Short-film storyline

My short film will be about a curious, clumsy man named Jim. Recently, there was a powerful plasma rocket launcher that is kept secret from everyone, being stored in a top secret warehouse. Jim knows about this weapon, and he is so extremely eager to try it out.  Jim sneaks into the top secret warehouse one night to try it out. Once Jim gets a hold of it, he starts to toy and play around with it but without actually shooting it. After some time of playing around with the gun, he gets serious and tries to shoot it. On his first couple tries, it does nothing but a tiny bubble that comes out. This frustrates Jim to the point where he throws the gun to the floor, shooting out a cannon of power and sends Jim flying to the air. Jim thinks it's awesome.

Time to start creating ideas for my short-film.

Now that Ben has guided me through all of the basic animation principles, it is finally time to apply these principles into a short film.

This film will be around 10-20 seconds long with a very short, straightforward storyline. Ben told me he wants me to start by storyboarding and creating ideas for the film.
Storyboarding:
Storyboards are graphic, visual organizers displayed in sequence in order to help the producer visualize the parts of the film.
Storyboards are a big part of pre-production, as it allows the film-maker to clearly visualize what the movie will look like in sequence before it is made. These are basically like outlines to the film, as outlines are to essays.
Big film-making studios have been using the storyboard process since the early 1900s, such as Walt Disney Studios.

For my purposes, I will draw several frames of storyboard on computer paper and edit them as time passes.

Finished Run Cycle

This past week, I've been busy with schoolwork and many other things, so I didn't get as much time to work on this Run Cycle as I did with previous assignments. However, I actually found this animation to be fairly easy. My mentor and animators online say that the walk cycle is the foundation to nearly any kind of legged movement, which I found to be very true. Since I've done the walk cycle, I applied the run cycle as a simple variation and came out to be very similar. With the run, I only needed to exaggerate the movement of the arms and legs, as well as space out the frames much more to make it faster. Overall, this was probably my easiest assignment yet and I hardly stressed over this, even though I had much less time.

The only issue I may have with this final run cycle is that the character is in the air for too long.

Ben is busy this week so I am meeting him next week to evaluate this assignment.

This assignment will be my final assignment for my Animation reel. This reel will present all of the weekly assignments I have done with my mentor, showing how I've learned the basic, foundational animation principles.

Time logged for this session: 4 Hours
Total time logged: 34.25

“The artist must make an heroic attempt to disentangle detail and tone in his own mind and vision. He must realize that his vision is a thousand times more beautiful than the camera’s if he will but trust it. If he is to obtain that greater beauty, he must combat the too-great detail registered by his camera rather than abide by it slavishly. It will be better if he learns to trust the camera less and believe more in his own inventiveness and feeling, trying to see with reason and imagination. Only in this way can his work soar to heights unattainable mechanically.”

-Andrew Loomis

Met with Ben today to evaluate Baseball Pitch animation and discuss next assignment

Today I met with Ben in order to evaluate my Baseball Pitch animation. He said it was good, except that I could have exaggerated the motion much more, especially the wind-up/anticipation to the pitch. He said it was done very well though, which made me feel really confident and proud.

We also discussed the next project, which will be the final one. He is going to be on Thanksgiving Break next week, so I will have a two week time period to work on my assignments.

Ben told me he wanted me to work on a run-cycle, which I should be able to figure out easily on my own since I have much experience with animating by now.

He also wants me to create a short film, having a length of 20 seconds at the max. I am going to figure out my storyline and I'm going to need to create a story board, as well as create conceptual drawings of the characters in the story. Normally, his students create a narrative short film at the end, which will tie together all of the principles that they have learned over the year, similar to my situation. I'm really excited for this short film, as it is what I originally intended on doing for this project, and being familiar with the basic animation will help me guide through this short film.

I will work on a run-cycle this week, and the short-film the following week.

Time logged for this session: 0.5 Hours
Total time logged: 30.25 Hours

Finished Baseball Pitch

Finally finished my baseball pitch over the course of this week. I spent wednesday to friday simply working on key frames, and by then I knew how challenging of an assignment this was going to be. It was very tricky, for many reasons:
-The mechanics of the pitch. For example, the rotating of the hips and shoulders and the whip of the arm in the end. I had to apply all of these factors into each frame.
-The timing and speed of the wind up and the pitch
-Shifting the weight from one leg to the other was extremely tricky. The shoulders and the hips played a very large role here.

I had to spend much time studying Tim Lincecum's baseball pitch as well as my own. It took many tries to get this to its final product and I'm extremely happy how it turned out.

If I had a chance to redo this assignment, I would definitely revise the timing. It seems that the pitch is a little slow and the wind up is a little too slow. I animated it on 2's so maybe I was a little thrown off since I was used to animating on 1's.

I've spent nearly every night this week working on this, and I definitely did put a lot of hard work and effort into this, to the point where I had absolutely nothing else to spend my time on besides homework.

Overall, I'm extremely proud of how well I did this. There were points in time where I simply wanted to give up, throw everything away and simply do another assignment instead of this baseball pitch. It was incredibly difficult but now that I have finished, I have never felt better about an animation of mine. Although, Ben did tell me if I'm getting frustrated, I can literally throw all the papers away and refresh, which I actually did. The first night I worked hard, and it ended up being a pile of waste and made me aggravated. This caused me to refresh to something totally new. I am totally satisfied with the final product and I will meet with Ben tomorrow to evaluate this.

I spent a total of 8 hours on this Baseball Pitch
Time logged for this session: 8 Hours
Total time logged: 29.25 Hours

Baseball pitch studies

Before I go off animating the baseball pitch, I need to understand the mechanics of the pitch.

In my animation, I will be referencing the SFGiants pitcher Tim Lincecum. This is a very good video for reference as they explain his technique and mechanics which are very beneficial to my final animation.

I took some notes in my sketchbook: 

Time logged for this session: 1 Hour

Total time logged: 22.25 Hours

Met with Ben today to discuss walk-cycle and begin new project

I met with Ben today to discuss my walk-cycle animation and to discuss this week's assignment.

As I showed him my walk-cycle animation, I explained to him how tricky this was, and that I spent a lot of time on it and eventually got it correct. He told me it was done very well! Everything was done pretty good on this animation, which made me feel really good because my hard work really paid off. The only criticism he proposed with my walk cycle is that the shoulders need to move slightly from side to side as the arms swung around. Overall, he said my walk-cycle was done very well which made me feel really proud of myself.

New Project: Anticipation
Today, I spent a good amount of time speaking with Ben about this week's assignment, which will be based on "Anticipation".

Anticipation is the preparation for a certain action.

For example, if an animator was animating a person jumping, the character would not jump immediately. Instead, the character would crouch down and explode into the jump. The character crouching down is an example of anticipation. The animation would look very dull and incomplete if the character went straight into the jump without an anticipation.

Ben showed me a 20 minute video by Richard Williams about Anticipation, which definitely gave me a lot of helpful information to this principle.

I will be animating a baseball pitch for this assignment. The anticipation would be the pitcher winding up for the pitch, and the action as the pitch itself. I have a big feeling this is going to be pretty hard but with hard work and persistence, I will get it done and it will be extremely rewarding, just as it was in my previous animations.

Time logged for this session: 1 Hour
Total time logged: 21.25 Hours

Finished Walk Cycle

I've finished a walk-cycle, and I'd have to say it was extremely tricky. At first, I figured it would be easy since there aren't as many frames, however, there were many complications that took place.

First of all, I had to make sure that in each frame, the legs/knees and the arms/elbows were in the correct angle. If the angles were off within any of the frames, then the shot would be very choppy and jittery. I needed to make sure that they corresponded with each other perfectly in order to get the movement smooth and precise.

It was difficult to keep the arms in each frame the same length. I had to gauge how long the arms and legs were as the bent or straightened, which was really tricky. This wasn't something that you can simply do by looking at the previous frame.

I also had to make sure the "small aspects" were correct. For example, as the knees bent, the body itself would be lowered to the floor, which I had to make sure I did not forget in the animation. I also had to make sure that the feet were stepping on and off the floor. These small play a big role in the final animation.

This walk-cycle was very tricky and sort of frustrating. I had to go back and revise multiple times to get it right. However in the end, it felt amazing to see it finally done correctly.

During pre-production, I studied the human walk-cycle intensively, watching the details of how an individual would walk, how some people's walks are different than others, and even creating a reference video of myself walking. This clearly shows how animators definitely need to have a reference in order to get a certain motion correctly.

Time logged for thie session: 6 Hours
Total time logged: 20.25 Hours

Began the walk-cycle

Before animating, I produced about eight key frames which will be the most significant frames, in which I can do "in between" frames of them.

When I began animating, it's really difficult and tricky because there's so much to pay attention to. I have to make sure the legs are in corresponding angles of each other, that the figure is bouncing up and down, that the arms are moving okay, and etc. Tonight I animated for about 1 hour and I'm about a quarter of the way done.

New Project: The Walk Test.

As I met with Ben today, we discussed this week's assignment which will be a walk test shot on Ones, or 24 frames per second. He showed me the principles of the walk test. I took note that:
-As the figure takes a step, plants foot and knees bend, the figure gets lower.
-As the figure starts to switch legs and straighten knees, the figure will be standing higher.
-The legs move at a constant speed.
-The arms move at a slightly eased motion when it swings around.
-Do not focus so much on the figure, focus more on the animation mechanics. A nice looking figure is nothing without a good animation. I can easily simplify the figure for now with a circle for the head, and a sausage-sort of body.

Ben also showed me a couple reference pictures that I can use, such as:

I can tell that these reference images will be a great help for me, and I will also want to take a reference video of my own walk.

I'm pretty excited for this assignment as it will be my first animation with a human figure.

Met with Ben today to evaluate my leaf drop and discuss next project

I met with Ben today to discuss my leaf-drop animation and to discuss my next project, which will be a walk test.

He said my leaf-drop was done very well. He liked that I shot it in 24fps, and he said there were really no errors to my leaf-drop. He told me it's really good that I like to go back and revise my animations to get it to be right.

This made me feel really good. I spent numerous hours getting this leaf-drop correct and it all worked out and I'm glad it was done well.

My next project for this week will be a walk (in place) test.

Time logged for this session: 0.5 Hours
Total time logged: 14.25 Hours

My studio set up in my garage. You can also see a new lightbox that I had acquired from Michaels.

My Leaf Drop template that I created prior to animating. This template represents the timing of my frames as well as key frames. You can see how I increased the length between each frame when the leaf accelerates and decreased the length when the leaf decelerates.

Although, I did make many changes to the frame timing as I went through my animation.

Time logged for this session: 1 Hour
Total time logged: 14.75 Hours

Final Leaf Drop Animation

Final Leaf Drop animation

Over the weekend, I've been putting a lot of work into this leaf drop.

The most tricky part was definitely the timing and the speed of the leaf, as I had to revise the animation more than five times due to incorrect timing.

Like what Ben told me, I tried to keep my drawings more consistent to keep it from looking "jittery". It's still there a little bit, but I know it's improved since my ball bounce.

This was shot at 24 frames per second, so I had to make 24 drawings per second of the film, and I had to estimate the timing of the leaf in relation to the 24fps scale.

I don't think this would have been easy if I didn't study leaves before-hand. I had to learn how they react to wind, how fast they go when they react to wind, how they fold, what they look like when they're blown off of trees, and etc.

This Final Leaf Drop animation took me about 7 hours to complete.
Time logged for this session: 7 Hours
Total time logged: 13.75 Hours