blinking walk cycles...

I can remember a few months back during life drawing classes to draw someone as he actually continuously walked around the room and me standing in front of my paper blankly. If only my mind worked like this music video...

Shit Robot - Take Em Up from Eoghan Kidney on Vimeo.

I think there's an actua medical condition for people that see the world like this.

People Feet

This is an intriguing character on the Flaming Lips album cover.

Made me wonder whether we all have invisible hands and feet that move our actual hands and feet???/ If so why aren't we allowed to see them?

It's me 3D character, doin stuff...

I managed to finish a working animation piece for my character animation. The movement could have been smoother maybe but it gives it a weird stop motion feel. I need to work on my weight painting but you would never know due to the cunning lighting. 

Don't blame me if you don't understand it...

There's A Light That Will Never Go Out from made by marshall on Vimeo.

Weight painting, what's that all about?

Anyway, today it way good to be doing the thing I signed up for at the beginning of the course and progressing my character again, although the 500 word mini essay and A108 development report looms I have cast the english language to one side and started using shapes again.

I have a new short animation in mind using the same character, it basically more viable considering the timeframe although still pushing it a bit.

That being said I have been experiencing nightmares with certain elements within my character now that I have started to try to move him about. To be honest I knew from the hand out how to weight paint, but I didn't actually understand what I was supposed to be doing or applying what where. the auto weight painting seemed to have attached his toes to his other leg and his calves likewise thus he would pulsate as he walked so I had to find a way of removing the 'weight' in certain areas which I discovered eventually on line.

I'm loving the shadow his eyebrows cast on the ground!

Then after finally moving my character from the 'Jesus Pose' all sorts of whacky stuff happens around the arm pits and the elbows. I'd like to find a way to attach the neck to the body so that the neck doesn't revolve when the head turns, i guess i weight paint this to the neck bones? And I kind of lost one hand, it started freakin out in funky spikes and I had to delete it. I've have since discovered the mirror tool in C4D which has saved me from re-morphing left hand all over again. I was considering giving him a bandaged stump for one hand but that wont be necessary now. I have actually produced eyeballs for him, and they worked perfectly but at some point they became grey eyeballs, don't know why, all I can do is repeat the process once more, although I'm considering giving him more non definite eyes now.

Although I haven't actually texture mapped and coloured up his skin in any specific way it actually looks really good with the lighting I've painstakingly set up today.

Fujiya & Miyagi by Wade Shotter

Check out this for something a little different, who needs complex 3D packages when you've got dominoes and dice to create colour and a half tone effect stop motion animation.

Fujiya & Miyagi- Ankle Injuries from Insound on Vimeo.

http://www.flyingfish.co.nz/wade-shotter/

...

You know what, I give up trying to control the line spacing on this blog, it's impossible

Pictolasma, Berlin 06-09/04/11

Pictoplasma is an annual event/organisation which provides a foundation to launch and push new and established art of character design, and for bringing obscure creative animation styles and ideas into the mainstream. Since 1999, they have encouraged the international character design scene by publishing collections of characters, organising character design conferences and by maintaining the Pictoplasma Archives, an extensive inventory, collection and showcase of contemporary character design.

The Pictoplasma festival in Berlin this year consisted of the Character Walk, Screenings, Lectures, Workshops and Concerts/Performances/Parties. For me there was an awful lot to cram in in a very short space of time, despite arriving on the Monday I was due to catch an early flight home Friday afternoon. Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to exploring a bit of Berlin and checking out the street art, some of which created by the well known artist Blu, the shear scale of some of artwork on the side of the buildings makes you appreciate the lengths the artist would have had to go to in order to simply get the paint on the walls.

The festival itself didn’t actually kick into action until the Wednesday which meant I had two and a half days to absorb as much as I could from Pictoplasma which began with collection our Pictoplasma wrist bands and then the character walk.

The Character Walk & Exhibitions
We signed up and received our festival wrist bands on the Wednesday, none of the lectures or screenings would begin until Thursday which gave an opportunity (or challenge) to explore all of the 24 exhibitions on the character walk, I managed to see everything by the end of the day with the exception of the Pictarot tarot reading which meant I could get the most out of the screenings and lectures over the next day and a half.

I have visually catalogued my Pictoplasma/Berlin experience in a separate booklet but the exhibitions and artists that inspired me the most were:

ROMAN KLONEK
This Polish artist produces some fantastic woodcuts, to me the characters are secondary to the overall feeling you get from the colours and the Russian/East European styling and the natural imperfections associated with woodcut art, the flat blocks of colour and the use of limited colours again associated with the process works really well with the relatively simple characters. I have also always loved the use of Russian letter forms, there’s something appealing about text that looks so familiar and year also as though it’s from another planet. The content of his artwork is pretty crazy, who know’s what’s going on or where his influences for each idea are from, but if they were drawn on a computer in vector form then they would not have the charm or character they hold as woodcuts. Though apparently some of his work produced for certain publications are literally drawn on the computer with a woodcut effect added afterwards. It’s a style that could be considered and applied to an animation in the future maybe.

ANNA HRACHOVEC
I simply liked this because it was perhaps one of the last things I’d have expected to have found here, and yet making characters from knitwear must be just as an obvious medium as any other may or may not be. There seems to be a lot of animations being used in advertising which feature characters running about on overly small worlds and I guess the creations of Anna Hrachovec use these kind of small planets in this exhibition demonstrate her characters in an alternate parallel medium?

THE BLACKHEART GANG
These guys were quite an inspiration to me during our cut-out animation module and so I was really looking forward to seeing some of their work close up. The level of detail and multiple layers and combination of 2D 3D and live action demonstrated what could be achieved using what were really simple techniques. Unfortunately I was heading to the airport at the point when Ree Treweek was due to do her presentation. But I did get to see and speak with her earlier that morning at her exhibition she was very nice and it was quite amusing to find her still working on the presentation that she was supposed to be presenting later that afternoon. It seems nothing changes no matter how professional you are. It looks as though they might be working with a crude stop motion format for the next stage in their story.

JEREMY DOWER
Australian based artist, musician and film director, he’s worked as a director in the games industry before moving to more personal work as a multimedia artist. His finished digital work has a really unique feel about it although it originally stems from very confident character drawings, I actually got to see him as he doodled on the glass windows at the beginning of his exhibition. It’s a shame I didn’y get to see him talk.

BEN & JULIA
I have to admit, I left this exhibition somewhat stunned, it’s almost impossible to put into words, in some ways it was my favourite exhibition just due to its sheer freakishness. On entering I exchanged my passport as security for a set of headphones that played a story as I walked around the exhibition. Even with the headphone I still had very little idea what was going on other than there being some kind of dog spirit and a mumified character at the end of the three stages of the exhibition. Then finally in a fourth room a totally unconnected film projected on the wall protraying a crude mixed media spoof game show. Their website features further equally mad mix media animated shorts and adverts.

The Psychedelic Mix:

The Psychedelic Midnight Mix was pretty hit and miss collection of animations, some of which were quite amateurish or might have been OK but simply dragged out the narrative too long seemingly to perhaps fit a required length and in doing so destroying something that could have been quite good or simple. An example of this was 'The Kiú - What Is Out There?' by Andrea Ruschetti. Other's seemed to simply have no narrative at all and were simply pattern based shapes which as techniques were fairly inspiring.

The Lectures & Screenings:

JEREMYVILLE

The one thing that struck me most about this artist is the compact composition of his drawings and the strange perspective that is neither real perspective or isometric, characters can appear to be on the same plane or depth and yet at the same time different depths. I think what perked my ears up the most was the fact that he was from Australia and most of his influence was originally taken from the beach and surf surroundings of Bondi Beach and then almost sadly switched to the sky scrapers and streets of New York due to the practicalities of work.

MARK JENKINS

Although maybe not too much relevance or influential to anything I’d be doing, I did find Mark Jenkins’ story and installations really interesting, basically what he does full time is to mess around fooling people into believing his sculptures are real and casing havoc as a result. For example the image on the left below resulted in the bomb squad being called out and the one on the right earned money throughout the day as a living statue, until the police came to get the sculpture to stand up and move along. It’s almost an artistic version of Trigger Happy TV. 

A TOWN CALLED PANIC

- by Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier for La Parti & Pic Pic André

This is just insanely brilliant and complicatedly simple series of animations. The lecture given by these two guys was kind of painstaking to listen to but still very funny and even revealing as to some of the less obvious techniques used to animate pre-molded toy figures in such a way that you just assume wrongly that they’ve simply taken a couple of plastic character out of a toy shop and moved them about a bit using stop motion. Well that almost sums it up. It’s very unique and crude looking and plays up to the fact that the movements of the characters are limited in very open manner that make the whole thing even more entertaining. The narratives are mad and the pace and the odd voices are simply frantic.

A Town Called Panic Channel

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LOGORAMA
This is a short film that was directed by the French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy + Ludovic Houplain. It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2009. It opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short. 
Building a world and short animation by using logos as the characters, building and objects is perhaps an obvious idea yet I guess no-one has done it in this way, the casting of Ronald McDonald as a villain with a speech impediment is complete genius. Whereas in any other story you would have to sit down create an idea, a narrative, and create characters from scratch, Logorama meant trawling through brand identities and adapting them into the plot. I'm not sure it that would have made things more difficult or easier?

Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo

DOOMED
Doomed by Guillermo García Carsí presents the failures of the natural selection. A set of strange creatures whose instincts instead of focusing on survival seem doomed them to an absurd and comic extinction, in the presence of the astonished gaze of the narrator.
Inverted hedgehogs and mooing cube fish are but some of the bizarre character creations.
Unfortunately I can only seem to find this short teaser trailer but the entire animation lasts 11 minutes of doomed useless looking creatures struggling to survive...

Doomed from vart on Vimeo.

BABIOLES
The version of this at the Pictoplasma festival was over 4 and a half minutes long, depicting the useless journey of some kind of naive squeaky rubber toy character seemingly looking for a purpose in life or friendship and certainly initially trying to scape the rubbish tip he's found himself in. What I really like about this is the simplicity, the comedy and the fact that the creator has chosen to place this 3D animated character into the real world. The great thing is although he visually and technically blends in amazingly well, the character itself is completely out of place in the real world. It's great.
Produced by Autour de Minuit, a film by Matray. 

BABIOLES_trailer 2 from matray on Vimeo.

BABIOLES_excerpt from matray on Vimeo.

This wasn't at Pictoplasma but it's still funny and part of the series of animations...

Babioles - TRAILER from matray on Vimeo.

HOLY CHICKEN OF LIFE AND MUSIC

I mean, what are we meant to think! Mental but brilliant...

The Holy Chicken of Life & Music from NOMINT on Vimeo.

What have I gained from this experience?
What I’ve acknowledged from this trip and from this course so far is that I have never been an illustrator, in fact I have no one definite style of illustrating, part of being a commercial graphic designer seems to have lead me to subdue my artistic identity in order to make something commercially viable, adapting to whatever style is neccesary for each individual brief to please a client and make money. Many of the artists within the Pictoplasma experience are very good at doing one style of something extremely well, which I guess is how you become better than someone else at doing something. There is a personal identification in my 'way of working' that I have perhaps lost by being ‘commercial’ that is kind of re-emerging and which I would like to re-gain, so far this course has re-awoken this and Pictoplasma has filled it with more fuel.

My experience of all types of illustrative styles and formats over the years has perhaps meant that the static illustration/exhibitions although still full of crazy characters and inspiration were less beneficial than hearing and seeing the artists themselves describe their own ways of working in animation and seeing a series of new inovative animations on the big screen. Even the more psychadelic less successful animations featured interesting aspects demonstrating what is possible should I want to apply these techniques to something in the future. 

In the short term, what it has re-enforced is my desire to have a go at producing some camera tracking animation, combining 3D characters/objects with real footage. It was well worth the trip it was just a shame I had to leave early so only really got to see just about a day and a half of the talks and films.

Kirin Short Film Competition

http://www.kirinfirstcut.co.uk/competition-info.html

Thought this might be worth looking at if there's anyone out there that's got something to enter by the 30th June 2011 then get in there! 
Oh yeah, what ever you enter has to be based on the theme "First Press".

1st Prize £3000! I'd be quite happy with 4th prize, a years supply of Kirin beer.

This Way Up...

Having discovered this animation by Smith & Foulkes I can see an example of how my own 3D character might well end up looking! I have been in two minds about whether the whole thing should be in black and white or simply dis-coloured/de-saturated perhaps in the same way as this animation. The texturing of the faces would work well with my own character.

AD108 Plan for the week...

First week back after the Pictoplasma conference in Berlin for which I will update my impressions and the way it will influence me will be tackled shortly..

Back to reality and full of inspiration I've just sat down to evaluate what I'll need to work on for my character and story to be complete. Things that need to be tackled are:

• Facial expressions - build the inside of the mouth and set up all the morph tags, these will be important as the character will be talking to a camera.

• Hand movements - set up the morph tags, these are not so important for the story but some movement is necessary

• Eye movements - set up the eye controllers and eyelids

• Hair - Although I have built 'solid' hair, there is still an opportunity to mess around with the hair effects available in C4D.

• Cloak - I've gathered reference to Ming the Merciless I just need to build his evil garment

• Scenery - There are two important scenes: 

1. Inside the shed, this involves creating a planet earth globe, laser cannon, stars and a couple of buttons.

2. Shed exterior, this would be a simple side on cut out drawn environment silhouetted at night

Then there are two supporting scenes of the characters broadcast on large screens around the world, such as Piccadilly Circus and Time Square. These would be manipulated using cut out photography in a distorted manner that will look like a different style again.

This week then....

MON

I would like to have the hand movements set up and maybe the eyes

TUES

Build the mouth interior and set up expressions and mouth movements

WED

The facial expressions may take a couple of days, I want to be working on the alternative hair by now.

THUR

Complete the hair

FRI

Start working on the cloak

SAT/SUN

Having the cloak completed by this weekend will mean my character will be ready to start animating. I also want to re-write/update my script and storyboard so I am clear of what I am going to be doing and what elements are needed for the scenery. Pictoplasma has actually inspired me to create a fictitious foreign language for my character which will then need subtitles.

Hyungkoo Lee - Disney Skeleton Sculptures

While we are in the middle of rigging our characters for the current module and essentially adding the bones to them I thought it was a good time to post reference to the South Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee. I stumbled across this fantastic set of sculptures completely by chance a few weeks ago. I think it's great that the artist has seriously considered how a series of fictitious cartoon character's bone structure would look like in order for the characters to move around, (forgetting for a minute that the character's movements and antics generally involve a serious lack of bones). Bugs Bunny is great, big teeth and no ears, and the poses are set to mimic the actions of the characters rather than simply being motionless.

Bugs Bunny

Donald Duck

Road Runner

Wile E. Coyote

NOT SO CUTE NOW ARE YOU!

http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/?p=1570

http://www.hyungkoolee.net/animatus/animatus.html

AD108 End of week 2 report...

Well, this creating a head business takes some time. It's coming along OK though, I'm in the middle of working on the hair now then the inside of the mouth. This isn't the texture I'll be using but I quite like sculpting it out of stone...

3D Character modeling update

I'm pretty chuffed with todays results, so chuffed in fact that I'm going to post todays progress on here. I think I've managed to create a reasonably cool looking hand, will certainly do for what I need it to do, which isn't much really and I could have got by with a far simpler hand but there would be no technical challenge involved in that.

What I also found pretty cool is that if you simplify the nurbs right down to their basic levels then you get to see the model pretty much as I modeled it, it's actually quite a nice style in its self...

Anyway, I've begun the daunting task of modeling the head, It's taken a while to get started and I wasn't too sure whether to continue modeling using the box construction technique but have decided to build it up polygon by polygon instead. Once the initial template was traced things have started to speed up, it's quite enjoyable seeing the chin and nose slowly evolve into existence...

Some 3D Character research that I quite like...

Last week we were shown a few animations, there is one in particular that I have seen before which I quite admire in so much as the style of the artwork produced. Although the animation is very much in generated in 3D the visual illustrative style looks hand painted. If you freeze the animation at any point you will be viewing what appears to be an individually painted scene. I love it.

Meet Buck from TeamCerf on Vimeo.

Another animation I really like for the style and technique is Codehunters, not necessarily for the story, but the use of light and texture creates a really dramatic effect along with a kind of hand drawn outline style used with almost super real/unreal textures. Strange stuff.

CodeHunters from Dustin Bozovich on Vimeo.

And in a very different way I love the stylisation of this crazy animation by David OReilly call Wolf 2106, The style of the scenery is very graphic, stylised and simple, I'm wondering whether to combine by 3D character into something similar.

WOFL 2106 (HD) from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Wallace & Gromit come to Newcastle 16th April - 30th Oct

Whether you like them or not it probably makes sense to check these pair out when it comes to the Life Science Centre next month...

http://www.life.org.uk/whats-on/events/wallace-gromit-present-a-world-of-cracking-ideas

http://www.crackingideas.com/exhibition/