Final

Here it is, the wee hours before my final. I’ve done quite a bit of work this week trying my best to animate as much as I can for my revamped first shot and my fourth shot. I have to say, I’m tired but I definitely feel like I’ve improved so much over the past couple months and I believe it shows in these shots. I’ve definitely also feel like I’ve been getting a better grasp on lighting in Maya as well. This past week has been filled with long nights and pestering people both in my class and those that have graduated to take a look at my shots and critique them so that I can push as far and as fast as I can. Anyways, I won’t draw this out any longer than it needs to be. Here are the final rendered versions of my revamped first shot and my last shot.

Shot 01 “Dr. Harleen” Final

Shot 04 “Serious Detective Work” Final

Now I gotta put all my shots together into a nice reel for my final class. No worries, this isn’t the final post by a long shot, I still have a short film to finish!

Lighting Update

Just wanted to post up a very quick update on how my most recent shot is going. Not much else to really say, just gotta keep working at it.

On a completely unrelated note, I also baked my last batch of Brownie Cookies for Dead Day today. Kind of a bitter sweet moment (no pun intended), been doing that for the last several years, its been a fun little thing to do and give back to my club.

One Last Shot

Between Raquel and I, we were able to come up with an idea for my last shot and I’m rather happy with the idea. Using the dialogue from the Teddy Bear Psychiatrist idea, I am going to make it about a detective/Sherlock like character investigating a scene and talking to his partner who doesn’t seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation off screen. I’ll be working hard and fast on this shot as I only have a week to do it, but I’m treating it as practice for pumping out animation shots as fast and as best as I can. I modified Malcolm already to prep for the shot. For simplicity’s sake I am going to name the character “Sherlock”.

Sherlock

I have to say I really like the hat I made for him….

Anyways! Wish me luck!!!

Fire it Up

Okay, so kind of in crunch time right now.

I’m still working on my first shot and I’m trying to come up with an idea for my fourth and final shot. I’m not too happy with the ideas I’ve had though. I’m pleased with the dialogue choices that I’ve picked out but….the problem I’m having is that I feel like I’ve been doing too many shots where there isn’t really a serious tone to them at all. That and I’ve been forcing myself this time to make a shot where it is strictly only one character. I have far too many shots now where there are two characters in the shot and personally its making my reel feel weird. I was able to draw up two options of what I might want to do for this last shot. One is a Teddy bear psychiatrist and the other is someone who has a floating head and sneezes it off of his body. Silly little ideas but I thought they might be fun.

Teddy Bear Psychiatrist 

Floating Head

As for my first shot, I’m still working on it putting as much time as I can into it. Here is the most recent version.

Not entirely sure why the camera moves, wasn’t supposed to do that. I must have accidentally keyed it to move at some point.

BFA Gallery

Tonight is the night that the BFA Gallery opens up! I gotta say, its pretty insane seeing my work up on the walls of this gallery, I remember thinking that BFA was so far away and here I am at the very end of it. Its kind of scary actually. But! I have to say I’m quite happy with the pieces that I submitted for the Gallery. I finally completed my third shot (I had to go in and paint over some frames since the geometry broke in certain places) as well as finished editing together the first sequence of our short “Failed to Send” (which had a last minute name change and is now under the name “Capsule Catastrophe”). Here are said pieces!

Shot 03 “There’s So Many Layers” Final

“Capsule Catastrophe” First Sequence

I’m very proud of my team and everyone that is helping out on this short. Seeing the short and how far its come has been such a rewarding experience. If you’re reading this and you were part of the team, thank you so, so much for donating your time to help us put this short together.

I actually also had a print that I submitted to the gallery but unfortunately there wasn’t enough space for it so it was cut. I would also like to take the time to credit Jon Mandel for designing the characters for our short (he wasn’t credited on the prints that made it into the gallery).

There’s still much work in this last month, have to finish my new first shot and start and finish another shot…wooo this is gonna be rough but I know I can do it.

From the Ashes of Maya

Okay, so over the past week I’ve been attempting to go back and fix up my first shot, you know the one with the two old women in it talking about how you can’t kill people you don’t like? I decided to revisit it since I decided that I could probably improve it to a certain extent with some better acting choices for the characters. Problems started to occur when I first opened the scene, Female Malcolm’s head wasn’t animating according to the keys that I gave her, I had to reference the character and create a new reference of her just to get rid of the problem. Then, it would appear that there was a problem with one of the assets that I told Maya to get rid of and it was a background task as well, meaning that its been going on for a while and no matter what I did it would crash Maya over and over again. SO! I have started the scene completely from ground zero. Got rid of all the characters and made my own assets. This time however I decided that it would be for the best to not use Female Malcolm. So I changed up the intent of the scene as well and came up with a geeky idea that Mery would be Batgirl and Malcolm would be Joker. Same dialogue, but only cut down to only the first part of the dialogue. For the scene I figured that Batgirl would be at Arkham Asylum telling Joker off, once again.

Batgirl

The Joker

However, halfway through blocking out the movements and taking reference, I realized that I didn’t really have an action that I could have Mery Batgirl do that felt right in the context of the situation. So I decided that instead of Mery as Batgirl, I decided that it should be Mery as Dr. Harleen Quinzel (before she becomes Harley Quin).

Dr. Harleen Quinzel 

This allowed me to open up and think about what she could be doing as a doctor in the asylum. I ended up with this as my rough blocking.

I’m really looking forward to working on this shot, I can’t wait to continue working on this and taking it to final, this time hopefully with no problems.

….Knock on wood.

Onions Have Too Many Layers

So I’ve been working on my shot over the past week so that I could get it to a good spot to submit it to the Dreamcrits session for animation. I’ve mostly been focusing on trying to get the breakdowns correct, lip sync, and improving the key poses.

There’s So Many Layers!

And so, I’ve been doing what I can to divide up my time between working on the short as well as putting in time to work on my senior portfolio shots. As stated in my previous post on the matter, I have decided to go with the Chef in training idea. I’ve spent sometime and I’ve got some rough blocking now, but first allow me to introduce my characters!

Upgrading to Malcolm 2.0 (with very special thanks to AnimSchool) I was able to really customize my characters quite a great deal and with a lot more ease. My characters’ names are Troy and Abed, named after the characters from the show “Community” (where I got my dialogue from). Troy is the Chef in training cutting an onion, doing his best to impress his mentor (Abed) with his culinary skills. But being an inexperience Chef, he is not prepared for the dreaded Onion. Here they are:

Troy

Abed

Originally, the scene was actually only going to have Troy as a close up single character shot. The onion would be off screen and then there would be the reveal when he raised up the onion like my quick animatic showed.

However, after showing this initial version to my professor (the wonderful Raquel Coelho), she suggested that I pull the camera out a bit so that the onion is in the shot from the beginning and the gag would be the action and how he reacts to it. From there I introduced Abed so that there could be contrast between the two characters. Here is where I currently am with my shot. It’s in the early blocking phase but I’m rather pleased with everything that I have in the shot.

I’m having a bunch of fun working on this shot and I can’t wait to continue working on it!

New Shot Ideas…

So while I would like to go back and re-animate my first shot for the year, I’ve decided that it would be best if I went ahead and started a new shot all together and took a bit of a break from that troublesome shot. SO! I’ve come up with a couple of new ideas for my next shot one idea is called “How’s the Hand?”, where I imagined that the scene would be between an overly enthusiastic doctor and a patient who has their arm still in a cast.

The other idea would be a bit of a gag shot, where the character would be cutting up onions and exclaim, “There’s so many layers!”. For this scene, I imagined that it would be a close up on a junior/chef-in-training.

After getting some critiques, I’ve decided that I am going to go ahead with the second idea with the junior/chef-in-training idea.

New Shot

So its been a while. I’ll be honest, I’ve been rather down for a little while but I’m starting to pick myself back up again. Rather excited to work on this new shot however! I decided that the best thing for me to do right now was to start and new shot but keep working on the old one, so chances are you’ll be seeing updates for both shots in the coming weeks. This time, I decided to do a more mechanical shot rather than a dialogue shot. Here, my character (“Bruce”) is practicing his swordsmanship when he is frightened by the appearance of one GIGANTIC fly.

Bruce:

In the way of the BFA Thesis, we’ve been making lots of progress over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been overall relatively pleased where we have been going with the short, however towards the end we keep getting to a point where there is so much build up and then the tempo of the story suddenly comes to a halt and slows way down. Still trying to fix it and hopefully I’ll be able to upload our new story boards soon.

Once again, sorry for not updating this as much as I have in the past. Though I will now be updating much more often now! Expect to see updates this week! See you soon!