Loop my life,

This was an interesting and enjoyable experiment, the aim was to create an animated piece where looping was the key word of the concept. It was particularly interesting to try to communicate something, within a linear structure, making use of repetitive actions that aren't expected to do anything extraordinary but creating a pattern by replying the same action or movement or sequence over and over again.

I can get why loops are so important in limited animation or in things that involves industrialized mechanical process, but I use to think that loops were just and easy way out, like reusing frames to extent the length of a shot for example. So I did a bit of research and found heaps of great animations using loops, after watch some of them I tried to play them back again closing my eyes where I knew a loop was coming and surprisingly they didn't make to much sense.

So for this work i explored the use of loops, to create short pieces of animation that rather than just be a repetitive action they are a linking pieces that create a whole, and instead of having a short life within a story's timeline they can be use to conform a larger piece of animation that dictates the time and length of the whole piece.

I mentally associate the word LOOP with similar things like repetition, monotony and routine, so I decided to work with that concept in mind and make it about the daily routine. A series of individual, seemingly unrelated, set of actions that occur on a daily basis to create a unified answer to the question "what did you do today?". Just because if we isolate each individual action of each single day, like "brushing my teeth", and we place it one after the other, essentially what we get is a LOOP.

Now, technically there isn't much to say really, is a 2D animation drawn frame by frame like traditional animation but using digital paper and a wacom tablet. Each loop was animated in a separated layer so it was easy to compose them.

Because I was using perspective and characters moving around (increasing and decreasing size to fake that perspective) I did a bit o planing of how the character were going to move and in which direction so they do not "intersect" each other, and to avoid incongruent things like a small character (further from the camera) moves over a big character (closer to the camera) because it would brake the whole illusion.

I had a couple of lectures this week about light, how to use it in benefit of the image and how powerful it is to establish mood and even style.

I have been always particularly interested in light because it is basically everything that we see and if I get to understand even just 1% of how it works I think as visual artist I can produce works with a higher impact just by manipulating light (and colour).

I did this exercise to put in to practice some concepts like rim light, key light, bounce light, etc.

(the 3D sculpture is something that I did a few days ago).

The concept for this short animation was idea of transformation. With this work I had the freedom to explore animation methods that usually I wouldn’t consider to use just because I like to have control, I am talking about animation generated by procedural algorithms or randomly generated pattern that somehow are appealing. To be honest I am not familiar with the programming language and i found it terrible boring, however I must say that I think what code can do is amazing, is just that it really don’t have the patience to try to understand it.

Having say that I found out that there are actually a couple of expressions that I am familiar with that can be tweaked to generate really cool stuffs, so here is what I did:

First i wanted to go from micro to macro in the transformation (I probably went too far and to obvious by choosing a microscope POV but the idea is there) and although abstract I was hoping to illustrate the idea of a “music particle” being introduced into a living organism resulting in an orchestrated visual dance stimulated purely by music that with the end of sound the image will die as well.

It is all motion graphics animated in after effects and the technique that I used for this animation is fairly simple, I just created Photoshop composition with layers containing all the objects that I wanted to be animated, for example the cell.

And the interface. (One object to be moved per layer)

Then I made a song that also transforms (or progress) over time to reinforce the feeling of transformation. Then, using after effects I isolated the bass from the high-pitched sounds with an inbuilt plug-in.

Then I started to work with the particle system and here is where it got interestingly randomised (sort of). Using a simple expression I told one of the sounds to drive the emitter of the particles around the canvas (that’s how I got the overall movement), then I created two types of particles groups one that basically lives longer than the other one, I played with some other properties but essentially that is the main difference, when I got a nice offset between those two groups I attached one to the bass of song and the other one to the high-pitched sounds. After that I just had to tweak a little bit some values here and there but I already have a good looking animation with particles and everything responding just to the wave of a song.

The rest was purely aesthetic decisions like colour and background textures, etc.

The interface was animated manually to an extend but again, the procedural animation that I have already produced, serve me as a guide so I just needed to parent things, play with the opacity and that is pretty much it.

Here is the link to the video: http://www.pablander.com/website/video.html

Unity!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT A GREAT SOFTWARE!!! I'm really exited about this program. I started to play around with it a week ago and is amazing. I must say I'm not really into video games (the last console I had was the first play station), and Unity seams to be specialize for game development. However the level of interactivity, rendering in real time, the flexibility and integration with other softwares makes it a great tool for a wide range of projects.

To get familiar with the software in general I build a simple 3D game which essentially is just a 3D moving spherical maze where you start outside the sphere and the goal is to get to a small cylindrical capsule in the center. And based on the reward system, you will get teleported!!!... To the beginning so you can do it again! And again and again....

I basically built everything in Maya, that is all the geometry, then I did a uv making per layer (cylindrical platforms) in wings3D and texture them in Photoshop then I imported everything in Unity3D and made it interactive.

Once again I'm not really familiar with any type of programing or scripting language but I needed at least two scripts to make this game work as I wanted, fortunately the Unity community is huge and very helpful, so after literally 5 minutes of research I found the way to script a couple of things (like rotating things for ever and trigger things, for sound and teleport) and then it was working.

The truth is that not everything was as easy as I described it, I made a lot of mistakes but thanks to them I think I learned some valuable tips for newbies like me. So here is a list "tips" or how I fixed some problems, there should be an easy way but in the meantime these worked for me:

1. Object inverted normals

I was working with Maya so when I imported my objects some of the looked inverted, my first response was to inverse the normals in Maya and re import it, but if the object is a compination of objects or a group it won't work so I and to separate the object and do that process individually, combine them again and re export it. But then I saw a helpful dropdown menu on the inspector of the object next to tangen normals, which is set to "ignore" by default so I changed to "calculate" and it worked as soon as I hit the apply.

2. Falling through objects

Sometimes my character (FPS) fell through the geometry even if the objects were colliders, apparently is because a lack of vertices or edges, because i was trying to keep every object in the lower polygons count possible when I imported for example the platform, the character fell as soon as I hit play, so i had to subdivide a bit more the platform, and then  it worked, probably because the less vertices on a plane the less point the software has to calculate a surface.... Maybe.

3. Double sided objects

I wanted to make a big sphere containing everything to simulate the outer space but I couldn't actually see inside many object so because I wasn't really Ginger to see it from the outside I just inverted the normals of the big sphere to get the desire effect an it worked.

4. Personalized imput

By default the FPS character moves with the arrows of the keyboard and jump with the space bar, I wanted the character to jump with the left mouse button, I thought at the beginning that I had to script something, but looking on the unity website I found out that is actually pretty easy to change the input of the game. There is an input manager (edit > project settings > input) where basically you can change all the input and the way you control the game and characters In it, so I selected the "jump" section and change the "positive button" to "mouse 0" which means left mouse button, and the it worked as I wanted.

I will be posting the game here as soon as i learn how to do it 

So with this short animation practice where I wanted to show a simple shift in emotions.

I started to design the character based on Don Quixote from the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, that way the character could have a story and i wouldn’t have to worried to introduced the character or his objectives or what he wants and what are his flaws etc. Because anyone familiar with the novel could (hopefully) identify the character and relate it with the story, therefore it would make sense that he is proudly attacking a windmill with a spear, getting surprise when nothing happens, and frustrated when he realizes that is actually a windmill made out of concrete and not a giant with long arms.

Even though creating stories is not really necessary and perhaps irrelevant for a simple acting exercise, I feel that knowing the character, his intentions and how he sees the world (his world) is incredibly helpful to the process from the design to the actual animation. Knowing your character will help you to create believable actions and reactions (physical and emotional).

I started the process by reading again one of my favourites chapters form the Quixote (thirteen) to get the feeling, then I sketch out some shapes and ideas trying to capture the insanity of the characters, his age, etc.

Then i started to model the character using Wings3D, i tried to keep it simple and in a low poly count for animation purposes.

With the model ready, I imported in Zbrush to texture it and work a little bit further on the proportions and general shape.

Then I imported it to Maya and I rigged it, I didn’t pay too much attention to the overall facial rig because it wasn’t the main focus of what I was intending to animate.

Once the character was rigged, I modelled the windmill which is very basic made out of cylinders and planes. Then I created the scenario moving up and down some vertices from a big plane to create the hills.

The animation process was the fun part, I started by blocking the extreme poses and then after a lot of playblasts I managed to get the timing that I want, with the timing locked i started to animate the character by layer beginning with the hips, the legs, the spine, head, arms and face (most of the time in that order) i used a dummy for the animation with one plane blue colour to avoid any distraction from the real smoothed model.

This is a screenshot of the final video for this exercise. I know! Where is the colour and texture??? Well I wasn’t really happy with it and I think that the black and white works better for this and make the character stick out the shot; also the strong shadow helps to define it I guess.

the test is here: http://www.pablander.com/website/video.html 

200 drawings / 1 sheet of paper

Ok, so the idea was to make 200 drawings about something without too much planning, just to jump in to the action. I wanted to do something around the idea that there are many things involved in the creative process and that even behind the simplest idea there is a huge collection of images, filled with all the things that we have seen and/or experienced, bombarding our heads. I think that in one way or another, these images influence the output of our thoughts therefore, the first idea, sketch or drawing might be full of clichés and unintentionally subjective to many stereotypes. In other words, I believe that the process of creating something, charged with our own essence, requires trial and error.

The experiment

The animation

 

 

Animation under the camera.

In this collaborative exercise we played with silhouettes or “cut outs” to explore some of the animation principles and I really enjoyed the process, because I had no idea of where I was going. I like the sense of freedom that the “straight ahead” or “straight forward” animation techniques give you but when you actually sit down to animate, you see the need of having a clear understanding of timing and the relation of the space and the forms.

My puppet (the waterbird)