For Unit 3 I will be making a showreel that demonstrates my knowledge of the animation principles using character driven animation
as part of Pathway B: an animated portfolio containing scenes, scenarios or episodic sequences
My goal is to work within a variety of styles that are not my own, use different programmes and show my diverse abilities when animating.
I will focus on body acting and, in part, facial acting.
I will have my showreel have a minimum of 6 clips to a maximum of 8, where the total time will remain at 1 minute.
SHOWREEL DEVEOPMENT
Showreel – Intro
To ensure that I use my time wisely, I thumbnailed roughly two ideas for the intro. Intros of showreels are common, and I would like to have mine based off of my name and logo. The idea is to have a wolf howl at my logo as if it was the moon after jumping up rocks
After importing it into TVPaint, it felt stale; the movement seemed fine, but the scene itself is boring and lifeless.
To push my idea further, I got in contact with my peers and previous co-workers on how I can make the intro more striking, and after discussion, I have the idea of the camera moving so the shot becomes more dynamic.
Original intro_001
End Card
For the showreel, I would like to have an animated end card. I have decided to animate a pigeon on the bottom underneath my details, a simple but fun detail that adds to the reel but doesn’t take away from the contact details.
This is the first draft of what the end card could look like
I decided to do a walk loop and broke down the pigeon design to be a more manageable animation. I plan to give this animation more character, as this version looks very stale.
Here is a coloured version of the pigeon. I’m not happy with the animation, however, due to the constant asking to see an animation on the model. I chose to have ‘completed’ one of my animations, which is unfortunately poor quality. I will be adjusting, if not completely redoing, the animation before using it in my official showreel outside of the course.
The legs do not work. One of the legs’ circles of movement is larger than the other, which makes the bird look as if it is limping. The other issue is the bread looks like it is dragging the head down; this can be fixed by letting the bread drop with the head and having no straight lines on the bread. The legs can be fixed by adjusting the legs to be doing the same-sized circle.
RIDE ANIMATION
Another clip I will be working on will be based off of a small clip of music from a musical called RIDE.
To begin, I listen to the music and picture the actions, positions and personality of how I imagine each character. For this clip we will have the lead in red and the secondary character in blue.
For the red character, she is charismatic, which means she has larger actions; she is trying to convince blue to join her on a trip, so she will be grabbing her hands and gesturing that they should go on their adventure. This would include side poses and large actions.
Blue will follow Red’s lead since she doesn’t talk; she has to go her separate way and will be experiencing guilt. This would make her have smaller actions, trying to avoid eye contact and slight frustration, like pulling her arm away from the red character.
My first pass is too long to use, but it’s drawn out in minutes to help me visualise the movements and personalities of the characters before acting out their movements.
After acting out the characters I redraw the scene. the poses are stale and not exaggerated enough; this is making my animation feel flat but the idea is developing. I will be acting out again and come back to this
The posing being changed has made a great difference. There are still issues such as staging; red is overlapping blue, so I must better position my characters and work on staging.
This pass has much better exaggeration and timing, though the beginning pose which once worked no longer does. I believe to fix this, I will need to exaggerate the movement and pose, as it is now the only one that really stands out as weak and slow.
‘EPIC’ Animation Clip
For my 3rd animation clip, I’m choosing to use a sound clip from a musical called Epic. This particular clip will be where a queen reminisces over her dead husband’s bow whilst talking down to her people. Body acting with a prop will be good to help portray emotion.
A queen would move with her head held high and hands behind her back with strong and regal poses. To show her emotion towards her prop, she would hold it close or even hug it to show her care.
To start I sketched out the poses as rough as possible, based off of my own reference footage i took
I
PHONECALL ANIMATION
I originally found inspiration in the Mean Girls phone scene where the character of Regina George expressed boredom using body language and facial expression.
Example: bottom right 1:07 – 1:30
To further demonstrate my ability to portray body acting, I will be doing an animation of a person on the phone. This animation will have facial acting to show my ability to animate facial expressions.
Character D
Blocked out version of model
Discarded / Various Animations
Due to the time constraints of the unit, some animations will be thrown away or some animations will be made as part of other projects
Facial Expression Animation
I wanted to try and focus on facial animation with this one. The idea is that the character sees something shocking, reacts and turns away, feeling guilt.
A more updated version of my facial animation; I will be scrapping this one for the same reason as the other animations I have left, which I prioritise quality over quantity.
‘Mad Ones’ animation
I wanted to do another interaction between characters this one is more subtle and even dialogue where the characters dont move much
A more updated version of the Mad Ones animation.
Bored child Idea
I was considering the idea of animating a bored child waiting at a bus stop as they move completely different to teenagers or adults
I decided to scrap this animation idea to ensure the quality of the other animations, such as the phone call, ride or epic animations.
INDUSTRY AND NETWORKING
along with practicing my body acting and developing a more efficient and industry based animation pipeline based on feedback, i have also netqorked qith various atudios and animators. Yuchi Wu 1st year, Beatriz Antunez an alumni and i managed to get incontact and collab in various qays with two studios. I also decided to apply for a position at Sun creature Studios as an assistant animator.
SUN CREATURE STUDIOS
sun creature studios posted on instagram they were looking for various roles for a production of a horror short and i decided to apply as if chosen it could be a great opportunity.
If im not chosen it will help me get used to rejection from studios and help me persivere through getting rejected as that is important in the industry to keep going and not get dragged down by not getting the job.
YELLA studio
YELLA studios reached out to me about a community project they were holding. Originally i seen their post on instagram Linked below, I did not intend to participate due to wanting to focus on the animations for this final unit.
However, shortly after the post was made, I received a message asking if I would take part, and I decided to give it a go. Since it was to do with an animation studio, I decided a 5-frame loop would be cool to have on the inside of their logo.
I decided to do a wolf run cycle across the letters of YELLA.
second pass of run cycle with designFinal Animation of cycle
As you can see from the development, the movement significantly changed at the final stage. I got feedback from my previous version from Instagram that the back jumped when the back/spine did not move. I tried to edit this in the final steps but should have caught the bizarre movement sooner.
Above is the background I decided to do for the YELLA studio collaboration project.
Below you will see the final outcome of what the animation and background were used for.
Yellow Mouse Studios
In Exeter there is a studio which many of my peers from my BA have worked with called Yellow Mouse Studios. I have connected with the studio before during my BA on Instagram briefly, but after seeing this post, I decided to email and participate in their academy.
I decided to email and sign up for the course, as I wanted to reach out to local studios. Also, due to getting told that networking is important and diversity in work opens up more opportunities by Laura-Beth alumni and industry professionals, this seemed like the perfect oppertunity.
Due to their lack of numbers, I was offered the unique opportunity to visit the studio and learn from the head of studio, Dan. As you see above, I talked with Dan, and we discussed the course and how I will get a 1-to-1 on their pipeline and training that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I agreed to come down the very next day and attend the studio on Tuesdays for 10 weeks. Over this time I was taught advanced After Effects rigging and animation and the basics of Moho. I enjoyed testing puppet animation in my BA so this opportunity qas perfect to feel creative and to have fun with animation
When at the studio, I would talk with Dan about my experiences and the work which I had taken part in. One of these films was sea silk. which I’m very proud to have been a part of. In Exeter, there is a festival called the Respect Festival; it is a large event celebrating art and diversity, and sea silk fits perfectly with the theme. After talking to Dan, I managed to get Sea Silk screened as one of the first films played at the screening, and I connected with the filmmakers and festival runners.
Overall it was a great experience, and I was proud to represent the team in place of the team as unfortunately they could not make the event.
As part of the learning experience, I decided to make myself the goal of creating an animation that I can use on my social media and a part of this unit. Dan agreed that the idea would be a good way to demonstrate my learning of their pipeline. Making a rig can be easy; however, because I demonstrated more advanced knowledge of After Effects, they decided to make a more complicated rig to really test my ability to learn and use the skills to create my own animation. As you see above, the drive folder shared has parts of the rig based on my character design for the phone call animation.
This is the final render of the rig as of now. It still requires adding masks on the hair where the divide is. I also need to set the opacity to 100% on the feet .pngs, I will also be tweaking the movement and facial expressions along with extending the floor guideline all of these are quick fixes.
I will be changing these things post deadline as to ensure i complete the more difficult animations that i am doing for submission of this unit.
I will also be contacting Dan on the 28th May after deadline as he has asked me to come work as part of yellow mouse on a project they will be working on in the next few months due to my knowledge of after effects and new ability to use moho and the yellow mouse pipeine.
Show Preperation
part of the industry is knowing how to advertise yourself this is something i have worked on since college, i have my oqn logo and brand and for simplicity in finding me i have the same handel for all socials which is @mxcharwolf. for the show I have updated my buisness cards and website. I also updated my website for the purpose of displaying my most recent work when applying to suncreature and various other studios. https://www.mxcharwolf.com/
I have also planned to give out stickers as a secondary buisness card and unlike my peers not sell them, this is to advertise myself on a wider scale beyond just a simple buissness card as people seem to love stickers. te sticker design i will use will be one of my pigeon frames from my end card animation of my reel, as that is the most popular of my recent works.
When creating my new buisness cards i decided that just my logo looked plain and too simplistic, it came across as a bland so i decided to edit it to show my characters behind it since i am a character animator and need my card to match the work i do.
when i was creating my new design I had to get permission of the co-creator Lewis Burke to use the image of one of the blonde characters tat you see on the card. this as the characters are part of a collaberation and not solely mine. I am aware that i could leave out the character however the characters fit the idea perfectly and Lewis was more than happy to have the girls included in the design. Now instead of giving a bland impression you can now tell that im a creative by just looking at the card front.
