Change in plan

I decided to change the way I will animate my characters head. I was all gung ho about the silicon mask and poured one to test the concept. At first (this was back in Nov 08) I was happy - it looked great, there was an issue with bubbles, but looked good. Then I tested eyebrow movement and the whole eye moved including the eye shape deforming. So now I'm back to using replacement faces. Frankly it doesn't hurt that Coraline pulled it off fantastically. For now I'm sculpting mine by hand, but the 3D printer idea looks totally fun and well, helpful.

Behind the scenes

Thought I would put up some behind the scenes shots.

Christian my main character showing off the camera sled. The camera screws in from the bottom.


Sled in action

This photo is the day after the last shot on my final assignment. The tinfoil wrapped light is my spot light that I lit his face with. I had a board above the camera that bounced the light from the black spots above too. The big arts and crafts light was off during filming.

I've been working for the last few months as if I was taking a class on animation. I made a syllabus with 5 assignments and the last one was to be at least a 30 second long video.

Below is that Video which includes a lip sync test (assignment #4).

Larger Youtube video here.

Character sheet is below:

Long time no post, but I have been working a bit.

Here my main character is standing in front of early character studies.


My first silicon mask is shown above with clay hair and a costume pulled on over the bare armature. This photo shoot is the geeky kind of thing that keeps me going.

Panning a room

Shot 5 has evolved into a panning shot of the whole room. In the finished shot he will walk from the chair to the drawers and take out a book. The posted video is just my practice run to get down a smooth pan. That's my first armature standing next to the drawers.











I printed lines .5 degrees apart radiating in a circle and taped that to part of the tripod, then I cut a pointer out of tin, taped that above the lines and moved the tripod by hand.



The pics below might explain it.


The set is 2 1/4" scale (the door is 15" tall).

Starting animatics

Now that my armature is almost done I got into animating. I decided to do some rough animatics of my shot list and see how they flow and to just practice animating.
I only have three walls finished on his room set so I can't complete all the shots in the film.
It's weird to animate using keyframes and then extend the shot (to get the timing) by copying the keys from two to 8 times.



The clip above is Shot 5 and 6.
In shot 6, the black to the left is the incomplete set. Yeah I didn't think I would have to build the bay window that should be there.

Armature walk test

Thought I would try to animate again.