Friday 22 April 2011

Snatched!

Welcome to my new blog, which I will be using to document my progress on my third Industry Exercises unit.  For this unit, I have three projects to fulfil; the first being documenting my work in this blog. The second is to produce a showreel of the best work I have made over the past two years, both university work and personal, and I will need to present this on an interactive menu-driven DVD.  

The third project, that I will speak about in more detail in a moment is to produce and/or contribute to an animated film. I have three options for this project; I can work for as a junior on one of the third year's final films, I can work on this year's Rave Live and apply my animation skills towards the channel idents, or I can find an external client and negotiate a brief on the work that they will want me to produce for them.

For this project, I have chosen to work as an animator on a third year students' BA short film.  A few weeks ago, I managed to get in touch with some of the animators, that were working on a film called Snatched, a film about a Marmot that snatches a Mongolian man's food, resulting in a massive chase.  They agreed to let me do some animating for them (a big thanks to them!)

The first thing that I they have given me to do for this project is a test animation.  This will be an animation of one of the shots in the film that involves the Mongol running towards the camera, just after the marmot snatches the food and runs off.  I have been given all of the scenes and character rigs that are required, as well as a link to the animatic that I will use to reference the timing and poses.

I have already put in most of the run cycle, as well as the Mongol's getting up to chase the marmot.  Here is the unrendered playblast of the animation sequence so far.


I have got the main poses of the run cycle in but, as you can see, it is nowhere near done yet.  I also need to add facial expressions and animate his hand movement.  At the moment, I am considering animating him running with shaking fists, to express his fury at this little beast stealing his food.  I am also trying to decide if I should convey more anticipation in his first action, where he gets up off the ground and moves straight into a run as this currently looks a bit unnatural.

Once I have made these improvements, I will work at adding some more character to the run itself.  He is clearly infuriated, so I think his run needs to be a bit more clumsy and he needs to throw his weight around a bit more.  I also need to try acting it out to see how I can convey anger in a run cycle most accurately.

As for the showreel, I have already made a showreel, which is available on the homepage of my web site, but I want to change some of the footage around and add some new animation.  I will also document the full production of the showreel DVD through this blog.

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