Frame by Frame

Demo Reel Summer 2011 from Daniel Wong on Vimeo .

It's been a whole half of the class since I've updated the blog last. I'm glad to say that since then I've learned A LOT. Physicality is only the beginning. Just when you start getting kind of OK with mechanics, we're thrown into intro to acting. Starting to get to the real meat of animation. And man, you've gotta think about a lot. Giving the shot a context, and giving reason for movement. Making the poses read clear for the attitude you want to convey. Clarity is the key. Here is my first pantomime shot. We were supposed to make our character go from one emotion to another or "changing gears." I think I did a fairly decent job on my first try, but it still needs a lot of work. Right now we're working on our first dialog shot, and holy crap its different from anything we've done so far. We're given the full body rig (Bishop) but only with a simple face. This is so we do most of the acting through the body. Now in our shots we are bound to ...

We had a week off of AM, so I took this opportunity to do a simple practice shot. Just a jump, purely mechanical. I wanted to accomplish a few goals with this: 1. See how quickly I can work a shot through polish 2. Try new methods for animation controls. a. IK spine b. Follow enabled on both head and shoulders c. Block in plateaued splines instead of stepped 3. Achieve a better subtle settle 4. Keep the body loose The settling and having a stiff body was probably my weakness last session. I went in and tried to apply as much of the advice I'd gotten from my mentors. For the stiffness, the IK spine really helps me with that, as well as using some nice squashing and stretching on the body. Before now, I hadn't touched the translate controls on the IK spine, shoulders, or head; but this time I decided to try them out. I liked the results. Anyways, here is the shot. I worked on it for about 3 days.

Here's a reel of all my work so far for the first 3 classes.

Awesome. Just awesome. Dreamworks has definitely taken a big step forward with How To Train Your Dragon. Everything on it was way beyond anything I've ever seen come out of Dreamworks. All the technical stuff seems a lot further along, in terms of hair, skin, textures, and effects. The animation was amazing. Toothless (the dragon) was especially really beautifully done. I find it hard to discuss that without going too nerdy on you so I'll just leave it at that. But most importantly, the humor works, and it had a great story. The characters were very well executed and you really felt for everyone. I couldn't have hoped for a better movie. Watch out Pixar.

Here's the final version of my latest and last shot for Class 2.

So the last shot of class 2 has been finaled, which means I'm now pretty much done with Class 2. One more goodbye Q&A with my awesome mentor Martin Hopkins, and a progress reel and I'm done!......for 2 days until class 3. Anyways, it's been about 6 months since I've started AM and I've come a long way. I figured that I would sit down and give myself a self-assessment on my skills and what I think my current weaknesses and skills are. Overall, I think I'm doing pretty well. Not to sound braggy, but my work tends to feel better than most of my class. But maybe that's just me. I can achieve a pretty high level of polish with my shots pretty easily, although I'm not sure if thats not smoothness more than polish. But my arcs are pretty good, my spacing feels nice, and I have pretty good weight. I think I have a pretty good understanding of mechanics so far, but I took a look at next quarter's syllabus and it looks like we're going to learn a lot o...

Viola, final product. Much much better than last week I think.

Tackled those splines for the first pass, and this was the result. A bunch of stuff got changed when I was editing the curves, but it was definitely for the better. Now everything seems to be working properly. Only a few troubled parts, but I've got another week until the final is due. Definitely ahead of schedule this time.

Yea....a lot more difficult than ol Ballie.

Man, adding a freaking spine and head into a character really starts to complicate things. I was doin fine on a ball with legs so I felt fairly confident doing a series of Parkour actions for my next shot. Not only is just doing a run challenging for the first time with a spine, but transitioning into and out of runs from rolls and slides is quite challenging. Even though there were no arms on this character, it probably would have helped a little to maintain balance and to create momentum for certain moves. I was left to create it with the legs or the bend in the spine. Anyways, here's my rough blocking pass. I think it was pulled off rather well after a long late night of working on it.

Hey what's up minimal readership? I'm finally done with my first animation for my second class. But first, I'll rewind a bit. My new mentor for this class is Martin Hopkins. He is trained in classical animation from Sheridan College and has transitioned into 3D, with his entire professional career pretty much at Dreamworks Animation for the last 13 or so years. He is currently working on Shrek 4, which he claims isn't as bad as you would think and is better than Shrek 3; which I haven't seen. So far he has been pretty great. He sometimes gets out of his chair and acts out something on the camera for you to see instead of just relying on drawing over our frames. His inputs have gotten me from my initial blocking pass up to the polish of the final (although he hasn't seen that yet). Anyways, here is my progress from blocking to final: You might also find this pretty interesting. After we set some keyframes, this is what we use to refine and polish our animations. ...

An Update!!! It's been a while, and decided that I should post something on here. I was going to do a post a couple of weeks back, and upload most of my assignments, but decided to hold off a bit. Now that our first class is done (yay!), we had to create a progress reel of all the final assignments, so I figured I would save myself the trouble of uploading everything individually, and just post that video. Not the greatest work on the planet, but hey, it's only been 12 weeks. I've learned a lot from my first mentor, Jon Collins (of Pixar), and I have enjoyed his critiques. He is very honest with your work, and doesn't sugar coat things which I appreciate. After all, that is what you have to learn to take in order to work professionally. That being said, I've got the next couple of weeks off and start back up with Class 2 (Psychology of Body Mechanics) the first week of January. Should be a pretty big step forward in our curriculum and I can't wait to start learn...

Week 4 down. Our assignment this week was to do a heavy and a light ball bounce. I chose to do a beach ball and a depleted uranium ball. My final results. FYI, here is my 1 ball bounce. It's supposed to feel like a basketball or soccerball

Just picked up the Blu-ray of the entire collection yesterday. It contains the films "A Grand Day Out", "The Wrong Trousers", "A Close Shave", and "A Matter of Loaf and Death". I've definitely seen the first two, and I think I've seen the third as well. It also contains a whole bunch of "Cracking Contraptions" shorts and behind-the-scenes documentaries. I hadn't seen any of these in a while, and saw that there was a Blu-ray released this week a couple of days ago. I then watched a few of those "Cracking Contraptions" shorts on youtube and was instantly reminded how amazing these guys are. They all excel in story, humor, and animation. The ridiculousness of Wallace and the emotion you get out of Gromit is something to admire. If you haven't seen any of their stuff before I really really recommend watching them. It's something everyone should have in their lives.

Woohoo! Got in for the fall session. I start Sept 28th. Until then, think I'm going to just work on my life drawing. I'll post some more in a bit *Update* Ok, so the first two are a couple more longer poses that we worked on. The paper is too big to scan so these are just kinda crappy pictures This last set I didn't have a model for. I was actually just trying to copy the style and poses of some drawings I found online just to draw more. I actually prefer poses like this instead of the ones we get in my class. I've gotten kind of decent doing it this way.

About to get to bed because I have to wake up early. I need to wake up bright and early, and get my ass to the LA Convention center before 8:30am to attend CG Con. I've never been before (obviously), and I'm really looking forward to it. I signed up to take some digital animation classes taught by some industry animators, most of which are also mentor's at Animation Mentor :) Hopefully I'll get the chance to talk to at least one of them and ask them about the program. As far as I can tell, it is pretty highly thought of among the industry. Some still are in the view that you need a traditional art college education for it, while others praise the concentration on only character animation and love the results they produce. Anyways, should be going now. Need my sleep!

So I decided yesterday that my first full body animation test is going to be a dude lifting a heavy block. Our network was out for like 6 hours at work yesterday, and all the work I do is off network drives, so I was sketching out some thumbnails of a block lift, and pushing a block up an incline. I kind of got a feel for how to bend the spine and stuff. Since yesterday I've done a bit of a pencil test. Up until my last iteration I actually hadn't looked up any information in my 'Animator's Survival Kit' book. After consulting the book, all I did was edit the beginning frames with the U-shaped arched back. Beforehand, they were going the same direction as the other frames. Here is my progress so far with some blocking for timing. http://megaswf.com/view/c1b8f87058d9e4304084d2c5ff65ba3f.html I haven't decided yet if I actually want him to put the block on the other block, or just to fall over backwards from the weight.

Over the last couple of days, I've taken it upon myself to take the practice I got at work doing thumbnails and stuff, and put it to practical use. A while ago I downloaded this program called "Pencil". I also had a drawing pad that I haven't used in a few weeks. So then I set to work putting my ball with legs on a walk across the screen. On paper I'd only ever penciled out 3 steps. The walk across the screen was 12...quite a bit more than I'd done before. Needless to say, by the end I got kind of decent, although I do have to say that the size of my dude changes a little over time. I can't figure out how to actually put the file on here, so I guess a link will have to do... http://megaswf.com/view/f3a9a29c06a80d98f5fb68931653a08b.html Next I thought I'd change it up a bit. Used the same beginning, but added a surprise. A quick practice in some physics. Not really as good as it can be... http://megaswf.com/view/9831171cf009b1722fbe60f8a59488cc.html Las...

Yea, so that's the funny thing about me having a blog. I can neglect it. I was never that much of a writer in school. Both academically and for fun. This is something I really should do though. Would do well for me to brush up on some writing skills, and by association, my communication skills. Nothing much has happened since my last entry other than me getting mad at some more drivers, doing some more practice animations, and oh yea...not moving home anymore. Whatever, it's probably for the better. Having not lived at home for almost a quarter of my life, it would be just too weird to move back inside those walls. I should go now, I'm still on a high from the "LOST" finale and just having gotten back from seeing "Star Trek" in IMAX. Pretty awesome.