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Education section added

Posted on November 21, 2010  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Education

I just modified the Tutorial category and created an Education section instead. I felt that the last items I posted fell more into a broader Education category since they are more observations than actual tutorial.

This also a tribute to Neil Blevins (Soulburn 3d). With Michael Comet and Keith Lango, he is one of the first CG online educators from whom I learnt a lot.

Animation Beat-Box

Posted on November 17, 2010  | 6 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

Do you remember this documentary about Richard Williams in Soho Square timing out motion of people and animals around him? Amazing wasn’t it? This is where this project originates from.

Being able to time out an action just by looking at it can only be done by people with years of experience but with some training you could probably do the same much quicker.

In my quest to gain a better understanding of timing and to share my research with fellow animators, I finally created a video version of my Animation Beat Box.

This video is a beat box that hit a beep sound every 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14 frames. Each sequence lasts for 1 minute (1500 frames)

Click on the pic below and enjoy.

2s.jpg

oops I forgot to give credit for the timing examples to my friend Andy Knight and some notes he took from a conference hosted by Eric Goldberg back in the days 😉

Related posts:
Richard Williams documentary

Lip sync observations

Posted on November 16, 2010  | 16 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

Lip sync scared me for a long time but this was due to my lack of experience more than the actual job of animating lips and expressions to the audio.

For a while, I thought doing lip sync meant to choose a sequence of premade phonems and blend them more or less successfully as led to think by the Preston Blair animation book. To be fair, this is pretty much what you are supposed to do in most TV series but the result will always look very approximative and of low quality which is fine when your audience is preschool.

A good lip sync for feature animation should instead be done by focusing on other elements like the following:

1- open and close of the jaw
2- narrowing and widening of the mouth corners
3- asymmetry of the mouth (Mouth Left/Right, Rotation should blend shapes can help greatly for that)
4- lips roll
5- mouth Up/Down attribute to anticipate plosive sounds and create more contrast
6- lips translation, mainly drag for plosive phonemes such as Bb/Mm/Pp
7- appealing mouth corner arcs
8- good interaction of the tongue with the teeth and jaw
9- drag, overlap, rotation and translation of the jaw

A good rig such as the freely available Norman or Morpheus, despite the collapsing geometry for specific closed mouth shapes, should allow you to handle those criteria.

To illustrate this, here is a video I extracted from the Toy Story3 trailer and animated by Victor Navone. I added on-screen notes and a graphical representation of the audio waveform so you can compare the timing of the audio to the mouth shapes. (thanks Chris Cantero for the animation credits).

To read all the notes, save the video on your hard drive and play it frame by frame. Microsoft Windows users should play the video with KMPlayer to get the audio feedback while step framing.

I think one or two frames are missing for the bottom lip roll overlap but this should make it a very good start to your lip sync learning.

AnimationMoustacheFixBuzzNotes

As a side note, the final shot has been slightly altered in the theatrical release with Buzz holding Jessee’s left hand rather than her right, I would be interested to know what the reasoning was behind that decision. They are obviously going for a tighter shot so we can focus on Jessee’s reaction but I don’t like her new pose much as her arm gets in the way and is buried in her silhouette. Here is a screenshot from Victor’s Toy Story 3 showreel.

I hope you like it, I have a James Baxter pencil test coming up next.

Related posts:
Norman FK world aligned spine
World orient head and shoulders
What is AAU
KM Player best video player ever!

To twin or not to twin

Posted on November 2, 2010  | 8 Comments
Filed under Acting, Animation, Education

the W pose

[update] Simple tip to break a W pose: Have the character hold a prop!

As Frank and Ollie expressed it in the “Illusion of Life” in 1981, “Twin, is the unfortunate situation where both arms or both legs are not only parallel but doing the exact same thing”. (p.68)

The typical example of a twin is the most dreaded pose in animation, the W pose. A pose where the character is standing straight with both forearms raised up, forming a W with his arms.

Carson Van Osten, a famous Disney comics artist illustrated it very well in his 1973 “Comic Strip Artist’s kit” and the illustration was reused in “The Illusion of Life”

Having been taught by some of the best animators in the industry during my training at Animation Mentor, I always try to avoid the W pose and find it really hard. I sometimes find myself wondering if there couldn’t be some exceptions. Don’t we, “twin”, in real life? Aren’t there any situation where the W would be acceptable?

Ron Clements seems to be thinking the opposite and in the same chapter of the “Illusion of Life” was quoted saying: “If you get into acting, you would never think of expressing an emotion with twins anywhere but somehow, in a drawing, when you are not thinking , it creeps in time and again”.

That’s not of much help is it? So what to do?

Well, when in doubt, I usually refer to my masters, the good people from Pixar and other feature animation studios but doing a fair bit of research I didn’t expect such an outcome. What a shock, their work is full of twins or at least the trailers I found on Youtube.

I made a funny animated gif to illustrate my findings. I hope no one will be offended, this wasn’t my goal, I could probably find similar examples in other studio’s work but those were the only trailers I had on my hard drive. Ultimately who am I to make fun of Pixar.

The W pose

The most surprising is the Ratatouille trailer where Rémi is twining for a long series of gestures. Wasn’t Brad Bird, Milt Kahl’s protégé, directing the movie?

So what to think of it?

Well if a Pixar director who started at Disney when he was a teenager is not bothered by twins I don’t think they should matter much but I would still refer to Andrew Gordon’s Splinedoctors’s article about cliché gestures.

A gesture here, a gesture there

W poses, with the neck rub and the elbow hold, are some of those cliché gestures that first come to the mind when thinking a performance and we should try to avoid them as much as we can.

If after exploring other acting choices they still feel adequate, then, we can probably use them but they should always, be the last option, not gesturing being the first.

Like listening to music while animating, keep in mind that you should avoid it but if it works for you or if this seems like the most natural thing to do, just do it.

Norman world align FK spine

Posted on October 31, 2010  | 5 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education


For those who would be interested, here is the Norman rig I am using.

The spine is in FK but as you will see, the spine controls are aligned to the world rather than their parent. This means that rotating the hips wont affect the rotation of the upper body. This seems a bit strange at first but this is proving really useful for walk cycles for examples as you dont need to counteranimate the upper body even after modifying the hips.

The file should open in Maya 2009 and up but also in older version provided you change the header.

One more thing you will notice is that the spine controls are transparent geometries instead of regular nurbs control. This makes the rig much cleaner and more user friendly.

[update]
It appears that I forgot to mention the constant use of a Xray hotkey with that kind of setup. Personally I use Alt+x to trigger Michael Comet’s Xray script (source “toggleXRay.mel”; toggleXRay();)

Download link

Related post:
So you want to be a rigger huh?

Lost in translation (layout refined)

Posted on October 26, 2010  | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation, Portfolio

Here is a new layout pass with few camera changes and animation tweaks so the story is a bit clearer
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16200084[/vimeo]

Lost in translation (layout)

Posted on October 25, 2010  | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation

Here is what I am working on at the moment.

Two characters shot with a healthy mix of high brow and pop culture 🙂

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16163725[/vimeo]

La fete – polish (French audio)

Posted on October 21, 2010  | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation

Sorry for not replying to your emails guys but I have no internet at home at the moment so lunch time breaks are extremely short to do all my online business 🙁

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16055287[/vimeo]

Since I am looking for work in France, I worked out it would be smart to use a french audio track for once.

For this piece I wanted to mainly focus on facial polish and lip sync and using a layered approach.

It is about 18 hours of work and I am sure this could be polished a bit more but I have become a bit blind to it. I will start a new two characters shot in the meantime and come back to this with fresh eyes.

The audio seem off by half a frame to one frame so if it bothers you, you can always download the avi version from Vimeo

[update] I just tweaked Bishop a bit, the video is exactly the same as above. Watching it with fresh eyes I realised that the mouth is a bit too poppy at the beginning and the lipsynch seems slightly off in places. I will revisit this in few days
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16370801[/vimeo]

La fête

Posted on October 20, 2010  | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation

I have been working very hard on a new 8seconds shot for the French animation market. I should be done in 1 or 2 more days. Here is a still picture in the meantime. The acting is a bit over the top but that’s the kind of work I am looking for at the moment.

Chico Chica Boumba

Posted on October 12, 2010  | 6 Comments
Filed under Animation, Portfolio

It is really annoying when for NDA reason your only showreel is a very old one that doesn’t reflect your current skills but it is even more annoying when you realise that you kept sending your old showreel despite the NDA being lifted month ago!

A year ago, I got to work on a really exciting pilot for a french TV series with a bunch of seriously talented artists. Chico Chica Boumba is a 52×3’30mins produced by Angouleme based studio “2minutes” and directed by “Intervalists” Cédric Babouche.

Working on that pilot was a bit of a shock at first, with all those squash and stretch, smeared frames, the style of animation was radically different from anything I had done before and the pace was so much faster but having some very experienced french TV animators working with me made the experience a lot easier. The show is very funny, the songs and voice over very catchy but more than anything it has that french visual flair I was hoping to be part of one day.

Without further due here is the pilot for Chico Chica Boumba, sorry I only have the french version. There has been a bit of editing on my shots and I will post the original ones later on.

Ah by the way, the first season is in full production and I am back in Angouleme to finish it.

Related post:
Back from Angouleme
Chico Chica Boumba teaser

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