Showreel
About me
Contact
Rss feed

L.A. Times Roundtable Discussion: Animation

Posted on December 2, 2012  | 2 Comments
Filed under Education

After the Storyboard class I took with Steve McLeod and CGMA (they just made some changes to the website), I have become more and more interested in Story and screenwriting.

During the introduction class, Steve told us about the classic Robert Mc Kee and Syd Fields books, and this other book I had never heard of before, “Save the cat” by Blake Snyder.

“Save the cat” was on my to-read list for a while and I was finally able to go trough it during my recent trip to L.A. Man this book is awesome. It is so awesome that after reading a dodgy Pdf version on my Kindle, I had to run to the nearest Barnes&Nobles to buy the paper version as soon as I landed.

Agreed it seems very formulaic with the various page count, but make abstraction of this and you will definitely learn a lot. The book was an eye opener for me and thanks to Blake Snyder, I am now able to clearly understand the structure of movies and even understand some screenwriting insiders joke like the “Save the cat” sequence on Pixar’s “Incredible”. If you ever wanted to write a script and didn’t know how to start, “Save the cat” will certainly be of a great help.

Talking about “Save the cat” I have been told the book is actually being trashed on the following video! 😉

Who are those guys anyway! Well it is non other than Brave’s, Paranorman’s, Guardians’s, Hotel T’s and my 2012 favorite Wreck it Ralph’s directors talking shop! Sounds like a great roundtable even if I already disagree with whatever they will say about “Save the cat” 😉

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h93zu_wGa0[/youtube]

Thanks Richie

via Cartoon Brew

Fini Candies – great rig

Posted on November 29, 2012  | 2 Comments
Filed under Education

I just found a video of a very cool rig demo featuring some new features I have never had the change to play with.

– No twist arms and hands
– Deform point system

The creator tells us he made the full rig with facial in a week with his own autorig.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/39365906[/vimeo]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/39371103[/vimeo]

I am using this opportunity to plug an old article about World orient head and shoulders. I am amazed how many professional rigs don’t have such a simple constraint switch that makes animators life much easier and allows us to reach higher quotas and quality.

Related posts:
World orient head and shoulders
So you want to be a rigger (TD) huh?
Looney Tunes shorts online
Rigging trends
Josh Carey VES Rigging submission

Back from CTN part I

Posted on November 26, 2012  | 10 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

[disclosure: This blog post might be biased as Mike Makarewicz gave me a free Tshirt to thank me for supporting Animation Collaborative 😉 ]

So I am back from CTN-X. CTN 2012 was a great success this year again with some really good guests like Andreas Deja one more time and CTN first timer Glen Keane.

Some of the conferences were a bit too generic especially the ones hosted by people who didn’t know the guests very well but there were plenty of great ones that went into the nitty gritty part of the animation process.

Animation Collaborative had a one of a kind demo this year with their “4 different approaches to Acting : context and creativity with Michal Makarewicz, Victor Navone, Rob Thompson and Aaron Hartline“. For that presentation they used a pretty bland audio clip that sounded like a Brian Tracy unless it was a Napoleon Hill audio book, and they went on explaining their tought process for animating a character to that audio clip. Michal had to shorten his presentation unfortunately but the presentation was really interesting. Ah, Victor was the only representative of the Step Key workflow, all the others used the Spline method.

I also attended an other demo with Michal Makarewicz which was way more insightful than the title implied: “Animate a take like a pro”. I know Michal pretty well as I attended Animation Collaborative last year, had a pretty long chat with him at Siggraph few years ago and he was also featured on several Animation Mentor lectures. Mike is also known to be one of the fastest animators at Pixar so it is always very interesting to see him animating and this time, despite the issues he had with Maya and one TV dying on us (compatibility issue with the Cintiq we got told), his demo was great.

As the title implied, using a Norman mod that looked like Sulley from Monsters Inc, he showed us how he would animate a take, using as reference, the shot from the famous Chuck Jones tribute sequence were Sulley fears Boo is being crushed in the trash compactor.

I knew Mike was a “layer animator” but I didn’t know how much he relied on properly setup hotkeys and additional scripts. As he said, all the interactions with the keyboard should be very intuitive and rely on muscle memory instead of having to look down where you fingers are going everytime you want to do something.

As such and with great difficulties, he set up all his Maya hotkeys to be on the left side of the keyboard. “You don’t want to cross the keyboard” he commented. If you have been following this blog for a long time you know I share the same views and I posted several workflow tips on how to make Maya more animator friendly. [Having only recently used Maya 2011 and 2012 I have had to face some incredible issues with the new hotkeys interface and eventually found a fix which I will share it with you very soon, I hope this was fixed in Maya 2013]

His other tip and probably the core of his fast workflow is to work in spline and copy the graph editor curves from one channel to an other as often as possible and scale, mirror or offset the curve when needed.

In the demo for example, he took the Hips TY (translation of the hips in Y) and copied it to the shoulders after inverting and offsetting it. There was also some nifty graph editor value operation using the *=.25 expression which was an “ahah moment” for a big part of the crowd and a never seen, at least for me and a good chunk of the audience, lattice graph editor scaling script which he used to create some residual energy for the head Y rotation on the settle.

He also explained that we shouldn’t “mess with the math” in the graph editor and never create kinks or overshoots with the tangents (Mike uses weighted free tangents only) instead you want to flatten the tangents and play with their weight. Here is an example of what he would do for a bouncing ball.

Alright that will be it for today, ah just to finish, I went to see Wreck-it Ralph at Disney’s El Capitan theatre on Hollywood boulevard and it was very good. I was expecting something a bit commercial with all the pop culture references and product placements but there was a great surprise with a specific scene I don’t want to spoil for you. Let’s just say, there was some of the magic from Tangled in the form of some very hearful moments were we couldn’t help feeling for the characters.

Talkback :
My post already brought some questions so here are the answers.

What is this *=.25 thing?

In the Graph editor, it is possible to adjust the value of a selection of keys by entering some expressions in the Key stats box. Here is how it works (click to enlarge the pictures):





And by checking the Maya online documentation, I realised the Lattice key deformation tool he used is not a script but actually part of Maya. Here is where you will find it and by double clicking on it you will access more options

Rich Moore “Wreck it Ralph” Talks at Google

Posted on November 12, 2012  | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation

I don’t like when people just post links to stuff without taking the time to write an introduction or some commentary but this is what I will do today 😉

Hehe, actually I still have to write a little blurb as Google’s Doodler Creative Lead Ryan Germick is once again hosting a great interview with this time “Wreck it Ralph”‘s director Rich Moore.

I love Ryan’s interviews as he always does a lot of research before interviewing people and has a lot of great questions which he asks with a lot of humour.

“Wreck it Ralph” hasn’t opened yet in France but I will certainly see it next week after attending CTN. By the way, I am free if someone wants to invite me at Disney for a visit next week, even if it is just to lead me to the gift shop 😉

Thanks Google, Ryan and obviously Rich Moore!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkxcO_MG4Gs[/youtube]

Related post:
Mark Andrews and the Google Doodle Team

Looney Tunes Shorts online!

Posted on November 10, 2012  | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

I just got told that the first two ReelFX’s “Looney tunes” shorts are now available online.

If you missed those look no further and watch them in their full 1080p glory on their own Youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/looneytunesshorts

The TDs did an incredible job to allow the animator to push CG animation to an extent that was never permitted before. Crazy smear frames, multi limbs, out of the ordinary facial and body poses.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZhlXAYtaMw[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cYMoxBWEZw[/youtube]

I am still waiting to see the entire Daffy’s Rhapsody but the wait shouldn’t take too long.

I also want to point out that ReelFX’s Supervising TD Josh Carey and the other guys from Rigging Dojo have an incredible source of information on their website so you must subscribe to both their newsletter, and blog’s RSS Feed, even if like me you are not a professional TD but only want to understand how things work and learn few things along the way.

Lately they have had some really good interviews with Sony’s Character and Animation TD Martin Orlowski for his work on “Pirates ! Band of Misfits” (I am wondering more and more how much was stop motion now….) and Sony’s TD Tim Coleman for his work on “Spiderman” and “Hotel Transylvania”. The latter was only available on the Newsletter so this is why you need to subscribe to both.

That’s it for today. I will write a longer article about the importance of communication between TDs and Animators an other day.

Thanks Amy for the heads up.

Related posts:
Josh Carey’s Animschool interview
Josh Carey’s VFS submission
Ray Chase showreel
Aardman’s Pirates behind the scenes
CGMA Character Design Week 03

Schoolism – Designing with color and light

Posted on November 7, 2012  | 3 Comments
Filed under Cinematography, Education, Painting

[update] Well the class sold out in probably less than two hours, this should give some ideas to other online schools like CGMA/CGMW (I can never remember the name, but I highly recommend the storyboard and character design class). CGMA has a 2 hours live class with the mentor every week, Schoolism doesn’t. Come on CGMA, there are plenty of great Feature Animation Vis Dev artist out there.

Check this out, Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism just announced a pretty awesome online class titled “Designing with Color and Light with Nathan Fowkes”.

I have been following Dreamworks visual dev artist Nathan Fowkes for a bit and I had to rush to book the course, granted I will have a slight issue compared to other students, I am slightly colour blind. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue, some people say Van Gogh was also colour blind and this is why the palette he used seems so vibrant to non-colour blind people.

Schoolism has also a bunch of other great classes from Zbrush to Storyboarding (with Kris Pearn) I would encourage you to check out

Schoolism online school

If you enroll to one of the courses and you want to support Animation with a Moustache, please give them the following promo code 75qs0

I should use this opportunity to thanks the two people who refereed me and I would like to hear which courses you took and how you found them.

I just found a 12 minutes introduction video to an other workshop he helds in L.A. that should give an idea to what to expect from his course.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32rLWfMzHTs[/youtube]


Related search:
Schoolism

Animation Podcast unofficial Tangled animator’s commentary

Posted on October 31, 2012  | 3 Comments
Filed under Animation

The Animation Podcast show 32

I was so upset when I realized there were no commentaries on the Tangled Bluray you wouldn’t believe. I understand Disney is trying to save money but how do you want people to truely appreciate your movies if you don’t give them an in-depth behind the scenes or at least some commentaries! I won’t be buying Blurays blindly anymore, that’s for sure.

On Pixar’s Incredible’s DVD there were 3 commentary tracks!

Anyway Clay Kaytis and a bunch of Disney animators came back with a bang. They gathered to record an unofficial Tangled Animator’s commentary to listen while watching the movie!

Excellent!

The Animation Podcast show 32 – The “Unofficial” Tangled Animators’ Audio Commentary

Related posts:
Tangled crew (Raiponce)
Joe Bowers Thought process
Jamaal Bradley shot progress

What is good acting?

Posted on October 23, 2012  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Acting, Animation

I wouldn’t be able to give you a clear answer to that but I think we can all agree that the following example is a really fine piece of acting starring child prodigee Henry Thomas during an audition for 1982 Spielberg’s E.T.

The video just surfaced on the internet at the same time as an interview for Esquire magazine where he explains how he approached the audition.

“I read a scene from some early version of the script, and then I was asked to do an improvisation. I think the gist of the improv was, “You found someone, and they’re going to take them away from you, and it’s your friend, and you really don’t want your friend to go away.” So I started crying, and really going for it I guess.”

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/henry-thomas-et-interview-13541489

According to the Huffington Post, legend has it that Thomas drew his inspiration for the scene from a deceased family dog.

Okay kid, you got the job!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV0vYQcmWK0[/youtube]

“The Quest of Digduguesclin” in Pixel glory

Posted on October 11, 2012  | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation

My friend Sebastien Lasserre just released his 34 minutes shortfilm to the public and an official website showcasing some of the artwork that went into the making of the “short”. (few more minutes and it was a feature 😉 )

Sebastien took a year off from work to dedicate to this project, a shorfilm mixing medieval storyline and 8 bits video game references all animated in Pixels.

My only contribution was moral support as I only discovered the finished shortfilm when it premiered last year in Bayonne.

I should also note that the music and sound design was handled by my good buddy Vincil from Ummo whom I mentionned a while back on this blog.

http://sebastienlasserre.net/films/

Grab some drinks and popcorn, sit back and enjoy.

In the year of grace 1351, the entire kingdom is devastated.
Begged for by the king in order to reverse the cursed Malsanto,
Bertrand sets off on a long journey…
Scénario, director : Sébastien Lasserre
Dialogues : Michel Pasut et Sébastien Lasserre
Music : Sylvain Aubert,

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/50612323[/vimeo]

Character design research

After viewing the short don’t forget to check his other stop motion short films, and especially “Christmas time” which was selected at Annecy few years ago.

Related posts:
Christmas time is here
Saint Louis video clip

Facebook birthdays comics part 01

Posted on October 4, 2012  | 2 Comments
Filed under Comics, Drawings, Education, Portfolio, Story

In order to broaden my range of skills and improve my employability I have started making comics. I think this could be a great training for storyboarding. My storyboarding teacher Steven MacLeod told us how much it helped him to clean up his boards so that should work for me too.

Here is the first story, well the first part. The first panels were drawn in Photoshop and the last one in PaintToolSAI. If you are a Twitter subscriber you have already seen some pictures I posted few weeks ago, that software is great.

Forgive the rudimentary colors and inking, I am really new to all of that and few month ago I couldn’t even draw with a wacom tablet. Things will get better with practice.

The second page will be uploaded tomorrow (I’d better finish it! ;-)). Enjoy

Related posts:
Pressing matters 01 rough first pass
Pressing matters 02 rough first pass
Pressing matters 03 rough first pass

← Previous Page — Next Page →