[Drawing] Court concept art

To help design the room for the next episode of Oddball I've created a simple diagram showing the scale. I plan to make more of these for future videos as it helps as a reference point when drawing in the backgounds and setting up camera angles.

[Misc] Organization day

No pretty picture or animation for today's blog entry. Today has been the much needed "organise everything" day. First up, I've done a bit of expanding lately with my work, and managed to get a few collabberation projects to work on, below are a selection I can talk about:

Solrac Ventures #1
After the success of the Solrac Ventures promo I animated with Yaplap, I've been told to be on standby for the first fully animated episode, which he'll be developing after his current project. You can see the first episode below:


I'm also working on another parody project with Yaplap, I'm unsure if I can give details yet, but that should be in production very soon!

Nick Basile Radio #2
I've been commissioned to create the second episode of Nick Basile Radio, you can see the first episode below:



Pip The Robot
I recently met an animator by the alias "Zictor" at a Newgrounds meetup in London. After sharing shows, we decided to hide cameos of each other's characters in upcoming episodes of our respective series. Below is his 3D rendition of Antique from Oddball, along with his character, Pip.

He also brought up the idea of me animating a possible 2D segment in a later video of his, which I agreed on, thinking it may be an excellent piece for a showreel. You can see an episode of Pip the Robot below:

I also organized my freelance work today. I've now got a book that I use to record jobs that are due, how much I'm being paid and if I've received the payment. This will help out lately as I have a few requests in the works.
Finally, the Royal Armouries project went into its final stages today, I met up with Jack and Will and discussed a final "to do list" for everyone. My final job is to inbetween all the animation states so that everything flows into one continuing motion. Once that's done, I just need to oversee the final stages of production that will be done by Will.

[Drawing] Solrac Ventures practice

I've got a heads up that Solrac Ventures may be back in production soon, so I've started getting back into the drawing style. Below is a quick picture I did to get some practice:

I've tried to add more of a sense of depth with my pictures lately,, rather than flat staging. It just brings a bit more life to the work and makes it more interesting to look at. Even simply moving a character closer to the "camera" makes it obvious that they are the intended focal point. I'm also thinking more about colour, using the classic blue orange contrast between the characters and the environment.

[Planning] Work schedule

Now that I have a few things I need to be doing each week, I've started to make a schedule for myself as a guide for each day. This should help me manage all my animation tasks for University, work, and personal videos.

This is just a guideline for now, to be on the safe side I've left plenty of time for catchup and sleep. These slots can be moved onto if I don't reach my daily quota for certain projects, such as Nick Basile Radio, or University work, as they have deadlines. If I achieve my quota, I can use this time for breaks and anything else that may pop up. I've kept Sunday fairly clear as experience has taught me that a break day can go a long way.

[Drawing] Oddball 3.5 Concept Art

[Commission] Hammer Out A Game

 

I was asked by a friend of mine to make a banner and user icon for his YouTube channel, HammerOutAGame. The two pictures above were made for the user icon. I went for a striking colour scheme as shown in the influence art I was sent. Aside from that, I added some videogame icons, such as the Space Invaders barrier as the "A" in "Game" and the pixel art logo I designed.

Early concept, the logo was originally going to have artwork either side based on their interests.

Above is the final design, they added an extra member to the crew along the line so I had to balance the image out again. Fortunately the logo made a suitable placeholder on the right hand side to balance out the symmetrical layout.

[Animation] Deconstruction: Frame by frame and inbetweening.

If you haven't seen my previous entry, I'm going to start making posts where I deconstruct animation I've created. These posts are going to be a mix of tutorial and personal reflection. Some of the techniques I bring up may have different names, or not even be techniques at all, I'm just explaining my findings as I progress.

In Flash, I find there are dominantly two core forms of animation, symbol and tween based, and frame by frame drawing based. The previous entry gave some brief tips on getting the most out of symbol animation, so in this entry I'm going to explain some techniques I used in the small clip above.

This clip is built in three basic stages, anticipation, action and reaction. See the three blue drawings on the left for the keyframes. These are core for making many movements look interesting and less mechanical. Anticipation is the movement leading up to a motion, usually in the reverse motion of the intended motion. In this case, the anticipation is the duck towards the book, a downwards motion that then leads into the looking up motion. The next stage is the action itself, in the case of this clip that's the looking up motion. Finally, the reaction. This is the "follow on" motion, which is usually hair or drapery (clothes) for me. This stage helps the movement bounce, rather than stopping unnaturally.

Once these three keys are sketched, it's on to the mapping. By this, I mean planning out how each part of the body will move. In an old test I did, I sent out some keyframes for people to inbetween. In the results, a lot of people literally drew the middle position. This method really doesn't work with motion as the animation looks awkward and has no depth to it. Instead, I've started animating each part of the body separately. In this case, I first animated the legs, as they are the top layer. Animating things separately creates an offset effect and breaks up the motion, rather than having everything stop at once, everything has it's own individual timing and rules. By the time this is done, you should have something like the second clip, with all the solid sections inbetweened, following the three stage rule on their own timing. The final step is to add drapery/hair. This acts to break the motion up a little and create an overall reaction stage. In the Animators Survival Kit, the rule says that drapery always stops last. You can see that effect in place on this. As the head drops down, the hair continues that motion. As it starts to go up, the hair has a delay before following this movement and bouncing back up. Finally I added a bounce at the end just as an extra reaction stage and to add some more life. The next stage will be colouring. For now I've used flat colours, I'll explain cel shading in a future entry.

**EDIT**

One final technique I forgot to mention is the opposite movement between the head and the book. This subtle technique just puts more space between them in the action, adding more of an impact to it.

[Commission] Nick Basile Radio

I was commissioned to make this animation for http://nickbasile.com/ The animation style is relatively simple compared to my other work as more episodes are planned to time restrictions, and as I do my commissions currently at low prices due to them they're on the side of my other work.

For this episode I was simply given the dialogue and produced a rough storyboard and character model samples for the client. Once these were given the all clear, I proceeded to animate the whole video. The animation style is similar to that on my old series, Universithing (seen below).

I handled this project a little different to usual, I set myself certain times to work on the project, and also created an invoice once the project was done for the records. I also kept regular contact with the client in this project and let them know everything I worked on and changed.
Another trick experience taught me with previous projects was to add a watermark to the video until payment came through, This meant I could freely send the client copies of the video without any risks (I've had a client try to run with a video before).

This project wasn't without problems though, fortunately these were only small ones, such as export glitches, changing sound levels and making slight adjustments to the video itself that the client pointed out. All in all the animation went well for time and budget limits, and I have learned to take a more professional and structured approach to commissioned work. My new workflow is as follows:

• Take request and find out enough information to agree on a price with the client
• Discuss art direction/influences to get a better idea of the work, also request any reference material needed.
• Request a percentage of the payment up front to assure money can transfer without fail.
• Create storyboard/animatic and art style samples for the client and tweak as appropriate.
• Create animation
• Adjust any tweaks in the animation stage
• Post processing
• Send invoice and receive payment
• Render and send the final file.

[Commission] Half Full

As an animator it's important that I can adapt to drawing different styles. This Christmas card commission for  Tom Kerin (http://www.singingmutestuff.com/) was a great chance to try this out, while tweaking the art style in my own way too. The first difference in style was that the lineart changes depending on the colouring, which creates a "gummy" texture, as a friend of mine calls it. These softer colours can be useful when it comes to shading as there's less attention on the outlines and more on form. To help make the picture a little more dynamic, I rounded off the background and tapered it inwards towards the top.
You can see the art style I based this picture on in the video below:

[Drawing] Perspective practice

As a bit of perspective practice I came up with this concept art for Oddball's "Eternal Library".
For this picture I used four points; top, center, left and right. The top reference point was high up, which let me place the viewpoint on the ground, emphasizing the height of the book cases. The idea behind the library was that it's constantly being expanded, so I made some of it look piled on as if it's been dropped into place. To add to the idea of space, I whited out the background and added a tint for distance fading on the back towers.

[Animation] Shot composition

Something I feel I need to improve my work is shot composition. Above is a work in progress shot from the next episode of Oddball. I've tried to make it more interesting than a straight on shot of Redi reading. To do this I've used the rule of thirds to place her on the right hand side and applied some depth of field using one point perspective. I've also slightly rounded the perspective on the horizon line to avoid things being blocky and hard on the eyes.

[University] Royal Armouries Scene 5: The Knight

The final scene in the animation. I decided to make the knight dark grey at the start of the video up until he puts the helmet on, this helped distinguish the silhouette as the Squire passes it up to him. For the horse animation I looked up reference from Muybridge's animal locomotion and then made applicable style adjustments.

[University] Royal Armouries Scene 3: The Furnace

These two shots are from the first scene I fully assembled, the aim was to have the characters carry the focus across the screen, highlighting the key movements by colouring them in white. The background by Jack was originally in colour to get the tones right, so I had to edit this into greyscale. Fortunately the greys were the right shade to emphasise both the black and white characters. The backgrounds were simplified substantially to keep the focus on the movement. To keep the pacing consistent, I decided to use multiple copies of the blacksmith character, rather than have him walk from position to position.

[University] Royal Armouries Scene 2: The Mines

As we draw towards the end of the project, I think now's a suitable time to run over everything I've done for it. Below are all the animated segments I worked on, I created all of the character animation for this video and split it into 2880x720 (the maximum width that Flash would allow) segments for Will to composite in After Effects. For these first two mine scenes however, I left the compositing to Will. The shorter shots mean that the stage could all fit into one panel.

Jack and I had previously planned to texture the backgrounds. To help theme the animation, we decided to stick to a solid vector style which was simpler and easier on the eyes. It also meant that the characters would fit in with the art style a lot better. The overall animation is going to have a tapestry texture overlaying it in the final render, so having these parts textureless also stops it clashing later on.

The colour scheming played an important role in these dark scenes as a lot of the miners blended in with the darkness of the background. Having the focus character in white not only drew attention to him, but made the highest possible contrast against the rest of the scene, highlighting his importance. The files are designed to continue straight into one another, while leaving some room to overlap and line them up. The final stages I need to take for this video are to make the inbetweening animation. I created these characters like videogame characters, in that they have separate "states", such as idle and running. Once the timing is 100% planned, I can inbetween the transitions between these poses.

[Animation] Hybrid style test

I've finally had time to resume a pet project of mine, Crusaders. Today I made this section of the animation, showing a character jumping into the stage and sliding along the ground. The animation style for this was primarily symbol and tween based. Some people would argue that this style of animation is lazy and ineffective, so I've tried to demonstrate how it can be used effectively.

I found the key to making successful tween based animation is to break up the motion as much as possible by adding secondary animation on things like the hair. Even offsetting these by one frame (which is what I did for the hair in some of this clip) stops the movement from all ending at once, and makes things seem a bit less robotic.

Another thing I found is to make extensive use of the smooth in and smooth out features that can be used on classic tweens in Flash. These stop the motion from moving at a constant pace, and again helps to break up the mechanical vibe that some tween based animation can give off.

The final technique is to try and change symbold frequently. Sticking to one angle of a head, for example, makes the shape recognisable and the viewer quickly identifies it as a separate object.

With these three techniques, the rest is similat to regular animation, making use of anticipation (in this case the jump onto screen) the action (the slide) and the reaction (secondary movement on the hair and tail)

[Drawing] War

The second Timekeeper to be redesigned is War. Since the original design I have added a lot more detail to his design and bulked out the details to make him look more solid. An important part of his design is the basic shapes he is built from, these are a huge help when animating as it helps to draw the character from other angles and in new poses. The main part of his body is a large box shape, that works in the same way as a "strong character's" chest area. This also helps to make the head look smaller, which reflects the characters low intelligence. 

The picture above was done by a long time friend of mine, who's illustration work can be found here. I learned a few things from this picture's style that I could apply to my work. The first was the focal point (the head). The rest of the design is rounded to make this the center point. For example the hovering fan below the character, notice how it tapers away from the center point of the design. This helps with the hulking appearance of the character. Another design choice I liked, but decided not to use was the points on the elbow area. These helped to break up the design just a little, while keeping the appearance sharp. I also took the idea of a third colour from this design. War has a dark red and black design, so in the image below, I added a blue glow to add some contrast. This could add some interesting lighting effects in dark scenes.

Mori also suggested changing the fan on the bottom of the character. With the regular guards, it was a comedic effect that the large bodies were supported simply by a tiny fan. For the leader however, this would be a huge weak point in combat, so I decided to create a ring of "energy" below him that carries the fan motif from the other characters.

The new design also reflects his personality design a lot more. An element of Timekeeper characters is the amount of power their bodies take up. War had a number of glowy parts and gadgets, which use up more power. All this power usage drains his intelligence and makes him a childish brute obsessed with conflict.

[Drawing] Pestilence

The main aspect behind Pestilence's redesign was to make him look more agile and slippery to represent his deceitful personality. I also turned his tail into a weapon, removing his robe in the process, this just makes him look more intimidating and adds more dark areas to contrast with the striking green glows. It was important to keep the character thin and flexible as he prefers to use manipulation from behind the scenes, using the visual metaphor of a snake allowed his design to translate as much of his characteristics as possible. 

[Animation Practice] Animatin' 'splosions

Part of my next video needs some colourful explosion effects. INSPIRATION TIME!



Will update with results!

[Influence] Expressive character movement

This video was floating around Twitter. These style of videos are done using Source Film Maker as well as models from Source compatible games, in this case, Team Fortress 2. I normally skip these sort of videos as the quality varies, but this one was surprisingly well done. One thing I've noticed with my work is a lack of expression in characters, this video shows the sort of level I'd like to be at, but in 2D. I also picked up some clever staging examples in this video too, that compliment the words and animation. The characters are also in 3D space which allows depth to be put between them a lot easier, which is another thing I hope to translate into 2D this year rather than having my characters on a flat plane.