Kayla - Home From School (cont.)

Continued animation sequence from last month with the Kayla rig:

Kayla - Home from School from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Going to make a couple of changes to the arc of the jump onto the sofa. Been very tricky trying to work out the change in Centre of gravity as she goes in and out of the front flip. Maybe a nice render will help the animation eventually too!

Anomalisa (2015)

Stunning trailer for 2015 film "Anomalisa" A glorious looking stop-motion film by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson. Definitely looks like it's pushing the boundaries of what an animated feature can achieve, and i can't wait to see it!

Kayla - Home from School

As part of our showreel submissions for this year I decided to do an animation with the Kayla rig as it looked like it'd be a lot of fun to animate with:

I wanted to come up with a mini story for the animation, something that I could try and draw an audience into despite being only 20 seconds long or so. I ended up with the following scenario:

"Kayla is returning home from school to find her favourite TV program on"

From here I quickly scribbled out some ideas on paper:

It's not much but it gave me a base to start on. From here I quickly modelled the scene in Maya so I could explore some more camera options. I do this as i find it a little bit tricky sometimes to explore all the camera options on paper:

Once I worked out how the two shots cut together I began work on the first shot as Kayla comes home. I imagined her slightly down, hugging all her books and she walks past the living room where she sees her favourite program is on. As i was shooting the video reference I was getting lots of great feedback from my peers and lecturers as we tried to think of ways of getting as much juice from the shot as possible. For example someone suggested that Kayla does this little dance of excitement before she runs into the living room. I didn't have this in my previous versions but it adds so much character, it's so important to get that fresh opinion on your ideas.

A WIP is here on Vimeo for the first shot. I still need to work on a couple things but i'm pretty happy for where i'm currently at. I've been working on the shot mostly in the evenings after uni for a couple weeks:

Home From School - WIP from James Saunders on Vimeo.

More to come!!

Key Poses - A Refresh

Found this video the other day and it's really made me look more closely at one of the key principles of animation. Key Poses!

The key poses are the building blocks of any good animation. Ideally one can communicate an entire idea through just the key poses, the storytelling poses. For a great key pose there are several factors that are usually kept in mind. These are usually:

Clear silhouette, Line of action, appeal, squash and stretch, rhythm, tilt and twist, (and many others i'm sure i'm forgetting) Life drawing really hones the eye in on what makes an interesting pose too!!

The video below highlighted just how important good key poses are in communicating a a story clearly:



The Keys: Inside Out from Kyle Kenworthy on Vimeo.


It's made me rethink the way I approach a shot as I have been becoming more reliant on video reference to give me basis of the shot. I think I need to spend more time drawing out the key poses I want as well as figuring out exactly where they lie in the shot too. That way I can be sure I have a really strong base to start animating on from the start.

Team Danger Explosion FINAL YEAR FILM

My final year at Uni has come around which means it's time to make another short animated film!!

Team Danger Explosion is teaming up again (Dan Ridley and James Richardson) and hopefully we're going to make an overall better film than last year, and if we're lucky get into the end of year Animation Expose.

All film updates can be found on the film's blog page here:

Robot and Dog

Check it out!!

Framestore Internship London

I had the opportunity to spend 8 weeks at Framestore over the summer to work with the animation team on Jungle Book. Working as an animator I got to experience what working on a major project is like, as well as having an amazing time :)

During the evenings I worked on a personal project to really push my character animation skills. I was assigned to a mentor Edwin Schaap, an amazing animator, who helped me along the way with notes and feedback as well as getting help from the Jungle Book guys around me. 

I looked online for a soundclip and began working my way through:


Framestore Internship - Personal Project from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Overall i'm pretty happy with the result. Looking back at it now I reckon i would change the acting at the end to match the angry tone of the dialogue more. It was a huge learning experience doing this and I've learnt a huge amount, can't wait to do the next one! (Huuuge thanks to the animators around me for such great feedback and patience aha)

Dialogue Piece - Workflow 02 - Acting and Reference

I decided to pick a sound clip from cancelled BBC sitcom 'Siblings' . It made me laugh and had some cool little qualities to it that I thought would be really fun to animate.

Sound Clip: https://www.dropbox.com/s/60bu9rz72lgq38f/shorter_version.wav?dl=0

The first thing I like to do is just sit and listen to the audio over and over. I tend to get an image in my head of who the character is and the general situation that he's in. (Refer to the acting essential blog post for more acting notes (Acting Essentials) This really helps inform the acting decisions later on.

I try to keep in mind several key points: What's the story? What is the scene objective? Overall objective? Obstacles to the objective? Play an action until an obstacle makes you play a different one.

From here I'll write down the dialogue and work out the general rhythm and timings of the speech. As well as writing down the acting beats:

I'll then put the audio on loop and start filming some video reference as i mouth the dialogue. 

Have a look at this video from AnimSchool where a mentor talks through different ways of approaching video reference: