.

Week 2/3 - Freshers and school start

2007-09-30T21:59:00.001+01:00

Now the campus is full.

The freshers (1. years) has moved in, and the campus filled with people. Approx. 1000 people live on the campus. In the school hours over 4000 people wander around the campus, finding the next class, getting fresh air or general socializing. Though I don't really get to see the busy hours, cause I'm not on this campus. I'm on the Glyntaff campus, which is across the valley just 20 minutes walking.

Along with the freshers start, the school starts as well. Or the introduction of the tutors, classmates, courses, and so on. Our introduction with the tutors was pretty fun. The tutors on the animation courses aren't as normal lectures. They all have a background in the industry, and therefore they haven't gotten the "traditional" education. This causes them to be a bit more relaxed in their tutoring.

My timetable is pretty filled compared to other courses on the University. We have school hours from 09:30 to 16:00 every day. This is because we have a lot of practical time, where we work on projects and generally practising. The modules that we are going to cover is very planned out, and it looks nice so far. They have build the course up so you a good foundation in life-drawings and understanding of media. The course is not without any "text work". We'll have to hand in essays, which f.ex. could be an analysis of a movie. Just so people don't think that the course is all practical and no theoretical work.

Our first assignment was to make a series of animations with the characters from the game "Pacman". In the animations we had to cover; acceleration, deceleration, change of direction, showing different of weight and characterisation and emotions. And here's some of the stuff I made.

If you want to see more videos follow the link; http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-1148849394693293515. All copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff school of Creative and Cultural Industries.
The "Pacman" assignment was to be handed in Friday, and then the tutor are going to examine the animations over the weekend. Tomorrow (Monday) we will have our first critique. So for the first time my life I'm looking for to a Monday..

We also got our first essay brief in Contextual Studies (understanding of media). We have to take 40-60 seconds of an animation, film or computer game, and analyse it. The essay has to be 1500 words long, which at the current moment seems very long for me.

The first week of school also brought on the first Visual studies class, which basically is life drawing. The tutor there seems all right, he definitely wants us to be good and he tries to motivate us as much as possible.

Besides the first week of school not much else has happened. Was out in Cardiff yesterday, which was actually really fun. There was a rugby match on in the stadium; New Zealand v. France. Didn't see the match, but heard it was a good game with a close win to France; 18-20. When there is a rugby match on, the streets are filled with fans and that gives the city a good atmosphere.

That was the words from the last two weeks, hope you enjoyed the little reading.

International Welcome Week - Week 1

2007-09-02T22:19:00.001+01:00

Finally!!

Been planning this for 2-3 months, and now I’m finally here in Pontypridd, Wales. I got accepted at the Glamorgan Centre for Art & Design Technology a month ago. In the meantime I’ve been planning the way over here; student loans, accommodations, student finances from the Danish government, and generally getting geared up mentally and physically.

If I knew the workload that it takes to start at a university abroad, I might have considered it twice. But when your dream-education isn't in your home country, you got to seek else where.

The UK was a pretty easy choice considering two thing; economy and language. There is some excellent universities, with computer animation (or there abouts), in non-English countries, but I’m a language idiot. Except for English, which everybody (in Denmark at least) almost gets in with breastfeeding.

The second factor was the economy in it all. At first I applied to a couple of universities, in the UK as well as the US. The problem with the US is that you can’t get financial support from the Danish government for any of the universities (not yet that is). So the choice landed on the UK.

After some searching I singled out two universities; Glamorgan Centre for Art & Design Technology and University of Cumbria. The initial choice of Glamorgan was a case of taste in course structure and references from former students.

After applying to Glamorgan, I took the chance of going to an interview. I got in, fortunately, but after hearing the prospects of place, I knew that Glamorgan was the right choice. Glamorgan Centre for Art & Design Technology has been bought by the University of Glamorgan, and the whole department is going to transfer to Cardiff. In Cardiff, the university is building a new department. MMMmmmhhhh, prospects of new facilities and new furniture, its always nice to be the first ones to use them. The new department is called Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, so if I in future blogs mix between the two departments names, then you knew why.

I have really been looking forward to start; meeting new people, see how the school/course works, how I match up to the rest of the class, how well I do in a foreign country, and generally starting a new chapter in my life. For those that haven't seen any of my work so far, I might just plug my website: http://www.3d-presentation.dk/. For the non-Danish, don’t worry the site is in English. For those non-English, worry... To reach my personal work, go into the Personal Works category, or just follow the link: http://3d-presentation.dk/Personal_work.html .

Started the Welcome Week for the International Students, and it is definately recommendable to any one going to University of Glamorgan. Not only do they show you the area and rules of the place, you also get information about the does and don'ts of Wales. And not only that, everything is free in the Welcome Week; Sports activities, informations session, trips. Of course you´ll have to pay the initial rent for the Week, but still its worth it if you go on the trips and activities.

Moving on to the room that I got, which is a standard room (no bathroom), is not too bad. The room is about 14 square meters, with a sink, bed, desk, deskchair and closet. At first it looked really small, but after moving the furniture around you'll get at bit more space. These aren't from my room, but its the same size:-

I am really impressed of all the possibilities that there are on the campus like sport activities and study support centres. The sports center on campus has decent facilities, but they offer a lot of different activities, which are off campus. Like quad biking, which I tried twice during Welcome Week.

Wednesday - Welsh Night. Getting some culture from Wales; food and dancing. Really fun night, where everyone was having fun on the dance floor.

Thurdays - Went to my first rugby game; Wales v. Japan. They played in Cardiff, so it was pretty easy to get to the stadium. I can only say that you have to try to go to Cardiff when theres a rugby game on. The streets near the stadium gets blocked from traffic and gets filled with people thats either pub crawling or going to the stadium. The tickets for the match were quite cheap compared to the view that you get; 16 pounds, and then you'll get a view like the picture. This is something you should do when coming to Cardiff, and its definately not the last time for me.

Saturday - Night Out In Cardiff. The was arranged a night out for all the International students. Again everyone was having a very good time. Theres a lot of pictures in the online album, so I would advice you to go there and have a look; http://picasaweb.google.com/3dinwales.

So these were the first words on my adventure. Ill try and update the blog a couple a times a month depending on the amount of activity, and Ill post all the work Ill be doing here.