Some Cool Tips and Tricks!

Hi there everyone!

I've been a little under active on my blog, but now you will find me here quite often sharing thoughts, tips/tricks, animation, etc. YAY!!!!!!!!!! ;)

Check out some really cool articles from a good friend and a very nice guy, Kevan Shorey (animator, PDI/Dreamworks and mentor at AnimationMentor.com). Some really gold stuff.

What Is Twinning? When Should You Use Twinning in a Shot?

How Do Animators Use Contrast?

There could be many more, check out his webpage/blog. Enjoy!

Thanks a lot Kevan for sharing all this and letting me link them up here.

-A

Terrorizing puppet

Hi guys,

I'm totally blown off. Check out this cool puppet video of a puppet terrorist named Ahmad. This puppeteer is just brilliant. Check out the eyes..... it leads the motion and shows every single thought coming in to the brain of the character, and it looks like he is really using his brain to think. Wow, brilliant stuff for animators, and so much to learn. Thanks YouTube!! Enjoy..... YAY!!!!!!!!

My caricature

Tim Ingersoll, our super energetic and uberly talented animation instructor at DreamWorks Animation (Glendale), did my caricature when I was there. Ah.. I should have uploaded this earlier. He did caricatures for every artist who were trained by him at the studio. Thanks a lot Tim!! :) This will be my profile image of this weblog!

-A

Anticipations

Picture taken from John K blog

Just a quick update................

Hi everyone,

I've been really busy with my work lately, so I hardly get time to update my blog and share stuff with you all. I have been watching Jason Ryan's video tutorials in my free time, and I can't tell you how much I'm learning from them... but I hardly get time to finish any of my personal animations, its a shame. I will have to use my weekends to work on them, and hopefully I will have something to show you guys in about a
month. Jason's Boris character is really fun to work with and I'm really looking forward to getting some time to animate this guy.
I've done quite a lot of test animations with the Madagascar characters, but I don't think DreamWorks would allow me to post my work here right now, but I'm quite affirmative that I will get permission to do so in the near future. :)

Anticipations
Okay lets talk about anticipation in animation.

Anticipations is basically used to to lead the viewer's eyes to prepare them for the action that follows. An action usually occurs is three sections : the preparation for the motion, the actual motion, and then the follow-through of the action which you may consider as the result of the motion that occurred. The first part is of course known as anticipation. Generally a greater amount of anticipation is needed for faster actions.
Try to think of anticipation as a 2 dimensional shape change and not necessarily an opposing directional movement. Before an action a character would gather some momentum and that would be illustrated by a change of some sort... and we could easily communicate that with a shape/silhouette change of that character.

Types of shape change that could illustrate an anticipation:

1. Angle change
2. Directional change
3. Weight shift
   
4. Squash and stretch
   
5. Expression change
   

The right approach when posing out an anticipation:

• As always, think "character" when creating a pose/movement and ask yourself.... "what is the character's thought process and state of mind before and during, and after the action? How can I illustrate my character's personality best? Would this kind of action suite my character?" The way your character anticipates for a move and the way he moves and overshoots or settles in or whatever, should reflect your character immediately and should communicate what you want to communicate without any second thought.
• Determine whether it is best to overplay, underplay or keep the anticipation "realistic" to achieve what you want to achieve and the overall purpose and style of the shot is.

• Determine whether it is important for the communication of my intentions to have a big visible anticipation and how much time should I spend on it? How many frames do I hold the character in that anticipation and how much moving hold there should be to just keep it alive. Sometimes when I'm holding on to a pose I make the character anticipate in a moving hold, so you cannot actually see the anticipation, but you can definitely feel it in your animation. Sometimes breathing could be a very nice anticipation in a dialog/acting shot. When saying out something, I let my character breathe in some air.... the shoulders generally go up and head down, creating a bit of opposite actions which keeps the organic-ness of your character and the dialog feels much natural.

Stuff which could help you make your anticipation as appealing as possible:

• Involve facial animation
• Coordinate multiple elements into anticipation when necessary
• Use appealing angle changes
• Make sure all the elements are harmonizing
• use opposing movements withing the anticipation (for example, hip moves forward, arm moves back or head moves down, and arm moves up.... I learned the importance of this from Jason Ryan and this really helps to make things look organic and not mechanical.

The most important thing to learn about anticipation is to answer the question "what's the right amount of anticipation for this motion?" and "which body parts need to be involved?"

Thats it for now! Hopefully I will be back with some animations with Boris. Take care guys! :)

Cheers!
-amrit

What am I doing? : Before a dialog shot

Hey everyone!

What the heck am I doing these days??!!........... Well, I'm really having a blast doing some test shots with my favorite characters from the movie, Madagascar, just to get used to everything. Yep, thats what I'm doing right now. Well the past few weeks have been pretty busy really... and now you know why I'm not replying to some of your emails. Sorry about that!

This is really one of the most productive part of my life as I am learning a lot from great people.
Before starting on today's topic, I would like to briefly write what I'm doing these days. I've returned back to Bangalore and have joined Dreamworks Animation India. I am surrounded by a big group of talented Indian and French artists. Everyone here is super talented and I'm learning a lot from almost everyone. We are working on tests shots and ramping up for our first show.

In my trip to Glendale, I met a lot of animation ninjas and got an opportunity to learn directly from them and see how they work. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had a class with James Baxter and I also got some really cool tips from him-which is gold for me. Here in India, I'm learning loads from some super talented French animators who already have experience working for DreamWorks new movie, Madagascar 2. It's really great working together with these guys and discussing animation all day long.

Check out this super awesome short film, Oktapodi, which has been created by my very good friend Julien Bocabeille (who works here with me as an animator) and his team at Gobelins. It was named best of show at CG confab Siggraph's Computer Animation Festival. Oktapodi also won the audience prize. It tells the story of two octopi and their comical escape from the grasps of a stubborn and determined restaurant cook. Everyone at DreamWorks Animation is really proud of Julien and this great achievment. Oh yeah... we didn't miss the party! We had great food and we all danced a lot... haha...!! It was great fun!



I have been learning a lot everyday and here's some of the stuff which I have been learning these days. Thanks to my to my instructor Tim Ingersoll for sharing all these cool notes. Just thought to share with you all!

Starting off an acting/dialog shot...

Break down the soundtrack:

When animating an acting/lip sync shot, the most important part of the workflow is listening to the soundtrack very closely. This analysis should happen at three stages.

1) Before starting with animation (this is a good moment to break down the sound. It will give you a lot of insight into the mood, he character and the intention of the performance... imagine how that character would behave while waiting for a bus). Also, mark where the character is breathing or could breathe (very important!).

2) While doing the mouthshepe pass ( listening to the actual track while posing the shapes is crucial. Get the sound file in a loop while working).

3) After finishing animation (this is where you simplify and clarify). Zoom in on the mouth, play it back at a slower speed, scrub. Do you love the shapes? Can you push it? Is it punchy enough, but still fluid? Don't dismiss it as something not really important! It's not okay if it's just kinda of working. A good lip sync will make your scene fly. Its the last touch of perfection. And remember that the audience's eye is most likely going to bounce back and forth between eyes and the mouth.

A super cool tip:

When listening to the track, approach your analysis in the following way:

Don't listen to the words.
Don't listen to the meaning of the dialog.
Listen only to the sound.

The characer might say: "No" instead of "Yes"; or "I hate you" instead of "I love you" is, in the confinement of our job, irrelevant.
What will and should ultimately dictate our work is sound itself.

The sound will tell us the real deeper emotion of the scene. "I hate you" can be the most romantic phrase ever spoken, its the tone and the sound which will reveal the truth hidden just beneath the literal meaning.

Get into your office and act out your scene not by performing the literal meaning of the take, but by reproducing the sounds of the take.

My suggestion:
Don't "speak" as you act, almost sing. SING!!
Don't use real words, mumble.

Just focus on exactly recreating the sound, the pitch, the frequency, the intensity, the loudness.

This will expose the true nature of those sounds and not just the lips and the mouth, but facial expression, head movement, neck and shoulder interaction........ and so on.
You will discover that just like it's impossible to keep your eyes open when you sneeze, it's also impossible not to squint your eyes slightly on the highest notes, or not to flex our eyebrows in falsetto, or keep your chin lifted if you make a very low pitch sound.... and so on.
Each specific sound actually forces certain physicality on our bodies. None of these true and most basic elements of our acting are given to us by "what" the character is saying, but by "HOW" the character is saying it.

-A