amirarima

In this term, we got to learn three more of the animation exercises, which are body acting, facial acting, and lip-synch.

The first exercise that we do is body acting exercise. For this exercise, I was animating a lovely character, Shaheen, which was made by Renad. The first challenge while doing this exercise was how to make the decision of what the character is doing and how the movement will be like. As an overthinker, I feel like sometimes deciding on something took the longest part of the doing itself. So, for this exercise I tried not to choreograph the movement too much while I filmed myself for the reference and just go with the plot. I remember the final movement is referred based on a take where I accidentally knock over my electric kettle. Which create a genuine mood change to animate.

The next exercise is facial acting exercise. In this exercise I animated a character receiving a call. The mood change that is happening in this animatic is bored-flustered-angry. I realised while filming this that I got super panicky when I filmed that resulted in too much movement for many of my reference video. I was glad that I am able to decide what part of movement to cut and make the movement clearer. But maybe I do need more acting lessons to make sure I do a good reference.

The last exercise that we did in this term is Lip-synch exercise. Which consisted of two exercises. The first one, I got to animate a character with the voice of my classmate, Vivi. And the second one is an animation with the voice from old Vine video. In this exercise (especially the first one) I tried to experiment with my TV Paint workspace. While doing the first exercise, I tried to separate all body parts layer, because my mind suddenly just thought that maybe it was a good idea (It was not). It resulted in a very messy workflow and tiresome revisions, so I decided to redo everything. In the second try, I only separate the layers into three (mouth, body, hair) so I could work much neater than the first try. In the second exercise, I still separate the layers into too many layers, but because it was only 6 second, I didn’t get as overwhelmed as I felt on the first one when doing the revisions. So, the simpler, the better. For the character’s movement itself, again, I think I haven’t successfully animated a natural acting for my character.

For me personally, all three exercises were really challenging, and I think I especially struggle with the acting part. I feel like when it comes to the technicality, I notice improvement in my grasp of understanding and creating the animation, but I still think my animation tend to look stiff when it comes to how they move. But overall, I still enjoyed every process. As stressful as the process was, to see how every frames you drew move as a whole animation was always worth it, and it gave you reason to move forward and keep learning.

As someone who loves a beautiful cinematography composition, I was excited to finally learn how to create a storyboard. In this class, we got to try and do our own storyboard based on a script. Personally, I think my approach in creating a scene composition is more live action oriented, because I watch more live action movie than animated one. I feel like animation would have more possibility in how we treated each scene, so for the future, I must familiarise myself more with many kinds of animated style so I could be more flexible in the ideation of storyboard creation.

In the 3D Pathway this term, we got to learn how to do basic human figure T-Pose and animate it! I feel like because we had the basic understanding of how to animate the character last term, now I got the chance do many experiments in terms of the scenes and movement of the character.

Even though I created my own T-Pose, the character that I animate is Kevin’s rigged character, Paul, because I forgot to save mine, stupendously, as always. So, the first thing that I did was to renamed the character as Obi, because I can. And then for my first animation, I got to animate Obi dancing. For this first exercise, I didn’t actually have a movement reference, but I work pose by pose and keep in my mind to keep the character looked balanced each frame.   

The next exercise was lip sync exercise, and I decided to use the Vine sound that I use for the 2D Animation. We learned how to use blend shape to create the mouth movement of the character. In this exercise, I also experimented a lot in the animation scene and decided to create a little photoshoot for Blue Obi.

In both exercises I attempted to render the animation with a simple Arnold’s Skydome Light for the lighting, to make the animation looked finish.

And here is the final video of the lip sync!

In this term’s life drawing sessions, I tried to apply what I learned previously, like how to use the beans and how to see the figure in three-dimensional approach. I feel like the more I do life drawing, the more I could learn how to prioritise what to draw when it comes to drawing in limited timeframe. I also noticed that the sessions helped me in how I could more easily breakdowns organic shape as primitives to help me build the base of my drawing. So, cheers to more life drawing in the future!

In this character design class, we got to create character design components of our own, which was a very exciting journey. There are many things that we learned about creating a character, such as the elements of shapes, lines, colour, and the more technical aspect like creating the silhouette, values, design sheet, turnarounds, expressions, and poses. The time constraint that was given also taught us about how to work and draw efficiently. Also, I tried not to be too idealistic about the character that I design and focused more on getting and doing the process right.

In the process of creating my character, the one that I struggle with most was the turnaround, because the shape of the hair was asymmetrical, and I lacked a clear vision of the overall shape from a three-dimensional standpoint. So, I was advised to create a 3D model of the head to help me revise my turnaround. I could say that I am quite satisfied with how the 3D model turned out because I was not sure that what I imagined of the hair was doable.

Another session that was challenging was when we were asked to draw the poses and expressions, mainly because of how limited the time was. But the feedback that was given at the end made it more clear to me how important lines, angles, and shapes are in the design of a character. For example, in my character, I combined the uses of hard and soft edges and I was advised to emphasize those elements so the character would be more clear shape-wise. Also when creating the poses, It was better to make a big pose that you can easily read even when it is just the silhouette.

In this post, I am going to talk about the mood change walk and animal walk cycle exercises, which probably contend with each other as the most complicated animation exercise that I have done yet.

The first exercise was the mood change exercise. We were asked to create a walking character that reacted to something which prompted the character to walk with a different mood. We all started with learning the basic walk cycle and the keyframes. After that, we shot some footage for our reference and then work on the exercise. For my mood change walk, I decided to do the mood changing from happy to sad. I would say that for the happy walk, it was easier to spot the keyframes from the reference footage because the movement was bigger and clearer than the sad walk. I also notice that in my animation there is still something that makes the movement looks odd, especially when and after the mood changes, so I would have to go through the frames again and try to improve the animation.

The next exercise was the animal walk cycle. In this exercise, we were given a day to observe and do life drawing of dogs to understand more about how they move and how they are built anatomically. I found this exercise very exciting but also quite complicated. I would say that I struggled the most in creating the right timing of the walk, and to be honest I still don’t know whether my animation could pass as the right dog walk cycle. I started with a walk cycle that I created based on a “standard” keyframing that I found in an animation book. After that, I tried to create another version based on real dog video footage. I found that even though the walk cycle that I do based on the book felt more even, the one that I did based on the video reference does feel more natural. Though I noticed that there is a slight limp in my animated dog, so I would have to go through each frame again to improve my walk cycle.

In this CGI Pathway, we learned how to do animation in Autodesk Maya. We started from the very basic, such as getting to know the interface, how to save and create a file, the shortcut keys, etc. In the first week, we were introduced to Bonky ( the pink bouncy character). We learned how to animate the character by making it move, bounce, and react to a T-Rex.

After that exercise with Bonky, we got to know Binky and learn how to make a walk cycle and mood change. Binky was a more complex character to work on than Bonky, but there are also more possibilities in the movement and expression. To be honest, I still find it difficult to make the walk cycle, thus more learning time is needed.

The exercise that I found most enjoyable was when we learn how to lip-sync. It was interesting that we were given the same audio and yet each person creates different movements and narratives. I could say that I am interested in a subtle performance, where sometimes the movement is small, but the teamwork of these small movements of body parts and expressions still well communicates the story and how the character felt. So, I tried not to give the character too big of movements, although creating this subtle performance was quite hard because the character does not have complete expressions as a real human does.

The next exercise was to make one character react to the other character, which then prompted the mood change in their walk. In this exercise, I want to make a giant Bonky, but the scale feature was not enabled, so I shot the scene in forced perspective.

Overall, I enjoyed the class week by week. I would say that probably learning how to animate these Binky and Bonky characters with the rig controller was not as complicated as I thought because they are well made (Thanks Kevin!). So, I am excited for when I get to learn how to do the actual modeling and rigging of my own character.

After living a quite sedentary lifestyle due to the pandemic (which I am not proud of), this class was quite a shock to my system, in a good way. I could say that this was one of the classes that I’ve been very curious about.

There are some interesting topics that we learned from this class. The first one was about Laban efforts, which consisted of punch, dab, slash, glide, press, flick, wring, and float. I think that the understanding of Laban would help us as an animator to be more familiar with movement vocabulary and how to assign these qualities to build our character.

The next is about the seven levels of tension. Where we learned about different levels of tension in movement. These levels are:

1. Level One – basically no tension at all (Catatonic). In learning this Level one, we got to be paired up and try to understand how the body is when there was no tension given, by moving our partner’s body when they are relaxed. 
2. Level Two (Californian) is when we gave minimal effort and are super chill and laidback in moving, like a drunk person or a zombie. 
3. Level Three (Economic) is when we give just an economical effort to do things, basically a straightforward movement. 
4. Level Four (Alert) is when we become more alert and aware of our surroundings.
5. Level Five (Suspense) Is when we are more reactive and responsive to our surroundings, like those feeling when we are scared or tensely waiting for something to happen. 
6. Level Six (Passionate) Is when everything explodes, where the emotions are let out. 
7. Level Seven (Tragedy) is when the emotion and tension are at the highest level that the body goes very still.

Another acting exercise that we did was to understand how the changes in body parts’ movement and angle could build different types of walking for characters. It was an interesting and a funny sight to see everyone improvising a Character walk. The walking exercise is continued by reaction or mood change exercise, where we acted out a reaction scene moment by moment. These moments that built the reaction scene are: Stopping, Looking, Reacting, Checking your surroundings, Leaving/Changing of mood.

I feel like I learned a lot by being in this acting class. Sometimes it may not be the most comfortable position to find myself in because I am quite shy, but through the weeks I got more comfortable doing the exercises, which is a good thing.