Character Animation II

Hello again,

I'm going to take a moment to talk about my most recent class, Character Animation II. It's the fourth animation class in Full Sail University currently- the first being 2D Animation, and then Fundamentals of Animation (3d) and Character Animation I (also 3d).  By this point in the schooling, you should know the basics of animation, the 12 principals of animation, all about curve progression and you should definitely know how to animate a basic walk in 2d and in Maya. They have drilled into your heads since Art I the concepts of design and composition, and by now you should know how to do a basic walk because you've repeated it in all 4 animation classes, with growing perplexity each time. I never really had much of an issue with animation- it made sense to me, as does most everything else- but CAN II is where it really sunk in... There's a lot of minute technical details that goes into creating a basic animated walk, and if you don't have a mental checklist in your mind of everything you need to do, you might forget something, as I did.

We had a practical application test near the beginning of the class to see if we can complete a basic walk, and I was entirely confident in what I was doing, and thought I'd get a 100%... I got an 80% on that test, because I forgot two little things overall... The most embarrassing of which was turning the feet out away from the center in the Y axis, for the entirety of the walk. That's rule #1 when animating a character and I forgot it! Even though I've done it many times, it just slipped my mind. The other detail, minute but equally as important, was that I didn't fix the flat lines in the curve progression on the spine to counter the hips. This shows that you have to be extremely careful when animating to make sure you get everything. The animation Graph Editor in Maya is your friend. When you think you're done with your animation, click on every control that you've keyed and check each curve to make sure that you have a smooth and complete progression, or you could have confusing results or unnatural movement in your animation.
Here's my test the first time around with the two minor mistakes that made me get an 80%

You can even see in this video where I went wrong, the legs don't look like they are naturally moving, and if you look at the spine, the movement is jerky in comparison to the rest of the body because I didn't check my curves.  The second time around I was 100% confident that I would get a 100%, so much that I told my lab instructor that I know that's what my grade would be. This is because after the first test, I reevaluated the way I look at animating, and remembered my mental checklist to make sure everything is in order. As a result,  I got 100% like I knew I would. Here's how it turned out: 

As you can see, everything looks just a little bit more natural in this video, and it would have taken me 15 seconds to fix the two issues from the first video to make it look like this. 

We had two main projects in this class, the pantomime and the lip sync. The pantomime was an exercise in composition, walking, and showing a change in emotion, and we chose our scenario from a list, and made the composition ourselves. The project requirement was to take 3 steps and then perform the action from the list. My description was something like "Your character goes to feed his fish and realizes that the fish is dead." I twisted mine slightly into my character feeding his fish, and killing it because he's very tired, then realizing it's dead. We had to think like directors and actors to do this project because if we didn't, the composition would be wrong or the emotion would not be properly communicated.  Here's the initial block-out of my pantomime. 

It's important to get a good block-out in your animation because if you don't, you may not know what direction you are going in and can run out of time or end up with animation that does not make any sense. After a few iterations of tweaking and changing, I came up with this: 

Looks better, but I still wasn't happy with the final. I feel like I could have spent a lot more time making everything more naturalistic and it would have turned out a lot better.  This month I had been going through a lot in dealing with life, so I was a little distracted to say the least. I would have liked to have done more, but I still ended up with an A on the project at the end.  

The second project we did was the lip sync. We were given an audio clip and had to animate our character saying the clip, and performing an action that complemented the clip properly. My audio clip was "We better get back, 'cause it'll be dark soon, and they mostly come at night. Mostly." I know this well, because in doing a lip sync, you will be listening to the same audio clip repeatedly for hours, if necessary, to get the right lip shape and motion to make it look like your character is actually saying the words. Later I found that my audio clip was from the movie Aliens, and the girl saying the audio clip does not move at all, no acting except for the words coming from her mouth. Why do we as animators have to put in so much effort when live action can just stand there and say things? -you may ask... Well, this is because we can. In real life, unless it's a shakespearian play, you wouldn't go around acting out every emotion with your body, because it would look incredibly unnatural and weird. In animation, if you don't make your character move, it could look very boring and the viewer might lose interest. This isn't to say that you need to overact, sometimes subtle animation is better. But you can't just have someone standing there literally not moving his/her body in animation like you can in film. Here's my blocking of my animation for the audio clip. 

And after tweaking, in-betweening, and a little bit of crying, I ended up with this...

I'm a little happier on this one than I was with the pantomime, though there are still a few things I would like to go back and fix to make it more natural, and I would possibly like to light and texture this scene to beautify it. The focus of this class was animation, so I spent all the time on animation because that's what we were graded on, not the textures or the colours. Some students felt like lighting and texturing their scenes, and they ended up with incomplete animations as a result. One of my friends, however, managed to get a good animation, and still had a fully lit/textured room that had humourous results in time for turn-in.  I simply did not want to spend the time for texturing, the only time I had was for tweaking my animation.  I don't know what grade I got for this project yet because the class just ended and it hasn't been graded yet. That's it for the main projects of the month, I just have a few more notes on the other projects.

For the research project, we had 3 groups between the 12 people in our class, and between our 3 groups we came up with various subjects for researching. Our instructor chose our subjects for each group to present on, and my group got micro expressions, luckily my favourite topic on the list, the one I suggested. Micro expressions are just like normal expressions showing emotion, except they are condensed into a small fraction of a second, and they generally tell you what a person actually feels, versus what they might be trying to show you. Some of it is up for interpretation, but generally micro expressions can be a very good thing to know about for an animator. There's a TV show, Lie to Me, that uses micro expressions to tell if someone is lying, to solve police cases and the like... Some people specialize in this in reality, but of course it's over-dramatized for television. The show does a very good job of explaining what micro expressions are and how to use them. A certain someone (I forgot his name) had done extensive research on micro expressions and developed the system for micro expressions that everyone uses today. Animation studios, such as Dreamworks, Disney, Pixar, the big ones- all put micro expressions into their animations, and you may not even realize it. It allows for much more emotion to be shown in small amounts of time, and it looks unnatural without micro expressions in there. The trick is, unless you are actually looking for micro expressions, you will not even notice that they are there. I challenge you to do some research on micro expressions and then watch any recent animated feature, and to look out for microe xpressions. You'll be quite surprised how many you can actually find.

We had a few quick lecture activities to strengthen our character animating skills, which I'm not going to get into all of them, because I'm running out of time due to a bit of procrastination by me... There was a 'lip sync test' that we did, just to get ourselves familiar with how to do lip sync animation and we just had to make the lips move to a previously animated scene. I found this quite easy, after the first little blunder that I had... Now I was very tired when I did this, so that's what I'm attributing this mistake to. The audio clip is shorter than the animation, and we were supposed to offset the audio to line up with the spot in the animation where we were supposed to do lip sync. I had the bright idea to scale in the animation to match the length of the audio clip, and this was the result: 

Beautiful, right? Yeah I'm definitely blaming lack of sleep on this one... So I added lip motions to that before I playblasted the scene and then realized how terrible it was and started over. Second time around was pretty easy, I properly offset the audio and animated the lips in about 15 mins, with a few distractions. I thought it was pretty good, but before turning in I wanted to do more, so I tried to open the file and it would not open... Sometimes these things just happen, so I dealt with it. I restarted the scene from the beginning for a second time, and completed the lip sync in 5 minutes, blasting through as fast as I could because it was close to the deadline for turning it in.  I know there are things that aren't perfect with this animation, but for 5 minutes I thought it was pretty good: 

That just goes to show how amazingly easy lip sync actually is... in 5 minutes, you can get decent results in animating lips if you know what to listen for. Of course, I know this is a poor overall job of lip sync, but 5 minutes, come on...  This happened before the actual lip sync project, where I spent quite a bit more time making the mouth line up better with the audio, and tweaking the final animation as it shows in the result of the final. 

Overall I learned a lot about the subtleties in animation with this class, and the Lecture Instructor (Eileen) and Lab Instructor (Skylar) were both knowledgable and experienced, and very helpful throughout the learning process. I may or may not become an animator, and either way, I have another well developed tool to add to my skill set. I think this was the last animation class in my program, and it was a good final animation class to have, because I am not only prepared, but I am also inspired to continue growing as an animator. To be honest, if I didn't continue to animate, I think I'd start to miss the multi-colored curves of Maya's animation graph editor... 

Thanks again for reading, and until next time, stay classy animators...

Intro & A Message to Students

Hello students, artists, friends, Romans, countrymen.. 

I am restarting and repurposing this blog to follow my academic career, my growth as an artist, and my professional career- when that happens. First, an introduction to who I am, and why you should even care enough to read my blog. 

I'm  Brad Bailey, Computer Animation Bachelor of Science student at Full Sail University. <- That was a mouthful of a title. Hopefully soon after I graduate, I can just change that to Animator, Rigger, T.D. of anything, Modeler, Compositor, Visual Effects Artist- really anything that can start my journey to my real goal to become a head Director of a project or VFX company. That's my first goal... Director. My second, not chronologically, but alphabetically- I want to open up my own studio. I may want to make this an animation studio, game studio, visual effects studio, or a combination of two of those, but I haven't fully decided yet. When I finally develop the tools and resources and I'm ready to start my studio, I'm going to try to do that, regardless of whether or not I've gotten my sought after Director title at that point. So that's a quick summary of my goals and aspirations and blabla enough about myself, lets get to the good stuff...  

My journey as an artist will come later in a post- I've got to get my stuff together before I show you that part, so we're starting with my journey as a student. I'm going to start out by saying I absolutely LOVE my school. There are rumours and trash sites online that say that Full Sail University is a scam, or a joke, or that they aren't a school that's good for the entertainment industry, or that they promise to give you a job when you graduate and don't follow through, and these statements are not only counter-intuitive, but they are completely false. Generally, they're rantings from bad students that don't like to do work, or think that everything is getting handed to them. Sometimes, the allegations come from university review websites that only support 'traditional' colleges because they don't understand how anything else works, and they are too lazy to find out the truth. The truth is, Full Sail University is a fantastic school for anyone aspiring in the entertainment industry, be it music, movies, video games, graphic design, or even entertainment business. I remember a particular video I watched by a university review website (that shall remain anonymous) that suggested that anyone that wants to make video games should instead of going to Full Sail University, go to a traditional college and get a computer science degree. I don't think any advice can be worse than this; a general computer science degree could be useful, and I've often contemplated getting one myself, possibly later on in life to augment my skills, but it will get you nothing toward an actual creative job in the entertainment industry.  Video games, animations, et al. are very much about the artistic process and theory, much more than the technical side of things. My school understands that well, and teaches the theories and technical sides to the artistic process of creating entertainment.  Anyone who doesn't believe me can ask the thousands of alumni that are leading the entertainment business today, and changing it into an entirely different beast before our very eyes. 

 

Honestly though, do you really think that any school will 'get' you a job when you graduate? That's your job as a student to do well and put in the effort to get a job. There's no amount of schooling that can motivate you to do well, even if the school already prepares you very well for the industry it's not a guarantee to a job.  Many students come to this school because they like to play video games, so they think they can make them. This is partially due to all the advertising from entertainment schools, including Full Sail University, that show video gamers having fun and then offer them an opportunity to make games, the thing they spend countless hours on, into the depths of every night... here's a staggering disclaimer... You will not be able to play video games the same way ever again, not as much, not in the same manner. This school will ruin that for you, in a good way. This school will dissect everything about a video game and completely eviscerate the magic that you think your favourite game holds. You will know how to create the art and assets for film and video games, and a good portion of the overall process. Of course, they can't teach everything but they get pretty close. Hardcore gamers, unless you are willing to go months without playing anything just to troubleshoot some script or work on art, you are not fit for this industry, and should not spend the massive amounts of money it costs to go to this school. I've seen many students who love video games sit in class playing video games instead of doing their work, wasting their (or their parents') money, eventually failing out because they did not have what it takes to actually be successful as an artist, or even a student. You can NOT expect to glide through this school with little to no work. Honestly though, playing video games is great, but creating them is so much more rewarding... 

Full Sail University is on the top lists for animation, film, and recording arts as far as I know, and has a good reputation in the various entertainment industries overall. So, it's not just a 'video game school' as some people may allude to, but more of a precision machine to get you into shape to conquer whatever branch of entertainment you may fancy.  The instructors are all very knowledgable and experienced, and they know what you need to learn, because they have actual industry experience, so listen to every word they say, and don't read Facebook during lecture time, because you'll miss vital information to your success.  The hours are long, the work is hard, but it will be worth it in the end. A typical 4 year university setup would not work for this type of schooling. We have 8 hours of class a day, which is still not enough, and one class a month- which is the ONLY way to learn this stuff.  I believe our school is trying to get regional accreditation which is great, and they are shifting into a 4 year school, which I believe to also be a positive thing.  You can not possibly learn all there is to know about creating Animation in two years. I'm struggling to learn enough and I'm on the extended 3 year program. As long as Full Sail University keeps it's general mission and similar policies, it will remain a great school as a 4 year albeit -still unorthodox school.  If you are willing to work, and your creative mind doesn't have an off switch like mine, then Full Sail University can be a great school for you. 

So, that was a long way of saying I love my school, but it needed to be said. I'll post a retrospective article soon about my past classes and my journey through school, but for now I'll end this one and talk about my Character Animation II class in the next post.