Pre-Production and Planning

Week 2

The animation that will be made for the first assessment is a short animation based upon a scene from an animation called "Grandma's house", In this clip, a child named Kayla is being told a story by her Grandma Bonnie while she is laying in bed. The assignment will involve planning, blocking and fully animating this scene based upon the audio clip provided.

Character: The two characters within this animation are Kayla (The child) and Bonnie (The Grandma). Kayla appears to like most children, in that she is inquisitive and excited but is also deeply engaged with the story and so feels the tension and nervousness during the dramatic parts while she is being told the story. Bonnie on the other hand, appears to be enjoying telling the story, trying to fully engage Kayla into the moment and making it as dramatic as she can.

Scene Setup: The scene will be set within a bedroom environment that was provided for the assignment. However, most of the objects within the scene will not be seen during the animation. The main objects within the scene are the two character, the bed and the some sections of the walls that will be seen. Both characters will be on the bed, with Kayla sitting with her back against the pillow and the end of the bed. Bonnie will be sitting on the side edge of the bed, with her legs over the edge, while she is mostly turned towards Kayla as she tells the story.

The scene will have 3 cameras. The first camera will be a close-up for Kayla, with her head and upper body taking up the foreground, with the back of the bed visible in the background. The second camera will be a side-shot of the entire bed. Both characters will be in the middle of the frame, along with the entire top part of the bed. The background will contain the wall. The final camera will be a close up of Bonnie, with the focus of the frame being Bonnie's head. In the background will be some of the walls.

Story Beats:

1. Kayla: Stares wide eyed, mouth-open at Bonnie (Shot 1 - Camera 003)
2. Kayla: leans forward slightly, still wide-eyed
3. Kayla: "Never to be seen again?"
4. (Shot 2 - Camera 004)
5. Bonnie: Leans forward, placing her hands on Kayla's upper legs
6. Bonnie: "Never to be seen again!"
7. Kayla: Pulls back slightly, eyes widen even more
8. Bonnie: Leans back, content on waiting for Kayla's reaction
9. Kayla: eyes narrow, and looks down. Mouth is straight. "Soooo..."
10. Kayla: Looks back up at Bonnie: "Everyone inside disappeared into the vortex as well.
11. (Shot 3 - Camera 005)
12. Bonnie: Head moves up, eyes close a bit, still looks at Kayla: "Oh my yes.."
13. Bonnie: Turns head, leans down towards Kayla, eyes open up more: "Nobody escapes the pultagese vortex"
14. Shot 4 - Camerea 003)
15. Kayla: Head tilted up, leans slightly forward, eyes wide open, "What about the little girl who was not naughty"

Reflection: When it came to figuring out my reference videos, I felt that using the provided reference video (as shown in the blog) is the best reference for me personally to use. On top of struggling to find time and accessibility to shoot my own reference videos, I felt that my nervousness about being in front of a camera acting out the scene wouldn't get the best result since I probably wouldn't have acted out the emotions and expressions needed for the animation. Instead the provided reference does a good job in helping me see the expressions and actions that I need to re-create in the animation. While I understand how this pre-production part is useful in animating outside of uni, I felt that I had a pretty good understanding of the scene and actions from the explanations already, making this part not the most useful or enjoyable part.

Layout - Week 3

The next step in the production process was to create the basic layout of the scene and cameras. The first part of this process was to get the environment and characters into a maya file. This was done through the use of referencing so that new models or changes to models in the future could be replaced easily without losing any of the animation that I have done. The models that needed to be referenced were the two main character models (Bonnie and Kayla), the environment and the pillow for Kayla's bed. Once all the models needed were in the scene, the first thing that I did was create a layer in maya called "hidden" which would be used to hide any object in the scene that does not need to be visible at the time. At this point, most of the objects in this layer were environmental objects such as the roof, some walls, bedside table and external environment outside the room.

Once all that was done, the next step was to setup the basic position for the characters. This involved putting Kayla at the head of the bed, placing her in a sitting position with her back against the pillow and her legs laying out in front of her and her hands placed slightly above her knees with the intention of having the blanket over her knees. Bonnie was placed about half way to 2/3rds down the bed. She has her legs placed off the bed and her body twisted to be turned towards kayla as she appears at the start of the second shot. Her hands have also been raised up in front of her body, with her fingers bend and spread a bit, ready for when she is about to lean down in the second shot.

Once the characters had been placed, the final step was to add in the cameras needed. The first camera is a close up shot of Kayla, with her face being the focus point while her body and hands above her knees in frame as well. Some of the background, such as the bed head and some of the bed and wall visible in the background. The second shot is a wide shot that is placed slightly more towards the end of the bed and angled towards the head. This means that most of Kayla's face and body is visible while Bonnie's face is closed off more when the shot starts, while the front of her body and hands are fully visible. The background has a large part of the wall in the background. The entire length of the bed is visible but only the bed head and very top of the bed height can be seen. The final camera is a close up of Bonnie's face. The camera has been placed slightly lower (meaning Bonnie's head is near the top of the frame), allowing for Bonnie to lean forward and still (hopefully) be in frame without needed to change her position. Some of the background room is visible.

Reflection: Overall I am happy with the resulting camera positions. I did find it tricky to completely recreate the shots from the video. This was mainly due to the difference in the angle of each shot is done in the 2D animation vs a 3D environment, so it was a matter of getting it as close as possible. This mainly was the case with the close up of kayla and the wide shot of the bed. The close up of Bonnie wasn't too difficult to get an angle that I was happy with.

Initial Blocking - Week 4

This week was all about starting the animation by creating the key poses for each of the characters. However, the first part of this process involved separating the four shots into four different maya files. While this isn't really needed for this assignment, this is important in projects with more than one animation as it allows multiple animators to be working at the same time albeit in different shots. This process for me involved saving the layout scene four times and setting the length of animation in each scene to be relative to the reference video and audio timings. The timing of the first shot was also offset by 10 frames (i.e shot 1 started at frame 10) to allow for any animation that could potentially be added in before the start of this shot (again, this method is another industry practice).

Once the shots were divided, the blocking could begin. For the first shot, this process involved setting up Kayla's movements. To begin with, I started with her more important movements in this scene; the head and body forward movements, as these are the driving movements that would affect any other movements such as the hands or face, and so getting these right would more important than other areas. The first bits of movement that I started with was her body moving forward and her head rotating upwards as she leaned forward. I then added her moving her legs closer to her body as well as moving her arms over her knees and some shoulder movement. I also added in some eye and eyebrow movement. Finally I added in some exaggeration in the neck both before and after Kayla

For shot 2, I started by animating bonnie leaning back in anticipation for her movement forward, as well as her moving forward. I then began a basic animation for Kayla's reaction to bonnie leaning forward, including moving her head, body and legs back, as well as making sure her hands stayed gripping her legs. Once I had that, I moved onto the next chunk of animation. This included moving her legs to a more relaxed position, moving her chest out and in (to simulate the big breath she would've used when say "soooo") and tilting her head and eyes down when she says "sooo". Finally, I rotated Kayla's head and eyes back up, as well as adding in a small head tilt to avoid her being static while she spoke. I also adding in some blinking and reduced the gap between her eyelids to really enhance the fact that she is thinking hard about the story when she is saying "sooo". I then added in bonnie's head tilting back at the end of the animation. Finally, I added in some small hair movements to Kayla.

For shot three, there was very little key poses that needed to be added. The main poses in this scene for bonnie are just her leaning back as she was at the end of the last shot and her leaning forward. In future I will probably look to add in some movement to create a moving hold so that she doesn't look lifeless in this scene. For shot 4, I began by animating her leaning forward as well as her tilting her head when she says "not". However, once again there is a lot of dead movement that will need to be fixed in.

Finally I have added into some lip movements to help with the visualization of the shots and to practice a bit with animating lip sync.

Reflection: This was a reasonably helpful week in starting to get my animations down. However, some small frustrations were occurring. I have been experiencing quite a few crashes with maya, particularly when doing movement with the jaw, although some crashes have occurred when rotating Kayla's torso and sometimes when animation on Bonnie. I am starting to think about ditching doing any more mouth movements to hopefully avoid these crashes, or at least reduce them, especially since I don't think any jaw movements really need to be in this early in the animation cycle. Frustration around the crashes aside, this was a useful week.

Blocking Refinement - Week 5

Once the major key frames were in, the next step was to add in the in-between poses to help get the movement to be more defined and accurate to how I want them to be. This process involved adding in key frames where I thought there needed to be more detail in the movement to make sure the animation followed a particular arc or direction. To assist in this process, I would also switch the tangents in maya from stepped to spline just to get some extra help as to where the in-between frames were needed (but switching back to stepped to implement the new keys).

To begin refining shot one, the first thing I did was to add in in-between frames for when Kayla moves her hands from above her legs down to grip her legs. I also began to add in some eyebrow movements and some extra head movements to help her feel more alive and avoid dead movement and expressions. Finally, I added in some breakdown keys for her legs moving in slightly.

For shot two, most of my time was spent tying to get Bonnie's breakdown keys for when she goes from leaning right up close to Kayla to when she goes back to her normal position. The was very difficult to find the right breakdown keys that I was relatively happy with. The main problems here were trying to make timing of the breakdown movements look reasonable as well as avoid having her hand phase through her legs. After that was done, I then updated the Bonnie model from the proxy rig to the fully detailed model. Then I added in some small movements when Bonnie isn't speaking, such as small eye, head and torso movements, to make sure she doesn't appear static and lifeless. During this phase, i didn't really add much to Kayla's animation as i felt there wasn't really any need for breakdown keys in her animation.

The first thing I did for shot three was update the bonnie reference to the full detailed model. For this scene, I found myself not needing to add in any breakdown keys, but instead added in some extra movement to avoid having bonnie being static for most of this shot. These movements included leaning more forward than what was originally animated, as well as some extra head rotations and eye movements

Initially for shot four, I started by adding in some more head movements for Kayla, with the intention of again, making her feel more life-like. Then I added in some eyebrow movements. However, I felt that there wasn't really much more to add into her animations at this point.

Reflection: This part of the blocking stage was more frustrating than helpful. While blocking usually for me isn't always the most useful part of the animation process, adding in these in-between keys to me felt like it wasn't helping too much. Plus getting that lean back of bonnies was a real pain to get reasonable (still not fully happy with it, still doesn't look light). Also, I've noticed that when I updated to the bonnie model to the fully detailed version, that there were still no nodes around the eyes and mouth. Not sure why this is the case but I was not able to make it to the tutorial to get help on the issue. Hopefully it is an easy fix that I can find out sooner rather then later. Looking forward to changing the tangents to spline and really starting to get a better feel of how the animation is looking.

Initial Refinement and Lip Sync - Week 6

The aim for this week was to change the tangents in maya from stepped to spline and start making adjustments and improvements to the animation. The other main aim was to add in lip sync to the characters. To help with the getting the lip sync right (since I have never done a lip sync animation before), there were three main sources that I relied on for the lip sync. The first were a number of slide from this weeks lecture about using visemes and the general shape of the mouth for all these visemes. After the lecture, I also created a visemes chart that broke down the script of the animation into these visemes and other major sounds. The next source I used was a quick video of my lip movements as I read the script (my poor timing on the script made it difficult to use this at times because it was read much faster than the actual script, plus the video viewing software I used was poor at scrubbing between frames). The final source I used was to just mouth the words that I needed at that time, feeling the mouth and jaw movements with my hands.

In shot 1, there was very little in terms of changes made initially from the blocking to the spline stage. So the first lot of major changes was the beginning of the blocking. So for this scene, it was straight into lip sync. The process that worked for me for creating the lip sync in this scene was the go through each word as it came up in the audio and working out through all the relevant sources how the mouth would flow through the words said. However, after watching the lecture, I realized made some big mistakes with the mouth movement that I had done in the blocking stage. This was because I moved the top teeth (which i shouldn't) and I used the translation movement for the jaw, instead of using the rotational movement. So I had to completely redo the lip sync in this shot (plus my original lip sync wasn't great). I exaggerated her neck translation when she leans down then back up at "again" to make the effect more obvious and give the action a bit of character. I also added in exaggeration to the eyebrow movements for similar reasons. I also made the decision to change the starting position of Kayla's hands. Originally her hands wouldn't even be touching her legs, instead starting above her knees before moving to grip her legs about halfway through the shot. I decided that this was not looking right so I decided to have her hands start on her legs. The only problem is that I have been struggling to get her hands to not move so much.

For shot two, I added in some more movement to Bonnie's moving hold, mainly adding in some slight body movement and also some hand/elbow movement to avoid having her appear static when Kayla is talking during this scene. For Kayla, I started off by adding some moving holds as well, mainly adding some slight movement to her legs and some extra head movement when Bonnie speaks at the end. Then i began to add in lip sync for Kayla and Bonnie. I again applied the same process as I did for the first shot. Working with the two different mouth models, I easily found Bonnie's to be a much better and easier model, as well as easier to get the results that I was looking for in the lip sync. I also had the same issue with Kayla where I needed to redo the lip sync because it was done where the top teeth had been moved during the blocking mouth movement. I added in some squash and stretch to Kayla's head both when she jumps back from bonnie and when she turns her down as well as adding in some small hair movements. Finally, I added some small breathing effects to Bonnie by rotating her chest out a bit, widening her nose a bit when she breaths in and opening her mouth when she breaths out.

For shot three, there wasn't much that I worked on this week. I implemented the lip sync as I have done for the other scene, and there were no issues with that. The only other work I did was small tweaks to the movement and eased in and out Bonnie's dramatic head movement to make it look a little better, Other than that, this scene wasn't touched much.

For shot four, the first thing I did was add in the lip sync. Since this shot didn't have any mouth movements in the blocking shots, I did not need to redo it. Then I began to add in some small details to the animation. These included some extra head movement and eyebrow movement to make the actions appear more natural and appealing to watch.

Reflection: This week was at times both stressful and difficult to find the motivation to work on some parts. Once again, I found myself struggling to get around to adding in some small effects or make some minute changes. However I did find myself enjoying adding in some of the moving hold effects though. As mentioned, I found myself really struggling to work with the Kayla mouth movement. Having to redo the lip sync either wasn't helping that and it was a real struggle at times to both get around to fixing it and to actually get the movement that I was looking for. While with the Bonnie model, I found myself happy with even the first attempt at the lip sync. I did have to redo Bonnie's lip sync again though because it somehow disappeared (might've happened when I removed Kayla's glasses, which is weird). However, I again redid it quite quickly and in one take again because I found it much more enjoyable and easier to use. Overall I am very happy with the progress that I have made.

Final Refinement and submission - Week 7

For the final week of the assignment, the aim was to polish the animation up as much as possible. To get an extra bit of help about what needed that extra bit of polishing, I got feedback from another student as well as the tutor about what needed to be improved.

For shot one, the only aspect that needed to be improved was to increase the angles of Kayla's eyebrows to make the nervous expression that she has even more pronounced. However, other than that, the feedback from the shot was very good. The surprising thing is that the tutor liked the effect of Kayla's hand movement in this scene, so I have not changed anything with that.

Shot two however, required a few more minor changes. The first was to reduce/stop Bonnie's back and head moving backwards right at the beginning of the shot but still keep the hands/arms moving back. This was because moving the head and torso that much of an unnecessary movement looks wrong and is impracticable. The next fix was to make sure that bonnie's right hand hits the bed before the left hand. Since the animation naturally leads with that hand anyway, normally that hand would hit the bed slightly before the other hand. This was a easy fix. The next fix was to delay Kayla's legs both moving back when she is scared and forward when she relaxes. Beforehand it looked like her legs were moving with her body, rather than driving her body back and being used to pull her forward which it shouldn't. I also rotated her feet back a bit when she is relaxed because her ankles would appear at an unnatural angle. Finally, I made corrections to Bonnie's spine. I also updated the Bonnie Texture to be the appropriate texture for the model.

For shot 3, there wasn't much that needed to be changed. The first change was to keep her eyes more focused on Kayla, as the intense situation would mean that Bonnie would be laser-focused on Kayla, instead of having her wander if she was even a bit uncertain about what she was saying. The other fix was the add some more emphasis on the "P" in Poltergeist vortex, as well as improve some of the lip sync for the word Poltergeist. I also updated the Bonnie Texture to be the appropriate texture for the model.

For the final shot, there were also only a couple of changes. The first being to improve most of Kayla's lip sync in this shot, since the movement of the mouth wasn't as exaggerated and therefore readable. The other change was too make her hands have some movement, since they don't move at all in this scene and therefore look dead. However, there was still limited movement in this scene since Kayla is gripping her legs quite hard due to the tension. So the only movement I ended up adding was some small wrist movement, and a small relaxation of the wrist and fingers at the very end of the scene.

Final Animation

Reflection on week 7: It was great to get some more professional eyes look over my animation, since my skills at being able to pick up on the little details that changing are very limited, meaning I wouldn't have likely picked up on anything that needed changing. Plus having a fresh pair of eyes looking over the animation always helps. Motivation was a times a little low since once again, making those small minute changes can be tedious work for me. However I did manage to get the work done.

Reflection for entire assignment: Overall this was a reasonably enjoyable assignment. While at times it was difficult to find the motivation to get some things done, I did manage to push through and get a quality product that I am happy with. It was great to learn about the process of lip syncing, as it is something that I have never done in my relatively short animation experience. However, even the task of making only a 15 second simple video was somewhat exhausting, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to animate a decent length video/movie. For any future assignment/animations that I do end up somehow doing, I would certainly change my lip syncing process. While it wasn't terrible the way I ended up doing it, I certainly would like to try the way that was suggested. I probably should try harder in future to have more reference clips, however, that is going to be a struggle with to find the confidence and ability to record myself in videos that require other person to record the reference video. However, despite this, the end product I feel is of a good quality and I am certainly happy with out the assignment has turned out.