Vision Statement

This post is mostly looking at my visual statement in order to refine it to better match the current focus of the project and where I think it will go. The following is copied out from rough notes:

Constructing Vision Statement - Style 1

• Ideas “Mini projects”
• Animation tasks
• books
• tutorials
• self set
• Problems I want to tackle

Medium: 3D animation

Audience: Not sure yet

Constructing Vision Statement - Style 2

Context - What are you doing/creating?

• Series of animations including:
• “Mini projects”
• Animation tasks
• Problems I want to tackle
• Why?
• To improve animation skills.
• To explore how acting in animation conveys an action, narrative or emotion and what techniques are used.

Vision Statement

To build a showreel of animations that focus on acting performance, to resin animation to convey an action, narrative or emotion and what techniques are used by others to effectively convey this.

• Performance
• Style

What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Contextualise it.

Idiom

We had a lecture that was centred around excerpts from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, and in particular the six steps to the process of writing comics (which can be applied to art in general).

We were asked to consider our idiom, which McCloud describes as "The 'school' of art, the vocabulary of styles or gestures or subject matter, the genre that the work belongs to... maybe a genre of its own."

Right about now as I go through university I am working upon my craft, learning skills and techniques directly related to what I want to do. What I want to do is create animations, particularly 3D animation. In theory, anybody can put time into learning the skills and technicalities behind animation so considering my work's idiom is important to distinguishing myself. Idiom is its purpose, why am I wanting to animate this? What gives my work identity as opposed to another animator's with a similar level of skill in the craft? What stops me from being "replaceable".

With animation it could be a number of things: the story or subject matter that the animation is trying to convey, the identity of the animation style, the ideas being conveyed through the animation. This is something I am beginning to touch upon and will hopefully realise in the future, hopefully through the help of this project.

Animation Style

Like any other art form, each animator has a style, a way of animating something that makes it there's. Often its through one of the 12 principles of animation. For example Genndy Tartakovsky has a distinct animation style, often focusing on squash and stretch and exaggeration, which gives his animations a comical and elastic feel.

Looney Tunes has such a distinct style, lots of cartoon elements such as stretching, anticipation and over exaggerated action where no-one gets seriously injured. Each of those things contribute towards an animation style and it makes it worth watching, sets it apart from something else.

Animation Content

What is it I'm animating and why is it worth watching. I'd like to think an interesting narrative coupled with good animation is in itself worth watching. The narrative doesn't have to be deep or long, maybe its just something humorous that an audience can relate to.

I like to think I can conjure up some funny animations, they often poke fun at things or are simply a product of a very strange imaginative thought. Throughout university I keep forgetting to return to this idea, the idea that I've always worked towards and that's just entertaining, to get a laugh out of someone. 

Character Performance - Waving

To get to grips with 3D animating I had a go at animating a character waving. I used the Mery rig which is a character with a Disney style aesthetic,

The animation was a simple wave just to learn the ropes of 3D animating. Each limb is controlled with a "control shape" which has attributes such as rotation and translation. 

I added anticipation to the wave as the character moves her body outwards before the wave. I also added extra motion to the eyelids as she squints to see someone off-screen, presumably someone she is friendly with (hence the wave) and the smile following the squint.

I'm reasonably happy with this as a first attempt although there are some weird timing going on and there's definitely room for a lot of tweaking and movement of other control shapes to add a more realistic movement to the character on the whole. I may or may not come back to this animation.

Character Dialogue

One of the things I want to learn is how to animate dialogue and creating believable lip syncing. Although I want to focus mostly on performance, I do think lip syncing will prove valuable to learn.

I'm currently mid-way through this animation but I thought I'd share my progress so far. I've discovered the 11 Second Club, a website where animators create responses each month to an eleven second audio clip from a TV show or movie. The animators then make their own interpretations of that audio, animate and post their results.

I've used the latest competition sound clip to base my lip syncing practice around.

At the moment I have the jaw moving for each word in the scene however only have the actual lip syncing done for the first "this device" part.

I've been referencing a mouth shapes diagram created by Preston Blair. I've also started to block out the movement of the character's body.

Presentation Feedback

I presented my Pecha Kucha this week and this post goes over the feedback I received, my personal response to the feedback, and where I want to go next with my research project.

Here is a link to my presentation slides on Dropbox.

The feedback from lecturers gave me a good indication that I was on the right direction with the way I wanted go about my research project. My goal for creating an animated showreel focusing purely on animation was good and I was right to not concentrate too much on writing a narrative or getting technical with rigging.

The idea of using Ed Hooks' Acting for Animators as a good place to start with finding problems I want to tackle and it was suggested looking up on power centres as I noted I was interested in exploring personalities in walk cycles. I will probably do my first research task on this.

Most importantly, it was emphasised the best way to work on this research task was to just do stuff. Only by animating can I discover problems and tackle them.,

There were a few things that I missed out in my presentation that I planned to mention but just got short in time or forgot. Those included conveying humour through actions, particularly slapstick humour and Monty Python style walk cycles. I will also try to do some evaluation blog posts on my previous work, in addition to the work I do throughout this semester.

In regards to the final "end goal" or "vision" I had also considered working towards something to do with the 11 Second Club, perhaps the showreel would be work trying to better myself into then tackling a larger project such as an 11 Second Club competition entry.

So with that in mind I should keep on track with animating stuff and research through practice.