Propercorn Brief

Design board designs

Here are some design boards of my design boards for propercorn, these were vital for production due to how I can rough out ideas and get to a more resolved conclusion:

This is one of my favourite processes due to the freedom that one has when getting ideas down on a page, and resolving ideas in a way that lets you feel confident in moving on to the next stage. also you can evaluate how close to the brief your ideas are before resolving them further.

The final animation

The file for my animation is too large for blogger so here is the link to the video on my youtube channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqhklk2LNgo&feature=youtu.be

My thoughts!

I have really enjoyed this module as i have such a passion for 3D animation and modelling, so I had a fire in my belly throughout the whole thing, the results I am proud with and feel as though the module went quite smoothly. if I were to re-visit the module I would probably choose a different song to extract lyrics from, as I felt like I was cheating with choosing a short audio, but other than that i am quite comfortable with the software used and am looking forward to using it in the future!

The lamp

Decision

As you saw in my initial designs, I was going to include a lamp on the small table to add a bit more to the atmosphere in the room, but as I started experiment with textures and translucency etc. I decided it didn't fit with the overall dark looking room of emptiness and emotion.

Here is my experiment

As you can see it is quite distracting and I thought it might take away from the feel of the animation that I was striving for.

So I took away the light inside the lamp, and dulled the textures of the lamp just so it was barely visible in the scene.

This is a prime example of a crucial aspect of animation ... Trial and error.

initial development

From the start

As I have been posting about the importance of development work, I wanted to post mine in order to further show my understanding of it and how it effects the overall outcome.

Initial design ideas for the environment

In this module the focus was on the animation and the understanding of character and narrative, so I wanted to keep the environment simple but also influencing the overall atmosphere. so here are my first sketches of the environment

There are a few elements I wanted to include in the scene but overall I just wanted to have a main light lighting up the floor and partially lighting up the elements of the environments, with no walls to cramp things into.

Here is my rendered example:

StoryBoard

Bearing in mind the audio that I have selected is quite short there is not much room for alot of movement without risking it looking over the top, but the storyboard does show slight concideration of camera angles and motion

Here is my first render of the scene

The camera does follow my initial plan, but after getting feedback on my animation it did seem a bit stiff, and after including facial animation you couldn't really see the mouth due to the movements that MOOM acts out. so as you will see the final animation has much improved camera motion.

the rise in technology

As 3D animation has come into its own over the last 20 years the main potential is one of the reasons I am so passionate about it, the potential to create fascinating worlds to get lost in, and special effects to be in awe to! and how fast this method is developing. lets go back in time to where 3D animation was getting introduced into film.

Looker

Looker was the first film to include a CGI character, all the way back in 1981, it used computer shaders to create sci-fi looking effects

Jurassic Park

Jumping to 1993, 12 years later, Jurassic park created 3D animated and modelled Dinosaurs, this was a big jump in 12 years, and already the quality of the CGI has come on leaps and bounds.

Toy Story

Just 2 years on in 1995 was the release of Toy Story, the first 3D animated feature length film, which is the foothold in the animation industry, the technology curve just sky rockets from here!

The animation style seems to step back a bit to look less realistic, I presume the reason for this is due to the fact it was a whole feature length film rather than just elements within the film, and as previously posted, it would have taken a lot longer to render.

And then in the 2010's we have films such as avatar and Beowulf which are CGI but also appear very Photo-realistic, which is the type of animation I want to pursuit.

benafits of 3d animation.

From experience in my personal project, there is a benefit of 3D that springs to mind after working out what method to use to animate an aspect of my project.

The project

My personal  project consists of an island in the middle of the ocean that is inhabited by one man who lives in a windmill all of which (apart from the ocean) I have modelled physically.

the challenge that I crossed was how to recreate the ocean.

my initial idea was to use a technique of modelling an ocean, but this would require hundreds of panals of ocean to use through stop motion animation to produce the effect of the ocean around the island.

But with the ever increasing technology of 3D animation, I soon realised that 3D has one potential that I couldn't create myself...

Infinity!

A problem that I would face would be a limited horizon if I went down the road of modelling the ocean, I would have to frame the shot so that the horizon would look like it was going on forever. which I can easily create using Maya and its built in ocean shader mixed in with some bifrost at closer parts.

Here is an example of what I mean:

As you can see the ocean goes on forever, until it reaches the horizon, so with a bit of learning I will be able to get a convincing ocean around my island without having to worry about framing to keep a modelled ocean from looking fake.

Summarise

To summaries my understanding of character and narrative, I am going to state what I thing what makes a success from stringing together different examples to form an evaluated assumption as to what works the best

The crucial step

Pre production

From experience in creating my own animations, I think the design aspect of the characters and narrative are the most important stage of creation, for without the plans to create you don't have an ultimate goal to reach for.

So Character Design

And storyboarding to create the environment for those characters to inhabit and experience!

With these initial designs fleshed out the rest of the production can begin, which ever method in which this is achieved, and then to be polished up in post production.

And then if these steps are followed well, the result will be a brilliant piece of art that has the characters and narratives working in conjunction to deliver the best possible result!

Character and Narrative

Bioshock

One of my favourite Animations/ Games to date has to be the Bioshock series, not just for the entertainment value of playing a game, but the amazing way in which the characters are involved in the narrative, it takes a few play through's to understand every aspect of the story, but it is definitely worth it.

From the environments

If anything the city is represented as a character, with a life of its own, that is integrated into the narrative

To the characters

They all work in conjunction, and they are executed perfectly.

This is a great example as to how the narrative works perfectly with the characters. the pre production through to post production shows how this success happened, even the pitch is an incredibly detailed document with many pages which shows how much thought went into created the game, and it all paid off to create such an immense story, accompanied by amazing characters.

Kara

Kara

I think the character is the most important part of the narrative, the raw emotion that they can convey is incredible, even when the narrative isn't really clear or focused, the character can still make the performance. for example, an old PlayStation 3 test called Kara brought out lots of emotion, and engaged me as the audience to feel for the character and relate to her experience.

as you can see, the narrative isn't that well portrayed, but as little as it is, the character brings the whole thing into fruition and bring out the emotion that the character is portraying.

At the time it was a revolution in the animation industry, being real time, but has been outdated now but that said the emotion is still very much alive!

limitations of 3D animation

Limitations

After researching into the process of animation  in the 3D form, there are two big set back that arises from this form of animation, even though the results can be extraordinary, there are two main problems with the increase in the technology.

The Size!

And the time it takes to render!

with the ever increasing poly counts and quality of renders, the file sizes and render times are getting immensely big, just for examples sake

here is an example of a low poly sphere compared to a high poly sphere:

as you add more and more high poly objects in the scene, the renderer has to work a lot harder to process all of the data, which in turn increases the file size dramatically.

Also with more realistic renderers, such as mental ray. here is a scene which I threw together to demonstrate the issue at hand, here is the comparison

Maya software renderer

 Still quite a nice render, but compared to the mental ray render it doesn't look near as realistic.

Mental Ray

As you can see this render look a lot more realistic, all I had to do was switch renderer to mental ray.

The renderer takes alot longer due to all the attributes that need to be calculated.

To contextualize this issue lets look at the film Avatar.

according to BBC's clickbits,  the entire rendering of avatar took 1 Petabyte of data, which amounts to a 32 year long MP3 file. which is absolutely mind boggling!

but more astonishingly is the time in which it took to render, one frame ... ONE FRAME took 47 hours to render.

This is just crazy! so it really goes to show how invested these companies have to be in order to produce these films, but it also shows the limitations linked with 3D animation, how it takes a lot longer to create a feature film compared to the conventional filming method. 

Facial motion capture

The progression of motion capture

As in my last post we talked about Gollum, and the way he is brought to life, but this led me on to think about the development of facial tracking in 3D animation.

So in the Lord of the rings the motion capture suit was quite bare, only a wet suit with a few tracking markers. so the face was very much exposed, other than very subtle tracking markers dotted out in felt tip.

And there is definitely room for improvement in the animation of Gollum in the lord of the rings, especially in the face. but we are forgetting how this was 14 years ago, so the increase in technology has been incredible since then. so lets compare this to the hobbit.

So as well as having the motion tracking suit, Gollum also had a facial tracking camera of its own, so the camera is constantly pointing and recording the actors face so in can pick up every nuance that the actors face creates.

As you can see the variety of facial expressions due to this method are 10 fold compared to its predecessor. in this method the camera is fixed on the actors face throughout the whole performance which anchors the position of the tracking. which makes it easier to place in the final animation.

behind the character

There is also allot to consider as to what goes into the character in terms of the 3 productions (pre, pro and post) as it is not just the concept art that brings the character to life, there are actors that play the characters, post effects that bring the character to life further, maybe in terms of the environment in which they are in, or even taking the actor and re-modelling them to create a completely different character.

Gollum

played by Andy Serkis in the astounding performance that is Gollum/Smeagol we see a different kind of character emerging after the first lord of the rings film in 2001, where this process was rarely heard of being used.

So first the concept artist (in this case John Howe) sketches what he interoperates the character as being (from the original novel by J.R.R Tolkien).

Then the actor (Andy Serkis) performs wearing a motion capture suit which tracks the actors movements and pumps them into the computer where the modelled Gollum is placed on top to form the base of the character and its motions.

It is then the animators job to go in and adjust the slight defects in the motion to make the action look more realistic and believable

And that is how Gollum is born!

Character driven versus plot driven

As i said earlier the narrative helps characterisation and characterization helps narrative, but there are also various different ways in which the narrative can be driven, the two ways i will be focusing on in this post is:

Character driven narrative

V.s

Plot driven narrative

there are tons of  prime examples of character driven animation, the majority being classic cartoons from the 90's which include:

Recess

The simpsons

Family Guy

A couple of these are still running now, which adds to my argument before about the success being down to the characterization. e.g.: the Simpsons being yellow with distinct features, people know its from the Simpsons due to its characterization.

So we define it as character driven due to the way in which the characters define the plot due to their individual characteristics, instead of the plot defining the characters in plot driven narrative.

The plot is driven by these characters being in an environment together, generally hilarity ensues but that is not always the case.

Styles part 2

so we have seen Disney and how they have a generic style of characterization, lets quickly see some other IP's that have the same form of generic stylization

Wallace and gromit

So similarly to Disney, Wallace and gromit do have big eyes, but in a simpler more spherical way. they also have very large hands simple shaped heads. but that doesn't take away from the way in which they are fantastically animated, much like morph, his simple body and head make for a very plain character, but also adds ways in which to add emotion and feeling in an otherwise simple character

So we go back to my previous question of 'does the success of an ip lie in the styalization of all of the characters' we need to assess more characters from wallace and gromit to have a strong case.

here is a character from the curse of the wear rabbit:

so as we see the style is very similar across the characters we have seen, the simple eyes, the mouths that have very simple definition which makes their phonemes appear simple.

so after exploring two well known companies, I can safely come to the conclusion that the characterization is crucial to your success an an animator. as both of these companies have a very solid similarity between all of their characters and the demographic in which love these characters can identify in future whether or not something belongs to that universe.

Styles of characters

Styles part 1

so as part of the course is to understand different aspects of character and narrative, let us start by exploring the different ways in which animation companies have approached their characters and how they are portrayed.

Disney

Everyone in my generation has grown up loving the characters of Disney, but what made us have such a passion for them, their charm? their looks? or their common attributes shared amongst all of the Disney characters, for example:

their Disney world has a very generic character design, involving big eyes, wide mouths and a cherished simplicity that just plays of their lovable nature.

so in conclusion, Disney's characterisation is very stylised, which could be the reason for its success, a familiar code in which the character designers stick to to let people know 'That is Disney!' and i do think that is a main aspect of how they became so popular, that and the animation, the characters all move in a very similar fluid motion, the arcs are exaggerated to make a bouncy, full of life, character.

Final crit

As in each module we have a final presentation of our final piece, finished or not, to receive constructive criticism that we can use to tweak our work before submission, here are the minutes of my crit.

Issue Discussed

Shot framing

in a few sections of my animation the character isn't framed right, he is outside the 'action safe zone' which gives you a guide as to where to condense the action into.

The ending

the ending stops way too abruptly, it cuts the end of the audio and makes it look unfinished.

The camera

i wanted feedback on the camera angles, wether they provide good coverage of the facial animation.

Student action

I will enable the action safe zone to see where i can adjust the camera to make it look more aesthetically appealing

im going to add 48 frames to the end of my animation to give enough room to finish the scene, to have moom assuming the fetal position and letting the animation come to an end

i will adjust the camera to stay close to his face on the first line to show his facial expressions in the first line of dialogue.

Study task 5

Making faces!

Part 1

So after experimenting with how to implicate my dope sheets into the way I animate I finally sussed it all out and managed to create a fairly realistic lip sync of my audio clip.

Here is the playblast

there are a few elements of this outcome that i am not happy with, but it will just take practice to refine the actions to make them suit the audio properly. but overall it did help me finalize my method of lip syncing.

Study task 4

What a dope!

Part 2

after my first attempt at animating my dope sheet, i was required to remake it due to the depth in which i went to recreate each movement in too fewer frames.

Here is my revised dope sheet for my chosen audio sample.

As you can see it is condensed into one sheet, with each phoneme lasting more than at least 2 frames (discounting the odd essential one or two) which provides a much more realistic animation, where as before I was key framing every phoneme on the first frame it landed on, which made things look too rushed, but when I shifted the way I key framed it all looked more natural and realistic.

so now i feel very comfortable with dope sheeting and have come to appreciate its essential-ism, i will be using dope sheets in every lip syncing I have to do.

Study task 4

What a Dope!

Part 1

This study task was all about dope sheets, their value, and how they benefit our working practice.

I havn't used dope sheets before this module due to the fact i have never had to animate a face to lip sync with actual words, i have only used innate babble in my previous work, so it was very usefull to learn this skill.

The dope sheet makes lip syncing one hundred times easier as you allocate a phoneme to a certain element of your soundtrack and the specific frame numbers, you do this for every audible syllable to form the dope sheet, which (when coming to animating) gives you a professional and accurate instruction sheet on how to animate the lip sync.

We had to select an audio clip from a collection that we were presented with, then we had to create a dope sheet from said clip.

I chose the star wars clip which included this line of speech

"I dont know who you are, or where you came from... but from now on you do as i tell you ... okay!"

Here is my initial dope sheet

Page 1

  

Page 2

As you can see it is quite a long dope sheet for one sentence, and after trying to animate it i soon learnt that it was too detailed, i tried to squeeze in every motion that the mouth makes, but by doing that my phonemes only lasted one frame (two at a push) so it looked ridiculous when it came to rendering it out.

I need to create a new one...

A simplified version.

Propercorn Brief

Animation

Here are the main frames of the animation to show the progression, but also to get an idea of how it will look in terms of a YouTube advert. a type of storyboard if you will:

Because the brief outlines the motto as the main driver for your response "done properly". this made me take it literal and try and describe (through animation) how there popcorn is done properly, by creating an animation that is appealing to the process of making popcorn, traditional and proper!

Propercorn Brief

Bag illustrations

I started by re-creating the illustrations that are present on the packaging so I could use them in my presentation boards and to possibly use them in the animations them self

These I thought could be a part of the background to incorporate these great designs into the animations themselves.

a dichotomy is born

A dichotomy is born!

so like the dichotomy of good and evil (good cant exist without evil) there is also a dichotomy between character and narrative, without the character there cannot be a narrative, and without the narrative there cannot be a convincing character!

i digress a little bit .. but what i am trying to get at is the way they both go hand in hand. the one makes the other stronger and visa versa.

lets break this down into examples that we know:

Homer Simpson

without the narrative, he looks like a simple, normal joe blogs, nothing special ... but as soon as you introduce the narrative, a bumbling idiot who's only activities include getting drunk and eating donuts ... the character suddenly starts seeming more convincing and then the character starts complimenting the narrative!

Scar!

at first glance this noble looking lion is one of normality ... but after watching the lion king you soon learn his cruel and traitorous ways after killing one of the main protagonists that we are all made to love (through the narrative making us make a connection with them) and so after looking at this lion again the character is designed around the nature of his actions, the scar, the yellow eyes and the black 'thorn' like maim, and in turn this helps the narrative portray his character.

Character

Character!

as well as the importance of storyboards to rough out the narrative, and give a form to the complete version of an idea, equally important is the character development, this is definitely the next stage in the development process after storyboards. if not then it would come first! it depends on the individuals preference of work flow. my personal preference is to sketch out the storyboard first with a generic character and then go in and design the character.

without characters the narrative cant be backed up or delivered, so the design of these characters are curtail to the development process. 

Its an opportunity to discover different styles of the character in which you didn't already have in mind, if anything its like a process of elimination in your own mind as to what you want your character to be, or if its to a client, its a whole array of character ideas that gives them plenty of choice, and you have more of a chance of depicting what they have already in their mind!

it is important to explore each small detail of the character to get the desired outcome.

This relates to my project because even though it is a pre-made rig with no real room for customising its aesthetic values, there is still the characters behaviour, the way he walks, the way he speaks, the attitude in which he encompasses. like i showed you in my study task 'Strike a pose' where the pose gives away alot about the character. they all make an impression on the final outcome, so its important to consider all of these elements as well.