BFA Thesis Week 12

Lot's of stuff done before Thanksgiving. I've been put in charge of putting together an animation style guide. I needed to figure out how exactly we were going to animate. For the previous tests I had animated Flash, and then I did the cleanup and color in Photoshop. I wanted to test out how I could do it completely in Photoshop. Olivia had found this tutorial by an animator named Alex Grigg, whose influenced my work in my Conceptual Animation class.


Photoshop Animation Techniques (Redux, Creative Cloud) from Alex Grigg on Vimeo.

After re-watching the video I did a rough test of one of the other radishes

I was apprehensive about animating in Photoshop, but had a lot of fun animating this scene. I kept it simple and limited, mostly because this was a test of the program, but we are going for a more limited style.

The cleanup was a little trickier. I used a video layer which was a bit confusing at first, but it was fine after I got the hang of it. 

After this I made the animation guide! 

It was fun! I was thinking I might be able to do a SHMinar on this...

BFA Thesis Week 11

I've worked out a few brushes I like for the film and have been testing them out. We're going for a rough sketchy look, but it can't be rough enough that there are holes in the shape. We need to be able to fill the character with the bucket tool during the color process.

Here's the test. I picked out 10 brushes and did the same 2 drawing in the 10 different brushes.

I sent these to the director and she picked out 04, 07, 09, and 10. I did a few more drawings and decided on 04. 

BFA Portfolio Week 11

Blizzard came to visit this week, and they looked over some of the senior portfolios. I submitted this reel to them after fixing some things from the alumni critique. I also rendered out the last shot I worked on.


David Johnson 3D Reel 2016 from David Johnson on Vimeo.

BFA Portfolio Week 10

Got a lot of good crits from the alumni who visited last week. They basically said to keep it simple and work on the poses more. I cut out the jumping over the box, and a lot of camera moves and worked on the final pose. I'm going to have to change it again, because he's way off balance obviously.

BFA Portfolio Week 9

Brought the animation into spline and tried to get some better poses.

Also showed my reel to some alumni who visited class this week. The 3D stuff is from last semester, so I got a few tips on polishing those. There's a lot of 2D in there too, and I was told to make 2 separate reels (depends on where I'm applying as well).

BFA Thesis Week 9

Working on brushes for the cleanup part of the film, mostly trying to make my own. We're going for a sort of rough look, similar to the xerox process from 101 Dalmatians.

BFA Portfolio Week 8

Starting a new shot this week! I went with a body mechanics shot, sort of based off the Overwatch highlight intros from Blizzard (Blizzard is visiting in a weeks and I want to impress!) There's a character in the background called Doomfist that is not in the game that I thought would be cool to do a little experiment to see what an intro for him would look like. I think I may have been a little too ambitious with it. Too much camera moves and jumping.

BFA Thesis Week 7

This week we were trying to pump out a proof of concept for a shot, so we decided to cleanup and color my animation.

Kaitlyn Joe helped with this. She choose a brush to use in photoshop, which I ended up not happy with, due to holes in the lines. It's shape was hard to control as well. We wanted a sort of rough look, but I think this was a little too rough. Kaitlyn and I split up the shot and each cleaned up half. Carmen Chow did a quick background and Olivia Asis composited it.

BFA Portfolio Week 7

Got into polishing this shot, and I'm still ironing out the motions on the shot. There's a bit where he's thinking about what to say where I added a little antic. I also started working on the lip sync.

BFA Thesis Week 6

Our thesis story changed a lot, so I redid the animation test with a different emotion on the character.

BFA Portfolio Week 6

I cut out a lot this week! I got some critiques that the dialogue was talking a lot and the character was moving a lot, instead of trying to talk. This was creating a bit of an overwhelming effect, so i got rid of the ketchup part. This was very rough and there are a lot of problems because of the deletions.

BFA Portfolio Week 5

What a week! I was in Ottawa for the Ottawa International Film Festival over the weekend. It was amazing! I didn't have a lot to do on the thesis project this week so I spent all my animation time on this shot.

I was having a lot of trouble with constraints again. Most of it I think was due to the fact that I would have some objects constrained to 3 locators at different times. The timing was getting really squished too. The hot dog stand guy was just doing too much at once. The crit I got this week was to take out some of the antics on the part where he's talking a lot. I was able to rig a hot dog and make it wiggle. It got a good laugh out of the class, so I'm thinking of replacing the ketchup part with him just talking and waggling the hot dog around.

Here's the progress:

BFA Thesis Week 4

Week 4 I spent animating this short shot. It was a test to be displayed in our pitch presentation. I think it turned out well for how rough it was.

                                          

Week 3 BFA Portfolio

I've been working on a shot that involves two characters interacting at a hot dog stand. This week I was struggling with the timing as well as with constraints. The character's wrists were looking broken when he was scooping ingredients. I was able to model a ketchup bottle, and was planning on rigging a hotdog.

Another thing I've been struggling with is animating the spine. At the end of last semester I found I had been doing it a much harder and less efficient way: by using all of the spine controls. I would have to constantly go back and counter animate. This was very frustrating, so now I'm relearning spine animation and it has proven difficult. I can't seem to get the right curves I need from Malcolm, without using those other spine controls.

These things together really got me stressed and very anxious one morning, as we were supposed to be done blocking last week, yet here I am still working on it. I managed to power through and get some good poses. Sometimes you just need to take a step back for a bit. I've got a lot of catching up to do, and a lot of preemptive work to do as well, as I am leaving for Ottowa next weekend.

Here's a playblast

Week 3 BFA Thesis

This week in my thesis project we've mainly been focusing on the presentation. I haven't been too involved in this because I will be in Ottowa for the pitch. Instead I have been working on refining a test animation for Bello.

This was a previous test I had shown in the very first pitch. This week I have redrawn it to refine it and get it more on model with our current character design.

Still some more timing to fix and the extras to add on, and of course the style to test. This was done in flash, and I believe we are going to try to do cleanup and style stuff in photoshop.

I also did some sketches for the antagonist. An eastern cottontail rabbit.

Some figure drawings

A few sketches from the past few months

Family jamming

10 min pose

10 min pose

character sketch