We divided the movie into parts that we then handed out to the people on the group that was most interested in animation. And then, whilst we were animating, the other group members would model more props for the apartment, texture props and characters, set light and so forth.
I was given shot 1-9 (as we had assigned them). This was the entire sequence up until JD is stunned by the sign. We were all more or less guessing how much we would be able to animate. We also assigned the shots fairly loosely, knowing that we could easily transfer shots should one of us be overworked. I had assumed I would be able to animate more then what was realistic, especially with the changes made to shot 3 that extended it by a lot. Luckily Daniel had time left over after having finished his animation, so he stepped in and animated a few shots.
When we started animating we had two options. We could either animate the shots as they appear in the move (i.e. shot 1, 2, 3…). Or we could animate the “hero” shots first, so that the most important shots were guaranteed to be done, in case we ran out of time. We were fairly confident that we would have time to animate everything, so we animated the stuff as they appear.
So, first off I started with blocking out the door entry shot. Here is a clip of the process I used. At first you see the original animatic, then a rough block, and then a splined out version. The final version is in the final movie.
As you may see I start out with a very rough blocking of the entire animation. I also tried to time this block as good as possible. At this stage I was also copying the reference video quite a lot. Once I was happy with how the blocking looked (timing, poses) I tried to get feedback on it from the people I was working with, from my class mates, and from my teacher. After the feedback I generally ended up changing a fair bit of the animation. Once that was done I splined it out and went over the entire animation a few times, cleaning it up. I usually ended up changing and retiming some (or a lot of) poses. And once that was done I went on a new feedback round and made some more changes, before the final result.
We did a few changes to this shot from how it was in the storyboard and animatic. We ended up removing the whole cloth rack that he was pulling down from the ceiling in the animatic (it’s the invisible thing he pulls down with his hand before sliding over to the kitchen area). Reason for this was that we felt that the broken lights, and later, the broken TV, would show that he was living in a dump. And we felt we wouldn’t need more clues for that. We also decided to cut the walk cycle over to the kitchen area, primarily to save time, but also because it felt a bit boring to look at it.
The video above should show my work process somewhat accurately. And I stuck with this process for the remainder of the movie. I won’t be posting the work process (from animation ref -> block -> spline -> final result) as a video for every single shot I’ve done. Reason for that is that I sadly had to delete a lot of previews I took while I was animating (ran out of HD space).
Had to split this in two since a single file got to big to upload. So first is the animatic, second is the animation.
For this shot I started out as in the previous one, blocking out whilst following the reference video. One problem here was that the reference video wasn’t really any good. I had filmed from an odd camera angle, so a lot of the movement JD does inside the refrigerator was hidden. I figured I could just improvise what he did inside the refrigerator, and I think it turned out pretty good. Due to the camera angle in the reference movie being odd I had to change out a lot of the poses to make it look good in the movie, but that wasn’t too much of a challenge. The biggest issue I had for this shot was the interaction between JD and the food and beer can. I didn’t want the mesh from the objects to go into each other, but at the same time it had to look like he was actually touching it. I didn’t come up with an easy fix solution to the object interaction other then keying a lot and making sure the objects and JDs hands looked good. This was only an issue at the start of the shot, inside the refrigerator, where the camera was close to the hands. Later on it wasn’t visible, so didn’t need to animate it that closely.
When I animated the walkcycle in this shot I started out with a very simple 2 pose cycle (contacts and passing poses). I did it primarily to have less poses (and less keys) to work with when I was timing out the steps. Once the walkcycle was timed I started refining it, adding ups and downs. I didn’t start animating the arms until I had timed out the entire cycle. Reason for that was I wanted to know how much time I had to open the beer can and drink from it. I decided to shoot the beercan opening from the back, and using arm movement to make it clear what he was doing. Reason for that was I didn’t want to spend a lot of time fiddling with the fingers. After that I tried out a few different timings for the drinking part of the cycle, seeing when I should start and stop.
When I started animating this shot he was originally going to just walk over to the chair, sit down and turn on the TV with a remote. After thinking a little about it we figured out that he could just as well turn on the TV, on the TV. So we didn’t have to model a remote control. Once I started animating I got the idea of having the TV be slightly broken as well, so we could show that he didn’t have state of the art stuff in his house. Once that was done I wanted to show that he was happy for a short while (when he sees his favorite TV show is on), since he had to be sad again when the commercial started. Going from happy -> sad seemed better than going from sad -> sad. All in all this shot ended up quite a lot longer than we had planned at first, and it also took more time to animate it, since there was a lot more happening.
The hardest part with this shot was making him look happy. At first I had him just raise and lower his arms and upper boddy a bit, like a very toned down jumping. But that was way to toned down. So I ended up making him jump up and down on one spot, before walking backwards to his chair. Eventually we came to the conclusion that he should probably jump backwards to his chair. It did look so good with the walking.
I was a bit unsure about the jumping thing making him appear very childish, but my group members liked it, so I went with it. Animating the jump was a bit complicated. At first I just animated it without reference, but that didn't go so well. So I quickly filmed some reference videos, and it went a lot easier from there.
In this shot I had most issues with him standing up. Originally I wanted him to push himself tiredly up from the chair, instead of just getting up normally. It turned out that it was fairly hard to get him look tired, but after a bit of time spent tweaking I think I nailed it.
We made one change here as well. In the storyboards he tossed a pillow at the window in front of the screen almost at the same time as he gets up. This was changed to the beercan in the animatic. Which he throw at the sign much later. The reason for tossing the beercan instead of the pillow was mainly because we wanted to use something JD already had in his hands. Making it easier to animate and work with. And we also had to model and texture one object less.
In this shot the major challenge was the throw itself. I started out with a baseball throw as a reference, but that turned out to be to sporty looking. And I didn’t want JD to look that sporty. So I found some reference on youtube of a girly throw (the term, not implying that there is any difference between the two genders at all). The problem I had with that throw was that it was way too little movement in his feet and upper body. So in the end I ended up with a toned down baseball throw with some influence from the girly throw.
The hardest part in this shot was having him look like he was burning his hands on the hot food, and him shaking his hands as if they were burned while rushing to the sink to get them under cold water.
For the burning his hands part of the animation I tried to copy the reference video as I had done for the previous shots. It didn’t really look that good, but it gave me some base poses that I could build on. In the reference video the actor was more or less holding the food in his hand constantly. I didn’t really think that was realistic if the food was burning hot. So I ended up having him throw the food in between his two hands (that’s what I usually end up doing when I take hot bread or something out of the oven).
Animating the hand movement when he was rushing to the sink was somewhat complicated. It took some trial and error to get the speed of the hand movement right. If it was too fast the motion blur would make it look like one big blur, and to slow would look…slow.
In the storyboard he had some curtains that he pulled in front of the window. In the animatic we changed it to a pull down shader. And in the final movie it was again changed to a nuclear panic lockdown/shutdown mechanism.
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