Animate!

This weekend I went to go see Zootopia, I was really excited about it actually, everyone I have heard from who had already seen it said it was amazing. I'm going to try and talk about this without giving any of the plot details away because it only just came out the other weekend so I don't want to spoil it for anyone.


Zootopia is about a bunny named Judy Hopps who moves to the urban metropolis of Zootopia with a dream of becoming a police officer.

First thing to talk about is the design of the characters, one of the main reasons I first was interested in seeing this movie is the character designs are adorable (also having a fox as one of the lead characters gave me Robin Hood flashbacks and I was obsessed with that film as a child).

[The main characters Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde. Also Chief Bogo because he is excellent]

I loved the character's ways of moving, especially Judy when she is hopping about ticketing cars on her first day as a police officer. Her movement has so much life and action in it. All of the character's animation was so expressive. There is a scene I loved (which they used in the trailers) with a group of sloths. All the sloth movement is in slow motion so you can really see how animated the character's facial expression are. Trailer link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_2E6nlnMPU


Some Zootopia storyboards by Dean Wellins (http://grizandnorm.tumblr.com/post/140973487268/a-tiny-insert-in-the-mr-big-sequence-boarded-by)

The environment and prop design was also amazing. This is one of the things I will really need to see the film again to be able to talk about properly as I was so focussed on the story the first time round but Zootropolis is split up into different sections that are like different natural environments for the animals. It means that you get to see a lot of different types of environments throughout the film which is great and the props in each one fit the type of environment. I really wan't to get the art book so I can look at more of the design and concept work and talk about this in the detail it deserves.  


There was also a lot of stuff at different scales for all of the different sized animals. In the police station most of the items around Judy are pretty giant compared to her as nearly all of the police are large predators, in another part of the film Judy goes into the area where all the small rodents live and everything is in miniature so that was really cool visually.



I will hopefully be able to talk about this film more eloquently and in more detail once I've seen it again in a few weeks.

Now that the rabbit's accessories are done I got on with the rigging. I built the rig and the control shapes and I did half the blendshapes for the face (Aimi is doing the other half). I had a bit of difficulty with the skinning as I don't have much experience doing that but luckily Krish was there to help me, well to be honest he ended up pretty much skinning it for me.

So we did our dry run for our conference presentation. I was pretty nervous but I think it went well, I didn't use all the time but there were a few things that I hadn't put in yet that will need to be added for the final presentation which should take it to 15 minutes.

I got some good feedback from Jeanette and the group: they said I gave a lot of relevant context about my project which is good, I also explained my methods and my next steps very clearly. Apparently I presented it well which is really good, I think I always think that my presentation style is much worse than it actually is.

 I realised a few mistakes I had made while I was doing the presentation, I need a few more slides as some of the time I was staying on an irrelevant slide while I talked about something else. I also ended up changing my topic title very slightly during the q&a at the end when it was pointed out that I'm covering the same kind of things in both my acting and my movement section so I don't really need both those words.

So here are a few slides from my presentation so far

We finished doing most of the shots of our previs before showing it to Brendan and Phil for feedback and advice. Brendan gave us some really great tips for improving the composition of out shots and made sure that we were using the rule of thirds and not putting characters on the centre line. Phil said that the humour of our piece was still coming across even in the previs which is good, he gave us a few tips about how to add the ending onto what we already have. We have started to do the revisions that have been suggested and we should be done with this new version by Wedensday and we will be able to show Axis the week after.

Krish asked me to sculpt the head for the rabbit. I started by building the basic model in Maya and attaching the ears Krish had made before taking the model into mudbox to reshape things slightly before giving it back to Krish for him to retopologize and attach to the body.

We have had 2 lessons from Sang on zbrush now. The first was an introduction to the interface then a tutorial on how to use fibermesh. We are going to use it for the hair of the trools so he showed us how to create the kind of hair we want and then how to import the curves into maya and create hair with them. Once the modelling stage is complete we will be able to start doing some experiments with it. We had a second lesson on how to retopologise the models we got from the photogrametry of the troll we did. Sang showed us how to sculpt in missing details to get a good high quality model to work with.