Life Drawing Updates - Covent Garden

Been getting back into the swing of drawing things again. When being so involved in a 3D digital world it's fun the break open the pencils and draw on paper. 

A New Animation - WIP Nervous Phonecall

Here's a new animation I've been working on in my spare time between Jungle Book and Thor Ragnarok. It's still in stepped at the moment so the spline stage will come next.

WIP - Nervous Phonecall - Acting Piece from James Saunders on Vimeo.

For this animation I really wanted to focus on animating visible thought process without dialogue. I like the challenge of communicating an idea or story without dialogue as it really helps me focus on what is important in a good animation.

I also wanted to incorporate a story into the animation. Rather than have a static camera and a full body acting shot it felt more interesting to build a whole scenario around this character trying to phone a girl.

I learnt a lot by forcing myself to work in a stepped mode since it's the workflow I use the least. It helped me focus in on the key poses but also figuring out more interesting breakdowns. We'll see how it translates once I've moved into spline. 

Here's some notes I scribbled as I tried to think of a good backstory to my character that I was animating (hope you can read them!) :

 

So far i'm happy with the block so will try and get this one finished as soon as poss!

An Old Animation

I watched this old animation I did from two years ago. It made me laugh and wonder why I'd never published it before. So here it is:


Door Walk from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Sometimes i think it's good to publish old work or even work in progress sometimes. 

Behind The Scenes - Making an animated film 2016

Throughout the last year of uni I thought it'd be fun to film a "Behind the Scenes" movie about us making our short. Just some fun but i'm quite pleased with how it turned out :)

Behind The Scenes - Making an Animated Film 2016 from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Thumbnailing Video Reference

So, it's been a while since my last personal animation project but i felt like the time was right to do another one again. It's been tough to find the time alongside work but i'm having a lot of fun! Hopefully it will be finished soon and look half decent. 

I began as per usual by sketching out some ideas and then filming some acting reference. Once I was happy with my performance I blocked out the shot in maya. However, there was a particular part of the scene where my character just felt really off. The performance wasn't as clear as it needed to be. Since I wasn't sure how to approach the issue in maya I began to explore more options through thumbnailing.

The result was the picture below: . 

(the animation reads left to right too)

I thumbnailed an exaggerated version of my reference which really helped my understanding of the mechanics and the performance that I wanted to achieve. Now I could have done this in maya but it would have taken an awful lot longer.

I took these exploratory thumbnails and then re-blocked it into my scene. The result turned out to be a bit too exaggerated but that was okay because it's much easier to tone down an exaggerated animation than ramp one up. Anyway, this thumbnail process is very helpful and I highly recommend it for people to use it in their projects too!!