I’ve been very slack at updating my blog in the past few weeks. In fact I’ve been a bit slack in terms of my work too and it’s bothering me. I’ve been working for quite a few hours every day, but I’m just not being terribly efficient at the moment. I think I need to start getting up earlier (and going to bed earlier). I need to try and be more focussed; getting more work in done in the same amount of time (which, at my current rate of productivity is easily doable).
This sensation is actually pretty typical. In at least the past two classes I’ve had “dips” during the middle few weeks of the term where I’ve felt bad about either about my work or my effort levels. It’s something I’ve always broken out of so I don’t expect it to last long, I just needed to tell someone :)
I’ll try and get my recent work and critiques posted first thing tomorrow!
Here’s all the sketchbook planning I did for Week 1′s assignment. This week’s lecture was conducted by the lovely Jason Schleifer, who is now Head of Character Animation at Dreamworks (a website that my ancient PC does not enjoy visiting!). Regarding the lecture itself… let’s just say I was impressed.
First up, we’ve got the phonetic break-down of the dialogue:
Or rather, the dialogue written according what what mouth shapes are needed to make the sound. For example, you tend not to write things like ‘W’ (as in “what’s the big idea?”) – you actually make the same mouth shape when saying ‘w’ as you do if you said ‘ooo’. It adds an additional layer of complexity/thinking than just writing out the line using phonetics.
I’ve highlighted the most important sounds, these are the ones that I have to hit if I want the dialogue to read clearly, and also made a note of where I think there will be a pretty significant change in mouth shape over a very short amount of time (anywhere there’s a diphthong, for example).
Now it’s time for some terrible drawings!
Amazing, right? I can only apologise! It’s just a basic idea of what expressions I wanted to use over the course of the line. As long as it conveys the emotion, it doesn’t really matter how good (or in this case, bad) the drawings are. As you’ll see, I’ve actually already deviated from this slightly in my blocking phase.
Mario suggested this quick way of nailing down some basic jaw rotations – take the dialogue line and think about how open the mouth will need to be at various points and sounds.
Man, that new Animation Mentor logo thing is really annoying! Anyway, here’s my first pass of the facial animation for this shot – I’ve just tried to block in the main phoneme shapes and expressions. I know the body still requires loads of work – I haven’t touched any of that since last term, mostly because I moved house yet again this week, so I wanted to dedicated the limited time I had to just concentrating on the face. I’ve also included a ‘head cam’ shot so you can take a look at the facial animation without everything else to distract ;)
The curves for the facial animation are all clamped; I haven’t done any refining of those nor have I done anything with the tongue, cheeks or nose yet as I wanted to make sure the basic sound shapes are reading properly first. There’s also almost no eye animation at the moment (I think it works reasonably well already?) and there’s some basic blinking going on.
Thanks for reading! As always questions, comments or critiques are more than welcome!
So, if you’re not following me on Twitter or privy to my Facebook status updates, you may not be aware that I’ve made a rather big decision this week: I’ll be leaving my position as animator at Sony at the end of March in order to complete my studies at Animation Mentor.
The Choice
I say “this week” but this is something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now. I feel like I didn’t get enough out my last term at AM due to a number of factors, not least because things at work have been ramping up and because AM Term 4 covered stuff that I hadn’t really done before. I was really happy with my pantomime piece but I was really disappointed with my dialogue shot; it just didn’t turn out as I’d hope. Juggling 20-30 hours of animation studies on top of a 40 hour working week for 12 months really took it’s toll on me, hence why I opted to take a Leave of Absence at Christmas and recharge my batteries for 3 months.
But soon enough, there was the invoice for AM Term 5 sitting in my inbox and I had a choice to make: try and juggle my normal working week with the most difficult term at AM (multi-character dialogue shot) or take a risk; do the course full time, treat it like a full time job and really nail it. Although I’ve spent weeks stressing about my decision, at the end of the day I think I probably knew all along that this was definitely the right decision.
The Plan
Naturally, there’s no way I could afford the tuition fees for the course alongside rent in Cambridge and living costs whilst not taking an income, so I will be moving back to my parents’ place in Enfield for the duration of the term. It is incredibly comforting to know that my parents are willing and able to help me achieve my dream and I am eternally grateful for the contribution they have made/are making to my career.
At this point, the plan is basically throw my all into this term and really make the most of it. I’m intending to treat it like a full time job and do a full time job’s worth of work each day. This should allow me to continue to have a “life” and it will be much better for my health! At the same time, I will be putting together a new show reel (currently in production) and I will be applying for jobs in the hope of securing employment by the time I finish Term 5 at the end of June.
The Risk
The risks should be fairly obvious. There is no back-up plan; if I can’t get a job when I finish AM, that would be… awkward. At the same time, I’ve been in full employment at Sony now for over 3 and a half years and I’ll have been studying Animation Mentor for 18 months by the time I’m done. I feel like I’ve got enough experience, released titles and passion to go anywhere I want. I ought to be very employable. I certainly hope somebody out there thinks so.
The Move
So what of Sony? Well I’ve had an awesome time over the past 3 and a half years, worked on some major titles with loads of amazing, passionate and creative people. I will be desperately sad to leave Cambridge and all the good friends I’ve made since I’ve been here. The massive support, camaraderie and fun I’ve had at the studio can’t be underplayed and I can only hope that wherever I end up will half as good as my time at Cambridge.
And I guess that’s about all I have to say for now. If anyone is looking for passionate, experienced character animators to start work in early July, let me know.
Right, I’ve finally sorted everything out on here. For safety’s sake I actually backed-up everything, took everything down, reinstalled WordPress from scratch and put the database with all the posts and all that jazz back on. It took quite some time, more than I would have liked but it was a necessary evil and I’m feeling good about having got it all out of the way!
I’ve also reposted and backdated all the posts that I lost when the site got hacked (that’ll teach me to leave huge gaping security holes and not back-up regularly!) so everything should be up to date now. Unfortunately some of the posts are perhaps not as visually appealing as they could be (a whole load of pictures/video and a few lines of text can look at little busy at the best of times) but yesterday evening I really enjoyed spending some time writing about last week’s work and I definitely want to try and set aside some time each week to do it properly. I really feel the need to write about what games I’m playing at the moment as well… Who knows, some of you might even find it interesting!
