Friday, August 27, 2010

Playing with the Norman Rig

It's been a some time since I started using the characters given by AM. They're great, supereasy to control and the models are flexible so we can customize them to look taller/smaller, more feminine, etc. I did want to experiment other rigs though, mainly to see how different rigs are build and work. Of course, the basics are the same: you need controls for the different body parts, there may be IK/FK controls, etc, but some details are different.

I have seen the Norman rig on several animations and it seemed pretty flexible. I found this page (www.romanim.com/norman_database.php) where you can get different customized Norman rigs: different female, male and kid models. This was great, because I didn't want to customize it right now, but just play with the rig. First I thought I'd try a model I had never used, so I downloaded the wrestler...

First thing to do was to plan the animation...well, I had never done a parkour shot...and to try a new rig it seemed a nice idea to do a body mechanics shot. Short stuff, a couple of seconds or so. I had recently seen a female parkour video which I wanted to use:


Of course...I can't use that reference for a big heavy man...so I decided to leave the wrestler for some other time and downloaded a light female rig ;-) Ok, I could have looked for a heavy man doing jumps, but I wanted to use that reference (not really lazy, just more inspired by that).

I chose a simple jump over an obstacle (they call it kong) that appears a few times in that video and made a few thumbnails...very, very rough stick-figure sketches. Marked down the estimated frame number where those poses would happen and went into blocking.

I didn't do any research about how to use that new rig, went right into Maya to figure it out because it's pretty intuitive. I confess though that I counter-animated a little while until I realized the IK hands were linked to the chest rotations and unlinked them. I had not worked with this before, but I suppose it's pretty common (and handy!) to have the possibility to say with which body part the hands should move along with. This was the main thing I learned doing this first shot with Norman.

So here's that blocking:


Then I went ahead and worked on splining it. I removed the black color on her arm, so it was clearer what was happening while she was jumping. Also made a simple camera animation to follow her. Here's the final animation:


It's a very short shot, but it quick to do and also great trying a different rig and a jump I never did. I really enjoyed trying out this different rig and still have to explore it more, since I didn't use everything it offers :-)

Monday, August 23, 2010

Masterclass with Guilherme Marcondes (2)

Guilherme directed several commercials and it was interesting to hear how sometimes one of his works influences another. He told us he directed a promo for BBC2 in which it was required that the character's head was a photography:


The way this was done is fantastic!!! The little world that we see inside the mailbox was, in fact, created inside a glass box which had little plants, lights and that strange machine inside. Because of the way the box was assembled, the scenery inside the box is reflected by its walls (which work as mirrors), so that the setting doesn't have the clear boundaries of the box. Awesome!  :-)

Because the character's head was a photo, he was contacted by British Gas to direct another commercial, which should also use photos for the characters. This time, the body and the face should be animated. He stylized the faces a little so they blended in with the rest of the scenery.

And what a scenery!! The initial concept was "my home is my world", so each house was placed on top of a different world. These planets were all maquettes, created very carefully, with typically British constructions on top of them. This was an important part of the project: the target audience was British, so it had to be clear that it happened nowhere else in the world. British Gas described exactly how they wanted each planet to look like and a maquette was created following the instructions.


Guilherme has created several advertisements for this campaign from British Gas and slowly he started using 3D because it simplifies a few things, especially when dealing with the interior of the houses. But the characters still follow the initial concept, they're 2D :-)


I found the Masterclass so interesting that I wanted to share a bit of it here. Learning with other artists always helps broaden our horizons, after all, the creative process for creating a short like Tyger or an ad like the one from BG isn't an obvious one. To see what exists, how it was done, where some ideas came from, getting to know other artists and techniques, etc - all that not only helps us understand how the process works for other people and the possibilities that exist, but certainly motivates us to find our own style and breaking some barriers.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Masterclass with Guilherme Marcondes (1)

I was lucky to watch the Masterclass given by Guilherme Marcondes at the Anima Mundi Festival in São Paulo. For those who don't know him, a quick presentation: he graduated in architecture in São Paulo and soon started working with animation and then directing advertisment both inside and outside Brazil. He also directed a short called Tyger, which won over 20 awards over the world. More about him here: www.guilherme.tv

It's always cool to learn a bit more about the trajectory of someone in our field, something beyond what we can find in the internet. So I felt happy I could hear Guilherme Marcondes talking for a few hours about his career and showing and commenting on some of his work with more detail. 

--Tyger--

This is a work he's clearly fond about. It was made originally for the Cultura Inglesa  Festival in 2006 using mixed techniques.

The inspiration came from several places. The festival required the project to be based on an English text. He developed the concept with Andrezza Valentin and they chose the poem "Tyger" from William Blake to "guide" the animation. Add to that his hobby of making  night photography of São Paulo and there you go, the story takes place in the darkness of the metropole, with neon illumination that reminds us of Bingo neon signs. He commented that, in the end, the movie is more about São Paulo than about the poem. Still, it's an abstraction, just like a poem is considered to be: there's no clear beginning, middle and end. It doesn't necessarily have to tell a story.

The chosen song (from the group Zeroum) also keeps a rythm, just like it happens in some poems. There is a clear and almost hypnotic beat that goes with the visual development of the animation.
Around the time he was working on the short, he had recently seen a children's play from his friends where the characters were puppets moved around by people dressed in black. The eye of the viewer "erased" the people and followed the story of the characters. This delighted him and so he decided to make the main character (the tyger), a puppet that walked in the city.

silhouete art from Lotte Reiniger
Another inspiring work were the silhouette animations from the German Lotte Reiniger. He decided to use characters created by the illustrator Samuel Casal. To animate them in flash and obtain results similar to silhouette animation, he partnered with Birdo studios. There were certainly other influences and inspirations, but these were the main ones, besides the creative process the author necessarily goes through while developing the film, which depends on his background story.


"Sapo" from Samuel Casal
Made by João Grembecki (Cia. Stromboli), Tyger is an articulated puppet that most of the time was manipulated by three people (João Grembecki, Cassiano Reis, Fábio Oliveira ). Only a few times did they use a device to move the tail. The color of the tiger was white, so that his color in the movie was defined by the color of the light on him (most of the time it's an orange tone, like the street lights).


There were several challenges regarding the manipulation of the puppet, since the people doing it were used to presenting on stage and in a film one has to pay attention to how each one enters and remains in the scene. There's a moment this attention to the positioning of the manipulators is very noticeable, when they enter the screen before the tiger does, on the top of a mountain (around 3:02).

The tiger and the manipulators were filmed in front of a green screen, and later the film and the animations were composited with the images of São Paulo.

Guilherme and Tyger
(Veja SP  - August the 2,  2006)

Something Guilherme really liked about Tyger was the freedom he had  to make it, which is usually not possible in advertisment. He commented that in some places the fact that the short doesn't have beginning, middle and end caused some surprise. Another thing that seemed unexpected for some viewers was that he didn't remove the manipulators...which would actually take away some of the charm of the short, since they are part of it.




Next post I'll write about the second part of the Masterclass, when he talked about some of his work in the advertising world. Till then!

Monday, August 16, 2010

Planning the mouth shapes

Back to the dialogue shot! There are basically two ways of setting mouth shapes...one is very simple and actually doesn't demand planning another that is a little bit more complicated but more precise.

Do everything in Maya
This is the way that doesn't really demand much planning, you actually do it as you go. I don't know (yet) how it works with other software, but in Maya, you can import the sound file and there's a pretty cool feature there that allows you to hear the foneme that's happening on each frame. So you scrub through the timeline with the left mouse button and hear the line "sound by sound". This is great and you can easily go on listening to the sound and setting keyframes for the mouth as you go.

The problem with this method is...sometimes when you click at the timeline in Maya, the sound you get isn't the sound that will be on that frame when you playblast it: you have to playblast it all the time to make sure it's working. So it's a handy and simple method, but not too precise.

Plan it!
You can plan where each mouth shape will happen by using a sound software to see for how many frames a certain sound actually is played. There's a free software that can do that (yay!): http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Open your sound file in Audacity (or the sound program of your preference) go to View->Set Selection Format->film frames 24 fps, so you can see the time in frames. Now you see the spectrum of the sound and can scrub through it, pretty much like you'd do it in Maya. Make a table and write the sound on one side and the frame where it starts/ends and there's your plan! It's a very simple x-sheet actually.

Here's an image to explain the basics:


1) this tool allows you to select the region of the sound wave you want to focus on

2) zoom tool so you can see that section of the sound clearly

3) ok, this is the play button, of course. But if you have selected a part of the sound, it will only play that. This way you can isolate the sounds.

4) here you can check the frames where this sound is played

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Intro to dialogue


This is my first dialogue shot! Started working on it in the end of class 4 and ended it in the first few weeks of class 5. Lots of work and it can be improved still :-)
It's a big step moving to a scene where there are facial expressions and lip synch! So this will be a simple introduction to animating a dialogue.

1. Body pass

To begin with, as usual...reference! I made the reference for the body movements first and animated that (going through blocking, first pass, etc). I played with eye movements and blinks at this point a little, just so the face doesn't look too stiff. Also had a bit of jaw rotations going on too, but just very simple mouth movements. This is how it looked when this body pass was over:


2. Animating the face

To start doing the facial animation, I did another reference video so I could see the expressions clearly and also the mouth shapes. This one was done sitting still in front of the camera. I did check the other reference every now and then too: although I did it mostly for body reference, there are some facial expressions there that make sense, besides, it's still helpful if I want to improve the body, etc...

Using the reference and the sound file I planned the mouth shapes (visemes). First it's necessary to write down the line that will be said but the way it sounds. Each sound is called a phoneme. So for my line, for example
"I...I haven't totally decided...he can ahm...he can live or... (inhale)...he can die"
I wrote the sound as:
"Ae...Ae heven toudaly dicided...hee kenah...hee ken leev oah...hee ken dae"
This transcription has to be done in a way YOU understand it, after all, you're the one animating it. Then it's good to mark the important visemes, the mouth shapes that yo MUST HAVE there or the viewers will notice something's wrong. The order of importance as I learned in AM would be:

1.both lips – p (as in play), b (bye), m (mom), w (wine)
2.lips and teeth – f (four), v (vote)
3.tongue tip and teeth – th (thin)
4.tongue tip and ridge between teeth – t (tick), d (date), s (sue), z (zoo), n (noodle), l (lemon)
5.tongue blade and palate – sh (rush), j (rouge), ch (rich), r (run), y (yaw)
6.tongue back and top of throat – k (back), g (lag), ng (sang)
7.vocal folds – h (hey)

You have to be aware that one sound may affect the mouth shape of another sound. That's called co-articulation. For example, when you say "cold" and "key" you say the sound "k" in both. But when your mouth is saying the "k" it's already preparing to make the next sound. In the first word (cold) the shape will be narrower and the jaw rotation a bit more open, anticipating the "oo" sound that follows. For the second word, the shape will be wider.

Here I have the important mouth shapes in red:
"Ae...Ae heven toudaly dicided...hee kenah...hee ken leev oah...hee ken dae"

In order to know when to set each mouth shape, it's very helpful to make plan on which frame each sound occurs. I'll talk about this in another post. So I set the mouth shapes following the planning and the facial expressions following the reference, did another polish on the body and the result is what you saw up there :-)
There's a lot more to dialogue...but this is a start! I'll talk about planning the mouth shapes in the next post.
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