Breathe

Now you can breathe in the wonderfulness of Welsh air anywhere in the world, for around 30 quid. This is kind of random. I wonder how well it will do...

Welsh Air

Of course!

Now that I am rested, reasonably alert and increasingly aware of my upcoming deadline, this is the time that my machine has taken the opportunity to go belly-up.

Yay!

Z z .

I've got a hard week in front of me. Last weekend I moved into a new apartment, so I was really busy all weekend, rushing around moving stuff. (Yay for me!) However, now I'm super-tired and have a deadline this week. Today I was forced to resort to drastic measures, for my head kept nodding whilst at my desk.

I had a cup of coffee.

So what? I hear you say.

Now I don't normally drink coffee, for although it has the nicest smell in the world, I don't really like the taste that much. Furthermore, I have many issues with my gastrointestinal system, and once consumed, the stuff hits me like a neutron bomb. I shouldn't be drinking it at all, but at the moment it's a case of needs-must. It has done the trick though. My tummy's currently sulking in the corner, and may lash out at any moment, but I'll be ready to beat it back with a flaming torch Indiana Jones-stylee, and at least I'm more awake and can work now!

You can't say this animator doesn't suffer for his art!

Letting Go

I am one of those people who are really precious about their work. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, since it means I try hard to make things as high quality as possible, but I am not very good when details have to change. Some of this is technical (changing complex parenting situations, character footsteps etc - what a pain!), and some of this is creative. The former has become less of a problem as I have become more proficient in computer geekery, whilst in the latter, I think I have improved at being able to accept change notes, particularly where the merit of a second opinion engenders up new ideas.

That said however, it is still tough to take out animation I like, and that works. I'm sure that this is the same for pretty much every working animator out there, but whatever anyone says, being able to simply detach from a creative endeavour that has a lot of you in it is very tricky indeed. I don't know if I am the type of person who will ever be able to just shrug and get on with it. It's who I am.

Fortunately this hasn't happened for a while, and hopefully, as I get better at being able to get to the heart of each shot, then this kind of thing will get rarer still.

Tap Tap!
(Knock on fake wood.)

Uli and Co.

I have a new favourite inspirational place to go.

It is here:

Eurovision

Enjoy!

Grrr

"Kevan"
....

It is only five letters, how can it be mangled so cruelly by ignorant mouths?!

Unfortunately the mnemonic involving large vehicles and colours does not seem to be asserting itself with the necessary force needed to blaze a new trail in the synaptic pathways of the human brain.

Maybe I should change my name?

Kev-Anne? Hmmm. I don't think my masculinity could take such a beating.

My dad has a lot to answer for, although I am sure that he had no idea the extent of the trouble he had caused with his choice. "Kevan" is a really cool name, don't get me wrong, but if nobody can get it right, what is a smallish animator to do?

Mouvs

Mouvs

I thought that I would write a little about things I try to remember when animating lip-synch. Now normally, and particularly if there is a phoneme library available, it is tempting to just dial in the correct shape for the sound and boom, you have a talking head. Now while this is perfectly fine and spiffy for many situations, we want to be able to make looking at our character as interesting and as expressive as possible, since a talking face is what the audience will be drawn to every time. The first thing we can do is to accent certain important phonemes, such as vowel sounds, making them bigger/smaller by manipulating the jaw and mouth. Immediately this will make things more interesting as the shapes favour some things over others, breaking up the parroty regularity of the jaw going up and down.

Another thing to try would be to find places to make the face assymetrical. Take a look at my really rubbish drawing of the two major face shapes in "what?". In the first set, the mouth goes into an 'oo', and then makes an 'oh' (as in "hot"). The jaw goes up, then down - fine, but pushing the jaw up and screen right, then down and left adds bags more character, particularly if the emotion is one of incomprehension. Clearly this is all dependent on the line, but the general rule can still be applied.
Also notice how I've sneakily complimented the mouth shape with eye squishiness and asymmetry. Compressing and popping out again adds a little punch!

When I've done all of this, the last thing I'll do is to go back over the line as a whole. First, I watch the corners of the mouth to see if it's too crazy, adjusting as necessary, and then go look for places where I can squash and stretch the whole face, (not just the mouth, but everything). A good little trick is to figure out the amount of squash/stretch as a fraction of how much the jaw moves up and down! Quick and easy, (particularly for us computer nee-urds), but it works! The amount is dictated by the style of the animation, but even a subtle amount can give realistic looking motion a bit of life and avoid the whole mask-like look.

My favourite piece of lip-synch is in "The Iron Giant" where Hogarth picks up the phone and delivers his greeting in monotone, as if he's said it a gazillion times before. He says something like, "Hughes residence, Hogarth speaking, who's calling please?", but the way in which the line is spoken is not in a way in which you would expect. Take the way he says "please" - the animator has totally got the mechanics of the delivery. Instead of your normal 'S' shape, and in keeping with Hogarth's reasonably glum attitude, the actor had kept his jaw stiff and the sound is being made by tightening the muscles below the lower lip and on the chin, making the escaping air whistle as it comes out over the top teeth. The shape is just perfect for the sound, and I thought that that was total genius. If you get a chance, have a looky and you'll know what I mean.

UK Adverts

In my last post I mentioned being slapped in the face with a big jelly glove. UK TV watchers may remember that particular incident, and it turns out that you can all watch it here!

Click on the "Tango - Napoleon" movie....

...and then look at the rest of them. I don't watch TV any more, but British adverts always were fantastic.

(Incidentally, the Orange "Night Night" advert is probably my favourite ever. It is linked here, so watch it and then you can agree with me.)

Full-on Wootness

Every now and again animation comes along that is so good it slaps you in the face with a giant jelly hand (remember this for later), leaving you with a new found enthusiasm for your own work. This happened to me just now in Dailies, on seeing the true spiffiness that is Mel's new shot. It's great to be pushed to new heights by those around you!

Great stuff, Mel!

Comic

Comic

It turns out comic writing is hard. I'll add it to the growing list of
things I'm rubbish at.

Heh.

DIY Comics

Absolute genius...


Send 'em in.

Regarding Inflation

Egos.

I don't like running into them. They lurk around corners and try to bite your shins off. Sometimes they'll even steal sweets from small children and run off cackling.

Now, I am very happy to report that I don't work with any of these egregious sweet-stealing personality leeches, (If you think that my work day is filled with rants and back-stabbing you'd be wrong - my co-workers are the most talented, supportive bunch of people ever, and are the reason why I have improved so much in such a short amount of time) but sometimes I encounter a boiling mass of ego and it kind of freaks me out. Why act like that? Doing what I do, is this how I am perceived? I don't want to be. Most of us aren't like that.

I am incredibly fortunate to get paid for doing something I love, but I hope that I will maintain a sense of perspective about this 'ere American Dream that I am living. Working on feature film work is all ace and flashy and people go "Oooo" when they hear about it, but it's not like I'm not saving lives on a daily basis or anything so worthy of a giant balloon head. (To those that have one, I can supply a pin or a sharp, pointy stick).

All of the best animators I know are remarkably humble, so, even as I move through my career, I want to be able to remember exactly how I got here, and all of the people who helped me get to where I am now. Hopefully I'll even be able to help a few others along the way.

Move aside Ego. Go and stand in the corner.

Faulty Wiring

At the risk of getting all political and stuff, I just wanted to voice my support for Mireille, Tom & Eric's response to the Wired article that appeared in June.

It is available here, and completely misses out how great the company is to work for. I've never read Wired, and this poorly researched article doesn't really do much for my enthusiasm to continue reading.



Ho hum.

Digital Life Drawing

Ouch.

My arm aches! This afternoon we took a digital life drawing class.

What is this, you ask? Well, it's a pretty good idea really! A model assumes a pose and we had to recreate it using our character rigs. With three 5 minute poses, and then two 10 minute poses, there was a lot of clicking involved. I found it to be a pretty intense experience, since there is very little time to navigate through the various minutiea inherent in 3D animation.

Hmmm. Turns out I can pose pretty quickly if I have to...



Has anyone else tried this?

Moan Over

Look! I am now in peripheral nirvana! I should be able to click away for quite some time now without keeling over.

Happy-K Keyboards Inc.

What with sitting at my desk for most of the day, I am constantly trying to come up with new ways to make myself more comfortable. These long American work days are pretty tough on the posture, after all.
Somewhere out there there is an ergonomic stetup so good I could press buttons all day and not fidget around all the time. The trouble is, I haven't found it yet.

Getting this right is a crucial part of making my time at work a pleasant one, and made even more important by a few appointments with a physical therapist who didn't seem at all pleased by the state of my geek-twenty-something back.

Our software requires lots of numeric input and the use of modifier keys. A standard keyboard is OK for all of this, but the problem is that all of them are so long, meaning that my shoulders slump as my weedy little arms struggle to use both the Ctrl key and the mouse. I hate all of the hand mileage that I'm clocking up! What I would ideally like is a keyboard that is deep rather than wide, eschewing all of those nonsense extra hotkeys. The Insert, Home, Page Up key cluster would be moved horizontally above the Function keys, whilst the numeric pad would be skootched towards the main keys, but so that Num Lock would be by F12, then the cursor keys could sit under that. I reckon that would shave off 2 inches from the length of the keyboard. It doesn't sound much, but it would help me.

in addition to my custom designed keyboard, I would also like a shaped mouse mat that fits around my keyboard so that the beastly thing doesn't sit on the pad like it does now. gar!

So, if you happen to see Father Christmas as you go about your daily life. Please could you pass on this information?
Thanks!

In The Blink Of An Eye

I was working on a shot a little while back; one that involved a CU of a character addressing another off-screen, in a kind but firm way. I knew what I was wanted to do, so, after thinking about it for a bit, off I pootled to my computer and started clicking things.


...Cue typing montage to the tune of the "Murder She Wrote" title score...


With my shot up for final, the director stopped by my desk to review it. We all looked at it, and yet something was wrong. I had shown it before, at a less developed stage, and it was fine. Unfinished, but fine. So what had a done?

Finally Rex, my head of Animation, said, "Was that blink always in there?"
He was right! I had squashed the eyebrows and lids, adding an accent to the dialogue, and had pushed it into a blink. This completely changed the whole attitude of the character, as he then momentarily disconnected from the other, weakening the intensity of the moment.

Duh!

Correcting it took thirty seconds, and made all the difference in the world. I was surprised by how much, in fact. I had shown it to loads of people before the review and none of us had spotted it!

So, as we can see, in this case I shouldn't have pushed the accent that far. Usually it is preferable to really exaggerate certain phonemes and support them with the eyes, (even to the point of squashing them to a blink). Here though the blink acted like a shutter, disconnecting the characters and indicating a change of thought where there was none.

Keeping that last bit in mind is an incredibly powerful little trick to have up your sleeve, and one that will definitely help the me's of this world in balancing the movement of shapes on screen and the feeling the character displays.


See? We all need a little help from time to time, (and me more than most).


....



PS. Incidentally, the post title is also that of a book about editing. By all accounts it is a good read. I have mine on order...

Random Thought for the Day

Does Shrek walk like a pregnant lady when seen from behind?

Answers on a postcard please.







(Oh, to be gifted with a desultory imagination)