Category Archives: Course Work

Acting workshop with Philip Watt

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This weekend we’re taking acting classes with Philip Watt. This is very exciting. Acting is what we eventually want our CG rigs to do. In order to achieve that it’s important to be able to imagine being your character, to feel what he feels, to act him out in front of your peers.

Some trivia: Philip’s been in the music video for Michael Jackson’s Stranger in Moscow as well as Steven Spielberg’s A.I. His main arena however seems to be the theatre. And teaching. He’s been giving this Acting for Animators workshop here in Viborg for the last five years.

During the week we’re supposed to create a 2-7 minute scene we will perform on Friday. On stage. For an audience…

I came up with Angry Man. He’s a tourist at a crowded beach at some holiday resort. In his forties something. Beer belly. He’s got a temper and easily becomes irritated with the people around him. Eventually he will explode in anger when being hit by a beach ball.

Today’s exercise was to act in front of the class who sketched the characters we were trying to convey. I found my classmates’ drawings of my character hilarious. I can definately use these to develop him further.

Here’s some of the interpretations of Angry Man. There were no signatures, so I don’t know who drew some of these. Sorry guys! Inform me and I will update this post, or you can slap my beer belly.

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angryman7

Andy Biddle.

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angryman3

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Dan Alderson.

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Laurens van der Velden.

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Claire Sab’s drawing cracked me up completely. This could so be me in a couple of years time. Need to work on that beer belly though.

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Evgeni Valentino Hristov.

Animation Basics Week 3: walk cycles

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Norman and Basic Guy

Here are some playblasts (unrendered Maya previews) from Animation Basics Week 3, which has been mostly about walk cycles. Meet Norman:

The first assignment was to create a “simple” generic walk cycle, just trying to get everything in place. This required a lot of “the hip bone’s connected to the back bone’s connected to the neck bone”-thinking, much more so than the things you can get away with in 2D. I worked three days with Norman…

We learned the importance of letting the character walk on the spot AND in space when creating a walk cycle. This way you can check things like that the feet have even spacing (so they don’t slide), and the way the movement of the character reads from different distances. I couldn’t resist giving Norman an expression.

The second assignment was to make a “character walk”, i.e. a walk cycle with some characteristics. I ended up with this goofy nerdy funky thing. Meet Basic Guy:

Basic Guy was more stretchy and cartoony than Norman. More suitable for this kind of walk I guess. Again, checking how the cycle reads in space.

Animation Basics Week 1

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Hogan_blog
At animation school in Viborg we’ve now entered the four week Animation Basics module. Here’s a collection of exercises from the first week.

The quintessential animation exercise: bouncing balls (in spaaaaaaace!). Actually I think it’s important you get this down allright before moving on to less simple stuff.

We had a go at the classic Luxo Jr lamp. The way it works is we get these ready made rigs, and then we get to play with them. So I didn’t model this, but I spent a helluva long time trying to make it shine and glow like a lamp, and that wasn’t even part of the assignment!

We spent two days animating a sack of flour. Yes, you may laugh. We also made it dance…

Meet Hogan. We will work a lot with this rig. He’s a bit funny, like you can see his neck throgh his mouth and stuff. But as I played with him I found him quite expressive. You can make him do just about anything. He’s like a digital puppet. The exercise was to make 7 poses for 7 characteristics/feelings. Can you tell which ones they are?

3D in Viborg

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Dear readers of my blog,

I’m moving on. Drawing is great, but lately I found it tedious and… well tedious. And I’m barely making it economically doing comics. Time to make a change. So I emptied my little corner in the Malmö Comics Studio and left for Denmark.

empty studio cornerI have to admit it looks VERY empty. Hopefully this will make my colleagues rush to find a replacement cartoonist for me, so I don’t have to pay for an empty place, like I’m doing at the moment.

penstumpar studion 2008-10Just to give you an idea of the amount of led that goes into cartooning. These are pencil leftovers from my two years in the studio, Actually there were more, I just left this neat little basket for my succesor to have something to live up to.

So I started this course in Viborg, Denmark in 3D animation. The downside is that I have to stay at the school (since it’s 5,5 hours away) and be away from my baby faaar too long. The good part is there isn’t much else to do than school work.

The first week has been frustrating beyond belief. Learning Maya when you’ve never used a 3D program before is like learning how to walk again. And I had forgotten how hard it is to learn to walk!

Speaking about tedious, when I mentioned I found drawing tedious, apparently so did the stop motion animators find stop motion tedious, just as the 3D teacher found 3D animation tedious. I guess the work we do in this business is tedious by nature. It’s just different types of tedious. But we always admire what others do (especially if it’s in another media or technique than the one we’re in ourselves). That’s just the way we are. By the way, those stop motion animators, three guys from Britain, just happen to be fresh out of animation work on Fantastic Mr Fox. How cool is that?

Here are some snapshots from my first trembling steps in Maya modelling:

death star blogsizeSome kind of Death Star. I always wanted to make one of those. 🙂

still life blogsizeRight now we’re doing a two week introduction course in modelling. Later on we will focus on animating already made models, so we’re not required to be experts in modelling. But it’s good to have an understanding of the basics. I can’t tell you how many times and in how many ways I managed to screw things up before managing to gather these objects onto the grid.

The main task of week 1 has been to create a Lego character. We’ve talked about polygons and curves and millions of tools and drop down menus. Today we’ve worked with UV mapping (attaching a skin or texture to the objects), which I found incredibly difficult. There is still quite some distance before I become friends with Maya. However, it definately seems to be a powerful program once you get some control over it.

Angry Lego blogsizeFrustration, irritation and anger will lead to the dark side?

Mad Lego blogsize

-AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Sad Lego blogsizeSo many times during this week I have felt like giving up and cry…

…BUT. I didn’t. These pictures indicate at least some progress. Not that I’m sure how I actually made these, and if I would be able to make them again. But hey, they’re there. We-hey! Tomorrow we’ll talk about lightening our models. Can hardly wait to go into frustration mode again…