UNIT 3 CHAR WOLF SHOWREEL BLOG

UNIT 3 CHAR WOLF SHOWREEL

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 programs 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 – 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 tv paint 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 qhat 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 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 circles 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 no straight lines on the bread. The legs can be fixed by adjusting the legs to be doing the same size 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 a 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 reds 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 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 Im 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 aho my ability to animate facial expressions.

Character D

Blocked out version on model

Discarded / Various Animations

Due to the time constraints of the unit some animations quill 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.

More updated version of my facial animation, I will be scrapping this one for the same reason the other animations i have left which i 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.

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 intent to participate due to wanting to focus on the animations for this final unit.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DHUNQCAsdzn/?img_index=2

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 design
Final 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 does 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 was used for.