Animating with a team part 1 (my first shot)

Over the month of December I've been in a class called Animation Production. The format of the class was a bit different than what we've had in the past because it all revolved around one big project, and every lecture period was time to get critique from the teacher and other students. I really like this format because critiques are invaluable to creating good content and it brought new ideas to the table that I otherwise may have never considered.

The project was an animation with 12 shots, where each group member was responsible for 2 shots. I had the 4th and 10th shots of this spy genre short, and I had a lot of fun with it. A big part of this project was communicating with one another, not just for critiques, but to be able to match our scenes to one another. For example, being shot 4, I had to look at shot 3 and follow that up appropriately, while also talking to the person with shot 5 and matching our beginnings and endings. There is some room for variation because every shot is a camera change, so the eye won't catch some of the smaller differences, though our group was pretty diligent about communicating and clearly planing out what to do.

Speaking of planning out, drawing out some breakdowns is very helpful before actually doing any animation on the computer. It's a good way of seeing what poses you might encounter and give you a good idea of how to tackle them.

Now its time to jump into Maya and start putting in the key poses. Here I tried to include the biggest anticipation and pull at the beginning and the contacts of each step while the box is pulled. This is still not every key pose and the timing is not done at this point, but it's a good place to discuss with group members and directors, because if the key poses aren't as they should be, the'll be harder to change later.

After each of these videos there has been at least one critique, which comes with it valuable feedback to apply to the next milestone. From the last video, I put in more breakdowns to make the motion more clear and included some moving holds to pace the animation a bit better (Having constant motion isn't always necessary, sometimes you need a break from the action). I also added more to the end because when discussing with the animator of shot 5, they wanted the head to pop up from the bottom of the window. Towards the beginning of my animation I also added a part where the hands slide off the box. This was critique feedback that was based off of our characters personality, which was a smooth cool dude who is sometimes clumsy and messes up.

In the next milestone we went out of stepped mode and into auto tangent, this came with its own necessary retimings, one of these included removing the slip off the box. I should mention that we all had set frame counts we had to stick to. Just like in a production you don't get an infinite amount of frames to enhance your animation, and more often then not, things need to get cut. As a group we decided that not every scene needed to show off the character's clumsiness, because that would get a little repetitive.

At this point you can probably tell that the box doesn't feel as heavy as it should. I noticed it too, and it was one of the biggest things I wrestled with for this shot. Like I mentioned before the frame count was set in stone, so I only had so many fames to make slow down the dragging of the box. This led to me removing much of any extra antics at the beginning, just to make the box pull look its best, because that was the most important part. That and getting the character up onto the box for the smooth transition into shot 5.

From this milestone onward I mainly focused on getting that box to actually feel heavy and adding in secondary actions (antenna and glasses movement) and facial expressions. By the final result, with the help of numerous critiques and much experimentation with the timing, I think I achieved my goal in giving the box weight. A big part of it was actually letting the elbows lock out when fully extended, and bringing the character very close to the box when pulling it towards him. After all the edits, this is what my shot 4 looked like.

Towards the second half of the class, we began working on the second shot. That came with its own set of challenges and and excitement. Check that out here.