So you may have noticed that I haven't been updating this blog quite as much as I should have been recently. For the last few weeks we have been really busy animating and as soon as we were nearly finished that we ran into a bunch of problems rendering. We think we've fixed it now (find out for sure on Monday) but going back to fix all the shots is going to take a bunch of time I would rather have used to polish our animation. So its a bit of a nightmare really.
So we have finally reached the animation stage of going live! Yay!! We split the characters between us so me and Nely are mostly working on He-Man. These are the shots I'm currently working on. We are going to have a crit session on Monday with the class and another one on Tuesday with Brendan which should help me refine and polish what I've already done.
So the last couple of weeks we have been working on the lip sync. We are like 80% done with it now and most of us have moved on to animation. This is one of the lip sync shots that I was working on.
And here is our previs (now with a new ending!) with our lip sync shots added.
And here is our previs (now with a new ending!) with our lip sync shots added.
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.
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.
Here are some pictures of the rig on the daughter rabbit.
A bonus picture of the rigging going wrong.
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
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.
