Animation with a moustache

The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!

Tagged: Disney

Raph breaks the internet – Behind the scenes 0

Acting / Animation / Animation Mentor / Education / Story

 by 

Raph breaks the internet – Behind the scenes

Behind the scenes are very rare those days compared to 10 years ago where you could get 10 hours of extra features on the additional DVDs so let’s celebrate the ones available.

As an animator and hopeful storyboard artist, I am mostly interested in the nitty gritty of animation related stuff and storyboarding and this video happens to have a bit of both.

I find it interesting to see storyboard artist (mostly female yay) working together in a room, with Sharpies on paper, but this makes sense as it probably is a brainstorming session to work on a specific scene. I wonder if they will scan the drawings next or just redraw them on the computer, probably the latter.

Animation wise, except few seconds with fellow Animation Mentor graduate Kira Lehtomaki,  there isn’t much to see however, I am still finding some material worth a look. In feature animation it is not rare for animators to use footage from actors reading their dialogue for their acting so I can’t wait to see how much the animators derived from it as the hand gestures here in the video are mostly contrived, symmetrical and unappealing due to the fact the actor are just focusing on their lines.

 

 

 

Related posts:

Rich Moore “Wreck it Ralph” talk a Google
L.A. Times Roundtable Discussion: Animation
Annecy 2012
Have you ever been tempted to use…

 

Impressive fan made Elsa rig 1

Animation / Education / Modeling / Rigging

 by 

Impressive fan made Elsa rig

Youtube user Spiel Kind is sharing a walkthrough of his impressive fan made Frozen’s Elsa rig.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGG9TGJ9tWc[/youtube]

It is so impressive that even Disney temp worker Josh Sobel thought it could have been “borrowed” from Disney animation but luckily Spiel Kind documented the entire process from modeling to rigging on a CG talk thread .

He breaks down the rig by explaining how many blend shapes went into the making of that rig:

“27 blendshapes, which I divided up and/or mirrored into 90 total shapes. On top of that I also have a joint-rig though, which is responsible for the jaw/lips- and eyelid-setup.”

The explanation on CGTalk is a bit more detailed:

“It’s made up of four rigs in total. The first is a joint-rig, which drives the eyelids, eyelashes and the jaw/lip setup. Marco Giordano’s eyelid setup has been a big help for this one. The zipper setup is built after Stefan Ehrenhaus’ instructions a few pages earlier in this thread.
The second one is a blendshape setup, which drives pretty much all expressive shapes. Been using some techniques from Jason Osipa’s book Stop Staring for this one.
Both of these feed into the third setup, which is another joint-rig with just a few joints with very broad weighting … basically a poor man’s lattice.
The fourth is the eyeball setup, which works independently from the rest and only drives two joints to which the eyeballs are skinned.”

and page 5 of the CGTalk’ thread he explains what his original idea was:

“The mouth is going to be driven by a joint-rig and a blendshape-rig. The joint-rig will open the jaw and provide freeform controls for lips, nose and cheeks. The blendshape-rig will contain wide, narrow, smile, frown, lip-roll out/in/tighten, mouth up/down/left/right, upper/lower lip-puff, cheek-puff and whatever cheek-puff’s opposite is called. Each shape will be broken down into at least lefts and rights. The lip-shapes will be broken down even more and divided among the joint-rig controls with some global ones above.”

Well I guess this will tie nicely with my previous article about mouth shapes!

Related posts:
You want to be a rigger huh (v2)
Mouth shapes Chester V

Elsa rig

Have you ever been tempted to use…? 0

Animation / Education / Fun

 by 

Have you ever been tempted to use…?

I was watching this today and couldn’t resist highlighting the following. I could watch this in loop so I made this a loop! 😉

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb6PY4le_5g[/youtube]
More seriously, I am depicting the situation as being black or white at Disney when the reality is far more complex.

Some movies like Pirates of the Caribbean are well known to rely heavily on motion capture and Disney research has published several papers featuring attempts to replace keyframe animators. The following one is particularly chilling as they are trying to prove how human motion capture can even be used to animate Non-Humanoid Characters with Human Motion Data using Pixar’s Luxo as an example. If someone called this blasphemy I would probably agree…..

http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/animating-non-humanoid-characters-with-human-motion-data/

 

Absolutely-not

 

Frank and Ollie Documentary 1

Animation / Education

 by 

Frank and Ollie Documentary

If you still haven’t bought “the Illusion of Life” or the “Frank and Ollie” DVD I don’t think you can really call yourself an animator!

Frank and Ollie DVD

There is nothing I can do for you regarding the Bible of Animation but if you were put off by the “Frank and Ollie” DVD’s NTSC only format you are in luck, Youtube user Paul Stanton posted a more or less legal copy of that fantastic and hearwarming documentary on Disney’s legendary animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

If you are too cheap to buy the DVD, I highly recommend you to watch it before Disney’s legal department finds out.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m7z1XUgdQ4[/youtube]

I will take this opportunity to mention the AWN hosted Frank and Ollie website, a website whose content was created by Frank and Ollie themselves in (cough) glorious Comic sans. The website contains a great amount of animation notes you need to keep reminding yourselves.

Frank and Ollie on AWN

And to finish, here is a quick introduction to the work of Frank and Ollie by Disney’s animator extraordinaire Glen Keane
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7SKLMVkudg[/youtube]

via Pencil Tests Tumblr

Animation Podcast unofficial Tangled animator’s commentary 3

Animation

 by 

Animation Podcast unofficial Tangled animator’s commentary

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

“Tangled” Joe Bowers thought process 2

Animation / Education

 by 

“Tangled” Joe Bowers thought process

Joe Bowers gave a great walkthrough of some of his shots from Disney’s “Tangled” and “Bolt”.

I love when an artist explains what his thought process was when creating a piece of work. The thought process is as much important as the finished piece itself I feel and Tangled is a perfect example for that as Glen Keane really helped the animators to push their work to a new level in CG animation. Those days people are so focused on performance that they forget about stylisation. If performance is all that counts you might as well using motion capture.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/48497275[/vimeo]

On a side note, the more I look at Bolt and Tangled, the more I am amazed at the look Disney created for those movies with the use of their revolutionary Painterly rendering

if you missed them I am also posting two older but still great walkthroughs by David Anthony Gibson for his work on Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs and some, related to my work at EA.

Related posts:
Animation design
Cloudy with a chance of eyeballs
Spare parts cutscene 2b
Disney related articles

Annecy 2012 2

Animation

 by 

Annecy 2012

Quick report on my Annecy trip.

I got to attend a workshop with Bill Perkins, a talk with Disney Story artist Josie Trinidad and Disney Vis dev guy Jeffrey Turley. I was also part of a classic 1h30 long queue for a pay-to-see “Lorax behind the scenes” that nearly ended in blood bath. The “Brave” and “Paperman” queues were 2h so I passed on those (my knees and elbows were still swollen from previous brawls). On a side note, Pixar didn’t hold their regular Mifa presentations which was really unexpected and sad.

Josie Trinidad won us over with her enthusiasm and Jeffrey Turley gave a very funny talk spiced up with lovely cartoony ink-brushed beatboards at the Disney booth. We were not allowed to take any pictures or report anything on their Wreck-it-Ralph presentation so I can only share with you the following pictures. (sorry for the picture quality, I had forgotten my charger and used my phone instead)

Here is the Wreck it Ralph trailer if you haven’t seen it yet:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf4r5q8-aWo[/youtube]

Despite the rapidly changing weather, Annecy 2012 was once again a great event and we will be back again next year …. with a mouth guard 😉

>Related links:
Wreck-it-Ralph official website and arcade game
Josie Trinidad interview

“The Sweatbox” 1

Animation

 by 

“The Sweatbox”

If you are a true Disney fan, you know what this is about.

Watch it before it disappears again. It is a very insightful and dramatic documentary on how much of a roller coaster commercial film making can be. I loved “Emperor’s new groove” a lot and never imagined it could have started so wrong to the point that it nearly got canned.

As a bit of trivia, this is the first time we get to hear/see Disney’s young and very promising character designer Joe Moshier. Joe did some great character design work on that movie, and on the following not so great “Home on the Range”, I love his very angular/stylized designs in the tradition of the old Disney movies.

Joe Moshier is also the guy Ricky Nierva was talking about in his very funny Splinecast, yes, the guy with a tight tshirt 😉

Animschool Tom Bancroft interview 0

Animation

 by 

Animschool Tom Bancroft interview

Hurry up, Animschool just posted an special interview with Disney veteran Tom Bancroft. The interview will only be available to the public for few more days so make sure you don’t miss that exceptional interview.

I have only seen the beginning so far but Tom animated one of my favourite characters on Mulan, the crazy talking dragon Mushu. People too often forget that there is no one Disney animation style, it all depends on the story and the character of the character. Mushu is a great example of the exaggerated Disney animation style.

Related posts:
Animschool Free Malcolm rig
Jeff Gabor webcast recording

Sergio Pablos – Frame by frame interview 1

Animation

 by 

Sergio Pablos – Frame by frame interview

Christian Dan Bejarano from the great “Arte y Animacion” blog just informed me about a recent 11 minutes interview they recorded with Sergio Pablos.

It is a very refreshing interview where Sergio explains what triggered his leaving from Disney. He talks about how animation is perceived in Spain vs the USA and how much of a challenge it can be to set up your own studio but as long as you take action, show persistence and learn from your mistakes, you should be able to reach your goals and Sergio Pablos with his involvement in Despicable Me, Titeuf, Rio and other secret projects is definitely proving this.

He also mentions the kind of movies he would really like to make, using the Iron Giant and Ratatouille as examples, but explains that comedies are probably the easiest stories to market and sell. The failure of the beautiful Framestore feature “The Tales of Despereaux” could prove him right actually.

Right, go on, why don’t you listen to the full interview now? It is only 11 minutes but it is packed with great insights by a guy who has been involved with many of the recent successes of the past several years from Tarzan, to Rio…

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/30124469[/vimeo]

While we are at it, here is a link to a previous interview with Sergio Pablos on the Character Design Blogspot http://sergio-pablos-interview.blogspot.com/

Hables espanol? I do!

If some of you also speak spanish, you are in for a treat. Arte y animacion also recorded some podcasts with other talented spaniards currently officiating at Disney and Dreamworks, here are few links for you:

Abraham Meneu modelador en Dreamworks

Daniel Peixe Disney Animator. Daniel is also tutoring at AnimatedBuzz by the way. The website seems to be in shambles right now but here is the link anyway http://www.animatedbuzz.com/

Espanoles en Blue Sky

via: Arte y animacion

Related post:
Pocoyo creator interview
Jeff Gabor webcast recording is online