I know it’s taken me quite a while to get to part 4 of my 11 second club workflow analysis. If any of you have ever done that sort of thing before (and tried to prepare it to be posted for the world to see) you know it takes lots of time. More time I have at the moment.
So, here’s a quick little something to hold you over ’til I can finish part 4.

A couple of weeks ago I happened to be browsing the TV and came across one of those shows that makes fun of pop culture and celebrities and the like. They were making fun of a clip of some little kid singing on the Today Show. I noticed something really cool while watching the clip, so I hit youtube to see if I could find it. Sure enough (what can’t you find!).
I turned it into a quicktime so I could save it for future reference, and also to chop off much of the extra fluff that’s irrelevant to what we’re talking about here.
Here’s the clip:

TodayShow_Kid.mov

This kid makes all sorts of funky faces. Most people do when they sing, but this kid’s faces seemed especially exaggerated, which is why I loved it so much.

You always read about playing with the facial features to stretch out one side of the face and squash another side. Or an ‘open’ side vs a ‘closed’ side. Whatever you want to call it, the principle is there. For example, I grabbed this image from a Calvin and Hobbes book I have.

Check out how all the parts of the face work in unison. Its like everything on the face is radiating out together. One side is squashed, one side is stretched.


But what I never grasped was that this actually happened in real life. I figured it was just a way to exaggerate a pose (hey - exaggeration is one of the 12 principles!). But this kid actually makes some faces that are more pushed than anything I have ever put into my animations. Maybe I’m just too conservative with my posing. Hopefully this will teach me to exaggerate much more.

Check out this pose:


Its really extreme. Practically the entire screen right side of his face is ‘closed’ and the screen left side is ‘open.’ All the parts of his face that are usually in horizontal lines are now radiated at angles opposing each other. Eyes, brows, bottom of nose, mouth. It’s like they’re all spokes coming from the center of a wheel (which is somewhere outside his face to screen right). .And then on top of that, the once-verticals are now convex curves from that point as well. The chin to the forehead, the line of the nose, all that stuff is curving in unison.


This squash and stretch, push and pull, curve and angle, all makes for a very expressive and exaggerated (and almost cartoony) face. And its LIVE ACTION!

I hope to get better at adding this sort of fun stuff into my animations.

P.S. another one of my favorite parts is around 25 seconds in, how his whole lower face squashes and stretches when he repeats “Let it snow let it snow let it snow”. (immediately before his breakout into the dancing, and after the wink mentioned above)
Watch his nose scrunch up, his lips stretch up and out for the ‘eh’ in “let” and go really high up, and his cheeks push up and out. Then on “snow” it reverses and the lips go down into the small ‘oh’ shape, the cheeks pull in, the jaw goes way down, the nose stretches back out… And then it happens over and over again really quickly as he repeats those words. cool stuff.

Welcome to part 3 of my workflow analysis for my March entry to the 11 second club. You can catch up here:

Part 1 - Thinking + Planning
Part 2 - PreProduction

Final Animation

Rough Layout
Layout movies were something I never understood. And when I asked why they were necessary, I would get answers like “it tells you what and when in the story.”
I couldn’t help but think, “Don’t the storyboards do the same thing?”
Yes and No.

I don’t know the real way of doing these things, or the real reasons, but I can share why I found it necessary to use a layout movie for the first time.

The main reason was that I had complicated camera moves. How do you time your camera moves if you haven’t animated the characters yet? Or how can you animate your characters without first knowing what the camera is doing? The former will result in a big waste of time because you could never make the camera track emptiness and get it to work out correctly once the characters are in the shots. The latter will result in a big waste of time because you would animate parts of your character that could be out of frame and the audience wouldn’t see. A rough layout movie will save time.

By placing basic ’stand-ins’ of the characters in their rough positions and playing their rough actions, you will have something for your camera to follow. By using these stand-ins as a guide you can get your camera behaving close to the way you want it to. And you get a better feel of how long the actions will take and where the cuts need to be.
The storyboards and the Rough Layout movies work in conjunction. Neither is really much to look at, but combined you can get a clear idea of the final product. The storyboards often give the proper expressions and poses, and the layout movies will show how the scene will play out in 3d space.

PLAY ROUGH LAYOUT MOVIE

Notice I spent as little time as possible on the way the characters are posed or the specifics of how they move. All I wanted to do was hint at the actions taking place, and how long I thought they should take. The speed the director walks up the stairs is very important because practically all of the camera movement is dependent on his movements. So I spent a bit of time trying to nail only the timing of him getting up on stage. Same goes for the ripping of the paper and storming off.
I’m sure you also noticed that these are not the final characters. The character modifications from part 2 were happening during everything going on here - another reason Layout movies are helpful. All you need is a stand-in character to get started.
When I finished cutting together the Rough Layout, I felt like it took an awfully long time to cut to shot 3, so I knew I needed to change that. Getting to shot 3 sooner meant that I would have to do more lipsync than I originally planned, so it’s a good thing I found this out sooner rather than later.
However, many of the comments from the 11 sec club voters stated the final movie still took too long to get to shot 3. I totally agree. It holds just a bit too long on his stunned reaction. So I should have moved the cut to happen even sooner than I did.

Camera
I love cinematography. Its a shame I’m not very good at it. But I’d like to share a couple of general guidelines I like.

Resist the temptation to do ‘cool’ CG camera moves. Just because the scene takes place in the computer and you CAN do all sorts of wacky moves, doesn’t mean that you SHOULD. Think of all the times you’ve seen in movies where the camera glides through a keyhole. or through a crack. or a gun barrel. There’s plenty to choose from. You know why those stand out in our minds? Because they immediately remove you from the world you’ve been drawn into. You get ripped out of the story and suddenly become aware of the camera move. You might even think to yourself, “wow, that was cool!” All that proves is that it was in your face enough for you to take notice of it. Anything that takes you out of the story, even for a moment, is a bad idea in my opinion.

The camera has weight. Along the same lines as the one above, the camera should feel like it exists in the world you’re portraying. It’s one of those things that you only notice if it’s wrong. In CG it’s very easy for the camera to feel too ‘floaty.’ I wish I had some examples of floaty cameras vs. weighty cameras. I promise I’ll keep an eye out and try to get some examples to post in the future.

Think about how a camera really moves. All too often we will look through the camera view we want to change and then click, tumble, pan, and track our way into the desired angle. This method has many problems. A major one is that when you ‘tumble’ in 3d space the camera will rotate around the point you clicked, or just from the center of the viewport. Cameras in real life never ever work that way. They rotate from the point at which they’re attached to something (someones shoulder, a dolly, a crane, etc) and also from the root of that object they’re attached to (the person’s waist, the dolly’s pivot, the crane’s arm, etc). None of these mean the camera can pivot from the object they’re focused on. It just simply feels wrong when you do it with the tumble method.

Have motivated camera moves/cuts. Don’t show the audience something for seemingly no reason. There needs to be motivation for what you show. Have the character look offscreen at something before you pan or cut to it. If the character starts walking, let them lead the camera. Or if the character is going to grab something, let them reach for it before you cut to it. Don’t just cut to it for no reason. It’s very jarring and feels out of place.
Hows this for an example: A car chase scene - the cuts are quick, the music is racing, the moves are fast, then cut to a little old lady about to cross the street. It comes out of nowhere! but you can sure as hell bet the car chase is going to go speeding right her by in a couple of seconds, maybe one of the drivers is even going to have to swerve out of control to avoid hitting her. Good directors/D.P.’s will find clever ways to make you aware of something important to the story without shoving it down your throat.

Try to keep these things in mind when you’re developing your animations and short films. It will really help sell the idea, keep the audience absorbed, and exercise your mind to make you a better filmmaker - all of which I am constantly striving for.

Part 4 will be about my actual animation process. Blocking, splined, workflow, thought process, thoughts on video reference, and more. Check back later to see!

And please let me know if you have any advice to further my learning!
-Jacob

So this is Part 2/4, focusing on my Pre-Production work for the 11second club March competition. You can catch part 1 here.
Or just to remind you what we’re talking about, you can check out the final product again.

Character:
This project consisted of two characters - the Director and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Guy (who I will call the Rocker). For both characters I used the Norman Rig. Norman is not a free rig, but if you don’t have access to him there are plenty of free rigs out there that are highly customizable as well. I would recommend the resource page of the 11 second club, or the Animation Buffet blog, that is meant to keep track of ALL the free rigs out there… man are there a lot!

The Rocker required a bit of extra customization.
Here are the sketches again for a rough idea of where I was headed:

So first things first - the makeup. I quickly painted some black makeup in photoshop according to the UV layout from Maya . If you remember from part 1, I wanted the top part of the mask to ride the brow line. This would really accentuate the brow shapes, and also allow for the ‘pointy’ parts of the makeup to be angled outward and downward (as opposed to up like KISS), giving him an overall sad and pathetic look.

When I was going to make a first attempt at applying this texture, it wouldn’t have done me much good to check it on only the defualt neutral face pose. I need to see how it deforms across the face when pushing and pulling his controls, because that’s the way the audience is going to see him. So I made a quick and dirty facial test, and then applied the rough texture to it:


I was super happy that I did this test, because I noticed something that needed to be fixed right away. When the character closes his eyes you loose all connection with him. The whole middle of his face becomes a giant black puddle with no geography markers. I checked out how Mr. Incredible’s mask was handled, and it seemed to me that either they never fully closed the eyes (leaving a little sliver of lighter color showing through), or a tiny rim of skin showed up on the lower lids when he blinked or shut his eyes. Either way, you never loose the geography in the face. So I went back in and added a sliver of skin tone on the lower lids (if I used white like the rest of the face it would blend into the whites of his eyes, and also feel pretty fake). Now when I reapply that to the face test, it becomes much more readable during the last pose:

On that test I had also refined and cleaned up the black brow lines and the lips to get a clearer readability. Admittedly, during the test animation I closed the lids too much (the geometry was crashing), and the slice of skin color ALMOST disappeared, but I took note of that for how much to close the lids for the actual animation.Now that I had gotten the face pretty close to what I wanted, I moved onto the hair. For modeling I roughed it out with a cube, then just started wildly pulling vertices everywhere. Then I parented it to the head and this is what I got:


Personally, I think the hair feels way too rigid. It basically feels like it’s just stiff geometry parented to the head (and it is). Every rotation the head makes, the hair follows perfectly. I wanted to change that, so I built a very quick rig to help break up the rigidity of the hair. I don’t want to turn this into a post specifically about rigging, but I do want to cover it briefly - so I’ll try to be quick.

Hair Rig: I made a new joint tree centered from the head, with joints outside on the left, right, and back of the head. I parent-constrained the root of that to the head joint. So far (if I bound the hair to this joint chain) I would get the exact same effect as before, but this is a means to a better end. Next, I added 3 separated ‘dangling’ chains at each outside joint, and only POINT CONSTRAINED them to their respective counterparts. This way only their translation, not their rotation, is defined by what the skull is doing, and they will stay ‘dangling.’ Also, their rotation channels are free in case I want to animate them for overlap on the hair. (side note: I would never animate rotation values on the joints themselves, its harder to break the rig - and much cleaner - if you make null groups that control those for you… but thats a whole different discussion). I made a quick diagram of this added hair rig to try to explain this better for those that are more visually oriented:

(I left out the chain for the hair on the back of the head for the sake of clarity)

After this was set up, I bound the hair geometry to the new joint chains and weight-painted accordingly. Now there is a slightly looser feeling to the hair in the facial test. It’s subtle, but its there. Pay special attention to the first head move, and you’ll see the hair doesn’t rigidly follow the skull anymore.


A different type of rigging setup was called for when it came to the guitar - getting it to follow the body, and the left hand to stay on the neck, while keeping all my channels open for layering animation on top of everything. But I won’t go into that. That’s enough rigging talk for now, right?


The Location:
According to my plan (storyboards can be seen in part 1), I need a couple of main things to make this scenario work. Mainly a stage and curtains, a staircase to the stage, a music stand and a sheet of music. I’m not really going to go into modeling talk. Mostly because I suck at modeling, but I am going to touch on a few things I think are important when it comes to set pieces in general.

Most Importantly, I only put in what was absolutely necessary. So why the drums? I felt it was needed to add some weight to the left side composition i n shot 1 (and right side weight in shot 3). Why the mic stand? Again, for another compositional purpose because without it the Music stand becomes too much of a focal point in shot 3. If it had tons of negative space surrounding it, it would stand out far too much, and you would be drawn to it.

But here’s the thing - I didn’t spend any unnecessary time with the set pieces. The music stand is simply a bunch of cubes, stretched, scaled, and rotated to make the general shape. The mic stand is just a cylinder with a half-flattened sphere at the base. The guitar and drum kit models I got from my friend Blake, and I actually spent a little bit of time REMOVING detail from them. Yes, removing detail. There were little nuts and bolts on the drum kit, all the tiny parts of the guitar, etc. If you let too much detail get on your set-pieces, you run a real risk of your shots becoming incredibly cluttered and your props will compete for the audience’s attention. Not good! (unless that’s your intention for the shot). So don’t waste all your time modeling useless details into your background set pieces.

Another thing I think really helps keep your set believable is asymmetry - even if it’s subtle. It’s very easy in the computer to keep things perfectly parallel and perpendicular. It just feels incredibly… well.. computer generated. Fake. Put things a little off-axis. Angle things a bit more or less than 90 degrees. Keep it interesting. Check out the Kitchen Floor in Ratatouille. It’s a tile floor, so it would be easy to make all the angles absolutely perfect. But none of them are. There are NO perfect squares (from what I saw). They are all slightly askew, tiny imperfections in the angles, small inconsistencies which make it feel less perfect and less computer generated.

I tried to incorporate that theory in my set. For example, lets take the stairs (staircases, like tile floors, can very easily be created too perfectly). None of the steps are parallel, nor the railings, and neither of those things are exactly perpendicular to the other.

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Well that’s pretty much it for my pre-production work. Part 3 will focus on Layout and Camera-work. I got lots of wonderful and supportive comments about the ‘documentary’ feel to the piece, and I’d love to share some concepts that helped me achieve the look.

-Jacob

So this is Part 1 of my planned 4 part-er on my recent submission to the 11 second club.

The final version can be seen here:

My March Submission


As I briefly explained before, these posts on my process are not meant to be a ‘how to’, but rather an explanation of my workflow on this particular piece in hopes that some people will be able to learn something from it - whether it’s because I did something horribly wrong or because I may have done something right. Either way, there’s probably something valuable that anyone could take away from hearing another’s process. Forgive me, I know its a lot of text. Next time there will be more to look at. Promise.

So lets get started:

On March 1st, the audio clip for the March competition was posted on the 11secondclub site. Since they take down their previous posts once that month’s competition is over, I have provided my own link to the audio here:

March_competition_audio.wav
(you might have to right-click and ’save link as’ if it won’t play streaming)

I downloaded it from the site and put it on loop for about an hour (which probably annoyed the hell out of my girlfriend, Christen). All I was doing was thinking. Sometimes I had my eyes closed envisioning different scenarios, different staging on the same scenarios, and sometimes I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking about, I was probably just spacing out.

Mostly, I was trying to really pay attention to the pauses in the dialogue, the breaths,and also the inflection of the voice. He clearly sounded very stressed, practically on the verge of tears during the first half, rather sensitive and frankly, kind of prissy and uptight. I wanted to do something unique, and something that could potentially stand out from the rest of the rest of the submissions. I just wanted to be proud of my work and know it was original and unique. Christen said something along the lines of, “everyone will probably do a stuck-up englishman, what if you had rock-n-roll guy decked out in full KISS makeup, hair, and outfit - it would be funny to see someone dressed like that crying” And there you have it - the birth of the idea.

To be honest, I was still fairly skeptical, and was on the fence about even going forward with creating a piece for submission. I had a character, but no story, and no context. Upon voting for the march competition I was impressed with several entries that simply had a guy sitting there and talking, without any sort of context, but with an incredible amount of emotion and excellent execution. They really pulled it off nicely. However, it’s something I’m not sure I would know how to do. I just feel like without a story I wouldn’t be attached enough to the project to really give it my all and bring it to life.. or know who my character is. For those that pulled it off wonderfully, I have respect for you, and I wish I had that talent!

But I was still trying to come up with that story and context. Sometime the next day, March 2, I came up with the idea of a reality show confessional…(Some sort of American_Idol/Real_World/everything else hybrid). See, most of the time on those shows they will show you the dramatic event, then start a voice-over of a person involved in the event, and then cut to a ‘confessional’ where the person is talking to the camera (or producer behind the camera) about what happened and how they feel about it. And usually they describe what happened after you just saw it take place. How perfect! He exactly describes what has happened to him, and then gives his response to it.

I now had my character and my rough idea, but I just needed to come up with my staging, cuts, and overall presentation. So I picked up a pen and a sketchbook and tried to figure this stuff out. Here are my sketches from March 2:

(I drew the closeup confessional one first, and in the middle of the page - hence the circled numbers describing the real order of the shots)

This was my method of working out what shots I needed/wanted. As you can see, not much changed between these ideas and the final product. It didn’t just come naturally, I had to really think hard and work all sorts of stuff out, but unfortunately its was all in my head and I don’t have anything to show you but these storyboards. Not very helpful, I know, so I’ll do my best to explain why I made the choices I did.

Why these shots?

Shot 1.) If he’s a contestant on some sort of American_Idol spin-off (American Rock God?) he’s going to be up on stage playing a song he wrote for the director’s approval (or judges or whatever, humor me). So it’s gotta start on a wide-shot showing most of the stage (both for an establishing shot and because it felt natural to show him with the entire stage in view while he’s auditioning to make him seem meek and less important). Once he starts playing the director would be disgusted with the music and start walking up on stage telling him to stop playing that filth! Once he enters the frame, the cameraman becomes alerted to his presence and zooms in on him to catch the action unfold.

Shot 2.) Having the director rip up the music from the wide shot wouldn’t be very effective, or dramatic. Plus, if I was going to do a wicked fast zoom at the tail end of the first shot, a cut right afterwards would keep the pacing up and the action flowing. So I cut to another moving camera, thats tracking with him as he finishes his walk to the music stand. I want him to grab the paper disgusted, and hold it at arms length like a dirty diaper. He rips it very dramatically and storms off. Here is where we need to see the Main Character’s reaction. In the flavor of most reality shows, I kept the hand-held feel and knew i wanted a kind of ‘whip-pan’ over to catch the immediate reaction of the man whose music was just violently torn by his superior. In order to contrast all these quick camera moves, quick pacing, and dramatic events, I wanted the character’s reaction to be practically ‘deer in headlights’ and motionless. Distressed, distraught, incredulous, and stunned. But motionless. This would help build a nice contrast amongst the fast pacing and really emphasize that moment.

Shot 3.) Usually during reality shows they will start a voice-over of the character we’re watching, and then cut to the ‘confessional’ for the finishing of their speech to the audience. So I knew I wanted an overlap in the dialogue, and then a cut to such a confessional. I didn’t want to use any sort of ‘back room’ or any sort of solitary room because I feared there would be an extreme disconnect across the cut. You would suddenly be confused and wonder when/where/why this shot is happening. So I thought that having the confessional backstage (or just off to the side of the stage) would solve that problem. It might feel like he was immediately asked for comment after he left the stage (to keep a solid timeline) and the familiar setting would serve to hold the piece together and keep the audience from wondering where he was.

A thought on staging: For the first two shots I consciously tried to keep the director on the left and the rocker on the right, and not to move the camera beyond the 180 line (never cut to a view from the back of the stage near the curtains outward toward the characters). Keeping the geography of the scene consistent will help to not confuse the audience. So why is the rocker on the left side of the screen in the last shot? A couple of reasons. First and foremost - I actually wanted to intentionally break the eye-fix across the cut (where your eye is looking. So the rocker is screen right facing left, and then after the cut hes screen left facing right). Usually this is something you do NOT want to do, but here’s my reasoning: I didn’t want the shots to feel like they were in succession. I didn’t want the cut to feel like it was another view on a continuing action - like the first cut is from shot 1 to shot 2. This way it might feel like they are two separate events:

• A) the ripping of the paper *shots 1 and 2*
• B) the backstage confessional *shot 3*

Character?
Next I started further defining my character. Maybe this is something I should have thought about more before I did the stuff mentioned above, but I didn’t.
Anyway, I looked up images of KISS, and realized all their makup was pretty wild. Crazier than I had in my head, anyway.

Two of the guys have pointy/flame-like graphics around their eyes. I wanted something simpler to get an easier read on the character. And I remembered that I liked the way the masks in The Incredibles worked - serving as a very harsh outline of the brows to increase their readability.

So I mocked up a sketch combining those two elements - the outlining of the brows, and the pointed star-quality of the real KISS makeup. Not only that, but the only pointy parts I have are angled downward, adding to the general look of sadness.

I also wanted the KISS hair, but not realistic hair by any means (what a pain in CG!). I remembered that KISS was on Family_Guy at least once, so I googled images of that to see if the show had a decent characterization of their wild, untamed hair.

Not too shabby, just lots of black pointy things coming off of a big black mass. I made a quick sketch of the eye makeup and hair I was going for:

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Alright, so that concludes Part 1/4. The next chapter will focus on Pre-Production. If anyone wants any clarification or elaboration on any of this stuff (or to tell me where I went wrong), feel free to shot me an email! I’d love to hear it!

Theres been a plethora of great animation information across the web in the last couple of months. Carlos Baena has been doing lots of amazing and super inspiring posts. Kevin Koch has been doing plenty of other great posts as well, which have sparked lots of conversation. Jean-Denis Haas has been doing some movie clip postings to discuss live action inspiration. All of these things are amazing reads. If you haven’t been to any of these sites, I suggest you scour through the previous posts. I’m sure you‘ll be pleasantly surprised.

Also, last week I was fortunate enough to be involved in a 3-day Animation Workshop led by James Baxter (and Jim Hull has recapped day 1 and day 2 on his blog). The inspiration, epiphanies, excitement, and enthusiasm that came from those 3 days is bigger than could possibly be put into words.

I wish I was smart enough, insightful enough, and talented enough to share all sorts wonderful knowledge that would give others the same types of epiphanies and enthusiasm. But at the same time, its great to learn from those who are all of those things, and be the eager student rather than the experienced teacher. Maybe one day, though, ill be that guy, and be filling plenty of eager new minds with animation gold!

This month I entered the 11 Second Club Competition. It’s the first time I’ve ever done it, and it was a lot of fun but also fairly stressful. I remember when the 10 second club was around, that was when i was first starting school, and I always thought it was such a cool concept. Then the 11 second club started up after the hiatus, and I swore one day i would actually enter. I’ve voted every month since it started back up, and I’m anxious to be a part of what people are voting on, rather than simply being on the outside.

Anyway, connecting those two previous thoughts - I hope that I can share my experiences with everyone - because thats all I have. I don’t have knowledge of “this is the way this works” so I can’t really be a teacher, but I can try to offer to everyone the way I approached the competition this month and hopefully other aspiring animators will find it useful for various reasons. So coming up shortly I will be going over my process for my entry into this months 11 second club. Please feel free to tell me where I went wrong, where I should have focused more energy, or maybe let me know of something that was actually successful

I’m looking forward to compiling everything I did and trying to organize into something coherent. I also had another exploratory explanation on how I do things in facial animation ready to post, and then one day WordPress just screwed up and lost ALL OF IT. Hopefully that won’t happen again - and this time I’m not going to write it in something more reliable and then just copy/paste into wordpress. Wish me luck!