Motion Arcs made by a Tennis player

I took this at the Exploratorium in SF. It's like what we do, innit?

'appy Chrimbo

It's the last work day before the holidays.

Yeah! Now I can go home and play some games. After a month long search campaign my spiffy new XBOX 360 is now happily seated next to my television, and I fully intend to put my free time to good(/bad) use.

Happy hols, loyal reader-base. Your patronage is muchly appreciated!

Shapes

OK, so I mentioned that stuff about shapes in my blog entry on performance, and a few people wondered what I was mumbling about. Well, while I don't have any formalised theory on this stuff, (the good peeps
at AM would do a better job than me), I'll try to give a description of what I take it to mean - character shapes and shape/form relating to shot flow.

[chews pipe thoughtfully]

In life drawing, you usually study your subject as a whole, duck in on a patch of detail, then blip back out again and study the entire image once more, comparing it to with the subject once more. I try to do the same thing in my shot work, and in more or less the same way.

We can step back and look at the forms the character is making with their body parts. Forget that you're looking at a character for a second and concentrate on the shapes that make up the two dimensional image - a leg, an arm, whatever. Ask yourself if you are happy with these the lines and volumes. Do they work well together? Do they draw your eye to the spot you want them to go? (like two converging straight lines, a road running to the horizon will draw your eye you the vanishing point). You can use your shapes to do the same thing! It's subtle, but can help in a shot if there are lots of things whizzing about) It's kind of like looking for a decent silhouette except you're not just dealing with positive and negative space. It should help to keep your poses as clean as possible.


This shape lark can also exist temporally, as well as the sub-character level. Directing the viewer's eyes within the frame is common thing theorised by film boffins, but this is really just an example of how our shapes can interact over time. (Obviously I am only talking about animation here, rather than set design, colour and lighting, which we can also use to our advantage in this respect). Humans have evolved to pick up movement, so we can make something pop out of the screen by monkeying with the characters' spatial relationships. It's funny, because some shots I have had recently are a good example of this. A small character onscreen is the focus of the shot, so to draw attention to it all of the other relatively giant characters push in slightly towards it - that movement directs you the the right place in frame in a very short amount of time, (hopefully).


This kind of stuff is a good thing to use when working on a sequence, because you can use it to help make shots flow together, just in the animation. Our bigger actions/poses obviously need to hook up, but we can compliment this with some good ol' shapish continuity.

Check out the two rubbishly drawn thumbs in the post below. In Fig. 1, the little guy registers shock in CU, and then gets shaken and shouted at by the big guy in Fig.2. The compositions are quite different, so I need to get the actions to flow as well as I can. I get my broad poses matching over the cut, so that's a good start, but I might be able to go a little further. In Fig.2 the two main shapes will follow the lines of action screen left, and maybe a little down as the boy cowers. It's kind of a rotation counter-clockwise in screen space. We could take this broad movement and try to hook that up too! Say in Fig.1 the boy is looking up. By adding a bit of sc. left head tilt to the the look up, not only would it add a bit of interest but we have started that spatial change that carries over to the second shot. Maybe the difference is super subtle, but it is there, and helps to make our cut better.

I don't know, maybe this is all taught somewhere as something else, but I haven't learnt it so I'm making it up. It does appear to work. Even if it makes things 1% better, it's worth considering, I reckon.



Apologies for the super long post, and if I am talking complete nonsense...

Whee!

Figures

Fig.1

Fig.2

Preaching

First off, sorry for the lack of recent entries. I will post something a bit more substantial when I've got my current shot off of my plate. It's a biggun, so once it's done I won't feel so bad about taking some time to write more interweb stuff.

Also, if the tone of my posts ever turn into me sounding like a know-it-all idiot, then please feel free to pull me from the pulpit and give me a resounding slap on the comments box. I don't want to turn into that person, and besides, what does a lowly assistant-me really know, eh? I'm still learning all of this stuff too, so I really have no reason to get "uppity" and la dee dah on you all.

To that end, I welcome all original Welsh jokes, and ones that liken my appearance to that of a 12 year old. The "olde" topics are always the best.

A Flatpack Project

I've been bugging my friend John for a decent version of his student film ever since we graduated 4 YEARS ago. He's one of the cleverest people in the world ever, but he's also a flake, so I got tired of waiting and made the movie myself:

Here.

It is an avi, unfortunately. I would like an H.264 Quicktime though, so if anyone is able to transcode it please let me know!

The film was made during our final year of university, (at the same time as my "Joe's Playtime" short), as is one of my favourite pieces of student work. All of the stuff is Maya/RenderMan and custom image processing tools that the lad wrote himself.

Wanna know where the ink bleeding effects in Tom Riddle's diary in "Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets" came from? Meet it's ancestor! John wrote that in no time at all, based on the work in this 'ere film.

Enjoy.

Pencil Tests

Do you read Jim Hull's blog regularly? If not, why not? The link's been happily nuzzling those of Mr. Schleif and Uli Meyer over there on the side bar for, like, a year or something.

Today he has posted some of James Baxter's pencil tests from "The Lion King". If there's any doubt that JB is "THE BOY", then this should clear things up.

Click here for automatic jaw-dropping stimulus.

Amazing short film!

YumYumYumYumYumYumYumYum

Here.