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!!

OVERLAP - I thought i knew...

When it comes to the principles of animation I feel like most people can grasp the concepts behind them pretty easily. After all that's the way objects move in real life. Overlap for example; objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to want to stay moving. When an elephant stops walking, his trunk will swing forward and then back again. Simple! Or so i thought...

The other day at work I was trying to animate some tentacles moving around and overlapping. As I was struggling away my friend and colleague sat next to me (Kayn) saw what I was doing and decided to give me an old school Disney lesson in overlap. Which went as follows:


He handed me a sketch which looked like this one below:

He then asked me what would happen to the string if the top were to start moving to the right, as if someone pulled it. I drew this...

WRONG!!! 

Though this felt like the only solution it was in fact incorrect. In my mind I thought "well the end of the string will want to stay at rest but I suppose it will have to move a bit". Well yes that is true but it won't look like the above. It will in fact look like the diagram below: 

The end of the string moves to the left!! My mind blew up a little bit at this point. As the string is pulled it's height shortens causing the end to move up and left. Try this at home now by holding a pencil at one end and moving it right rapidly. The end will drag left first. 

 It also gives us this really wonderful S curve and curve reversal in the end of the string. This S curve appears again if the string were to stop moving too. 

As Kayn corrected my drawing like the one above I could finally understand why my overlapping tentacles weren't looking too hot. Even though i felt like I grasped the concept of overlap, I didn't really understand it. And that's where the difference is. So, time to revisit all the principles and really understand the secret mechanics of them all.

Life Drawing - Framestore Evening Classes

The past couple months Framestore have been running life drawing classes in the evenings. Even after a long day of animation on the computer it's really nice to break out the pens and pencils and draw for a couple of hours. The drawings below are from a session where I just used pen. I did this to just mix things up a bit and force me to commit to my lines. The classes too really helped my animation as it trains the eye to be more analytical and precise when studying movement.

MOVING HOUSE - A short documentary film

In preparation for starting work at Framestore I moved to London along with some of my University housemates. I thought it'd be a cool moment to capture so I made a little documentary short film about it. Hope you enjoy! It's a bit silly...



MOVING HOUSE 2016 - Short Film from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Christian Bale - Dialogue without Dialogue

Whilst watching The Big Short again the other day I was blown away by how good the acting was. One scene in particular really grabbed my attention and got me thinking about acting without dialogue.

It's the scene in which Christian Bale's character Dr. Michael Burry is negotiating a deal with Goldman Sachs in order to short the housing market. 

Have a watch of the entire scene below:





A really good scene, Bale is super interesting to watch. So there is a point in the scene where the camera rests on Bale as he is waiting for the other two to finish negotiating. He isn't listening, just waiting in my opinion. His acting here is so genius i love it! Watch the clip below again which should play at this particular point (2 minutes in):





SO GOOD. By acting the way that he does Bale gives the character depth and dimension. In animation we constantly strive for this kind of unique acting instead of the generic cliched stuff.  So the question is, what exactly is Bale doing that is so interesting and how does he do it?

Let's allow Bale to explain to explain that himself:





Niiiice. So what he's getting at is even though he doesn't have any dialogue on paper, he has dialogue in his head which informs his acting choices which we see on screen. This whole interview is super interesting and worth a watch. I've pulled out some of the quotes below:

"If you're silent in the scene you have an internal converstation that never stops"

"What i'll do sometimes when beginning a film [is] write dialogue for the silence"

"You can convey almost everything you need to convey without saying anything"

Now, with what we've just learnt we can look back at the scene from The Big Short with fresh eyes and try to decipher what Bale's inner dialogue might be...

This is a really simple concept but when done right it really brings the character to life.


Just briefly Michael Caine also talks about this method for listening in a scene (it applies whether someone is listening or not as in Bale's case) too. Again this whole Workshop is worth a watch too:






So, how does all this apply to animation? I think it's especially useful for those quiet scenes where a character may not be doing much . It's tempting to over animate these as a cheap way of trying to keep the audience interested. But by constructing this inner dialogue we have a structure on which to guide the performance. And this in and of itself it makes the character seem much more alive. Which is ultimately what it's all about! Hope this helps :)

Final Year Films at Uni of Herts

Finally getting round to posting my final year Uni films!!

Hope you enjoy them :) 

Far Fetched was the film I worked on with Daniel Ridley and James Richardson. We had tons of fun making it and a very hapy with the result. I think there are definitely some changes that we'd all like to make but under the circumstances I think we did okay. Enjoy"

Far Fetched - Animated Short Film 2016 from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Bertie the Elephant was the other film I had a part in making. I animated 3 shots in total and learnt a lot in the process. Again there's changes i'd like to make but that's the way of the animator!

Bertie The Elephant - A short film by Chris Turner and Zak Boxall from zakboxall on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

Drawing again!

Found some time to go back to some life drawing recently (still V. rusty):

Check out Glenn Vilppu for some amazing drawing tips from an absolute master. I learnt 3 super valuable tips from his drawing demo which i'll link below. The tips concern hand movements as one tries to define the form and the gesture of the figure (16mins 30secs into the video) which are:

1. Draw with the flow
2. Go over the surface and around the form
3. Contain the form

By doing this we get a very deliberate 3 dimensional drawing. Here's the vid which I highly recommend watching the whole thing:

Bear in mind there's no rules for life drawing but sometimes tips like these can really help, and of course nothing beats practice! Hope this helps! 

Animating the Pauses - Philip Seymour Hoffman

I was randomly watching some movie scenes on YouTube when I came across this one from Along Came Polly with Philip Seymour Hoffman. I'm a big fan of Seymour Hoffman and love his comedic roles, they're just packed with comedic timing. The thing i noticed about this particular scene however were two instances where he anticipates his dialogue. He gestures within the pause and makes the whole scene funnier and more emotional too. 

Here's the first example after he says the line "base jumping":





The intensity of Hoffman as he tries to force the words "crocodile wrestling" out of his mouth just adds so much believability to his acting performance. His mouth forms random shapes, his shoulders rise up and he shakes his head and hands with exaggeration and anticipation of what he's about to say. It also adds so much depth to the entire scene as the character Sandy Lyle (Hoffman) is pretending to be Ben Stiller's character as a favour. And since Sandy Lyle is not a insurance lawyer he doesn't know what he's talking about so ofcourse he'll pause and try and be overly intense to make up this fact.

Another more emotional example comes towards the end of the scene:




Right after the guy asks "Are you one of the guys from Crocodile Tears?" Hoffman reacts like he's about to immediately reply but instead he pauses, lets out a sigh and then says "You're goddamn right I am" So much is occurring in that pause!! His entire character development is completed right in those few anticipatory seconds!! (Some background info: Hoffmans' character Sandy Lyle basically is trying so hard to give off the impression he is a serious actor but everyone only recognises hims as the 'Crocodile Tears' guy he played as a kid.) so, in this scene he finally accepts who he is and just owns it instead. Such good acting :) just imagine the scene again but without the pause. It would be 100 times less effective.

Okay...so what??

So, by leaving room for a pause in the dialogue we can animate the thought process of a character! This can add drama, humor, emotional weight and subtlety. All the things that help make it seem like a character is a living, breathing and dimensional entity reacting under it's own accord.

This is definitely an area i'm going to explore for my next character animation piece. Hope this blog post makes sense :)

Creature Animation Workflow - Bertie the Elephant

I recently finished animating on the last shot for my friend's final year project Bertie the Elephant. Since it was my last shot too I thought i'd put everything i've got into it. It was probably the hardest shot I've ever had to animate so I thought I'd write about the workflow I took to animate it. However i will say that there is no right or wrong way to animate a shot. There are probably better and faster ways to do this as i'm still just sort of figuring out stuff for myself!

For context the elephant has just returned the toy to the girl and is walking away gleefully from the house.

After discussing some ideas with the leads of 'Bertie the Elephant' (Zak and Chris) we settled on the idea that Bertie would cross the road and then look back at the girls house before proceeding to walk towards the camera and out of frame. With this basic idea I began to plan, research and maximise the entertainment value of the shot.

Research!

Probably the most important aspect in doing any creature shot, realistic or cartoony, is doing research of the animal that you're animating. I watched plenty of baby elephant videos on youtube so I could simply get a feel for the way the move and interact with the world. I would also try and find footage that matched what I had in mind for my shot, relevant walks and head turns basically. Then by taking the best bits of video reference I went and imported them into maya for a reference guide.

Blocking

Once all the video reference was in I began to animate!! But before leaping straight into all the little details of the shot i wanted to make sure the basic movement, timing and screen position of the elephant was looking good. To do this i simply slid around the global controller of the elephant into the areas i wanted, easy! Once i was reasonably happy I then created a large sphere that moved along with the elephant. I did this so that when I muted the global animation on the rig to start properly animating the sphere would show me where to go! I then took the local body controller of the elephant (which controls the entire body except the feet) and animated the movement of the elephant with that. If it was up to me i would have hid the legs but since i couldn't i keyed them in to follow beneath the elephant. 

In the end the blocking looked something like this (password: bertie)

blocking 002 from James Saunders on Vimeo.

It looks rubbish but the basic timing and movement is there as a skeleton to work from.


ANIMATING WOO

Once all the blocking seemed good i then began to really start animating! I decided to break the shot down into two parts from here; the walk up until he looks back at the house, and then the run towards camera. So, i began by looking at some happy walking reference from earlier and dove straight in. I just focused on trying to get the rough placement and timing of all the feet first, especially since the elephant starts to turn to walk almost sideways. By getting all this information down into maya it gave me a pretty solid base to move around and play with. I didn't detail too much in as i knew my first guess of these placements would be close but not perfect.

Getting the feet placements and timings correct was probably the toughest part about the shot. Especially when the animation has to drift away from any video reference that you have. When this happens it's just a case of gritting your teeth and using your animation knowledge and research to make sure the timing and posing still looks good. There wasn't an easy way to do this!!

After a while I had something like this (password: bertie):

Bertie - Blocking 003 from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Again it's still rubbish looking at first glance but I'm slowly getting the feet positions into roughly the right places.

Also look at how much i'm managing to use from the video reference in this shot and mould it into what i want to use. I have a feeling that the more advanced an animator you become, the less tied you are to the video reference in the way that i was. That being said, by the time i got to the end of the shot i had deviated quite a lot from just animating from one single piece of reference.


Once I was fairly happy with the feet positions I went back and did another pass over the whole shot. I put in more detail such as the hip and shoulder rotations and paid more attention into getting the elephant to move smoothly. After this stage I was at a fairly good place body mechanics wise and acting wise. Password: bertie

Bertie - Blocking 005 from James Saunders on Vimeo.

He's still a bit wibbly wobbly towards the end but I'm now way closer to what i wanted to achieve out of the shot.

Throughout the animation I would make tons of notes on ways to improve the shot. Generally i'd playblast to check my progress and then write down all the areas i found wrong with the shot. I'd then go back to maya and address my own notes. This way I never found myself wasting time by noodling with unimportant issues with the animation. Highly recommend doing this!!

Polish

The final stage is the polish stage. It's where you begin to tidy up all the little details in the mechanics, smooth out any graph editor curves and in general just get the shot ready for handin. The trickiest part of the polish stage is getting rid of any knee pops and weird leg movement overall. But really, the hard part is over and with a few extra days needling out any weighting issues i got this (passowrd: bertie):

Bertie - FINAL from James Saunders on Vimeo.

Wahoo! A finished elephant shot :) :) All in all this shot took about 8 solid days work. Hopefully with more practice i can increase my speed.

Anyway, hopefully that helps illuminate my creature workflow for this type of shot. I think workflow varies widely from shot to shot depending on the movement of the character but through experience it should be easier to spot the correct direction to take! That's all for now, will post up the finished film soon in all it's rendered glory! 

James

Thumbnails, Exploration and Planning!

For one of the shots I animated during Far-Fetched I made the classic mistake of not properly planning the performance i wanted. Even at the time I felt pretty comfortable with the action i wanted to animate but after i diving into maya it soon became obvious I was out of my depth. Inevitably as i wrestled more and more with the keys the shot started to look really bad. Ultimately I decided to restart the whole shot from the start and do some PLANNING!!!


We all know how easy it is to skip over the planning stage of a shot, it's so tempting to think that you can save time this way but inevitably it will nearly always come round to cause problems down the line. The aim of this post is not just to talk about planning however but to talk about how the combination of video reference and thumbnails in the planning stage contributes to the quality of a shot.


In case anyone is wondering it might be helpful to explain what thumbnails are. Essentially thumbnails are very quick, rough sketches that help the animator figure out key poses in a shot. They allow the animator to explore as many posing possibilities as quickly as possible as well as figuring out any staging and acting issues.

Example of thumbnails by legendary animator Glen Keane

What is becoming more and more useful to me is the feedback loop between thumbnailing and video reference. Throughout Far-Fetched I would rough out my poses on paper and then try and feel out those poses in my video reference. I'd then look back at my video reference which would then spark more ideas which i would thumbnail again. It allows me to really explore and then refine the acting for the actual animation stage.

Once I got into Maya i would refer back to both the video reference and thumbnails again. In many cases the camera angle in my video reference would not quite match the angle in the film, when this happened i would refer back to my thumbnails for a posing and staging guide. 

Some examples from Far-Fetched:

Maybe you'll be able to spot which shots these came from in the final film!!

All this planning process sounds like it takes a long time (which is why it's so tempting to skip it!) but by going through this process the animation becomes so much more considered and the quality sky-rockets. And really this whole process can only take a couple of hours when it's all added up. I can't recommend it enough even for the most basic shots.

Here are some great PDF links too on thumbnailing and a fantastic one on Glen Keane's animation process. Definitely worth a read.

http://www.animationmeat.com/pdf/nineoldmen/rescuers_thumbs.pdf

http://www.animationmeat.com/pdf/featureanimation/Glen_Keane_Animation.pdf

A Quick Post on Failure - (An old post I wrote but never published)

Last week all the animation students at University had to hand in their latest showreels for a pre-christmas assesment. We then gathered as a year and watched them on the big screen for everyone to watch...

I'll admit, when I watched my showreel I felt like it wasn't up to the standard I usually aim towards. The title cards were outdated, the pacing was bad, none of the shots were rendered, none of the shots were finished to a stage I was happy with and it was generally boring to watch. 

That being said, I feel like it's okay to have a major kick in the teeth like this one. 

As 'artists' we're constantly asking ourselves to create. Create drawings, sculpts, matte paintings, animation, whatever it is, our job is to create. And in order to create great work, we must fail, and fail often. By failing fast and often we are constantly faced with opportunities to assess the quality of our work and then ask ourselves and others how to improve.

Failure teaches the shape of our intuition. After you keep making a mistake/failing, you'll begin to see it coming from farther away than before.

All in all there is therefore no straightforward path, so keep failing and fail often.

Work Dump 2016

Been ages since I last posted on here. Testament to how busy things have been and how rubbish i am at keeping a diary.

Thought i'd dump a whole bunch of separate animations i've been working on for my final year films: Far-Fetched (apologies for the lack of blog updates on here too...) and Bertie the Elephant

All of these are still in the WIP stage:


Bertie the Elephant


Bertie the Elephant - Shot_009 WIP from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Bertie Shot_013 - Sad Walk from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Far-Fetched



Shot_123_FarFetched from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Shot_017 from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Shot_033 from James Saunders on Vimeo.

More updates to come....i promise :)

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!!