Youtube it! part 1!

This will be the first post of my new series where I will be recommending short animations from Youtube.com and other places.

The Saga of Bjorn!

Bjorn, an old Viking, is determined to reach Valhalla, the warriors afterlife full of excessive drinking and debauchery. To gain entry he has to die a honourably in battle, but he discovers that the right death isn't so easy.

My comment:
This is by far my favourite animation in the last few years, and the most shocking is that it has been created by final year students at the animation school "The Animation Workshop".
The timing and visual style in this short is amazing, the laughs keeps on coming, even in the more serious parts of it.
The character design really fits everyone of the characters, from the big hulking old Viking to the slim and fast spearman/dragoon.
I only wish the design on the Dwarf was better, he kinda sticks out from the lot of them. But the looks fit the actions of it.
The animation is also really well done, and I do not think I have anything to criticize on it.

The presentation!

Our first task for this module was to create and present a presentation where we analyze a short animation clip of our choice.
I selected a clip from the amazing Disney animation Aladdin (1992), where Aladdin and Abu first meet the Magic Carpet in the Cave of Wonders.

The reason I picked this clip is because I abseloutly love the Magic Carpet character, even with so little to work with Randy Cartwright (wiki) gave this character lots of appeal.
Since the Magic Carpet has no voice it has to express emotion through its movements. Almost like using pantomime.

Here is the clip I used "Aladdin meets Carpet" , the original clip I used in the presentation has been removed due to copyright problems.

And here is my final presentation;

 
 Hope you enjoy reading this, and keep on checking in for further updates.
 

Welcome to Animation Practise 2

Hey, it has been a while since I posted something on this blog. We started Animation Practise 2 right after last module, I was however a little sick and burned out the first 2 weeks and the work has been going slow.

These are the tasks for this module:

- Analyse and presentation of a short animation clip.
- Lip-sync to a short sound clip.
- Lip-sync and acting to a "news anchor" sound clip.
- Singing and dancing animation to a music clip.

I will also write some post about some short animation I have found on internet.
Keep reading for good times.

See you later.

Almost death by piano! Final!

Yes! Here it is, the final submission for the first module.
But lets talk about the last few days of work before showing it.

On Friday everything went smooth and I got a lot of work done, I focused on most of the facial expressions and the hands, in addition to finishing up the run to walk cycle.

Saturday started out great, and I got to work on the stuff right after my character picks up the ball. However, when I rendered a preview and showed it to a friend of mine, we noticed that the steps where waaay to long and the animation was choppy.
I decided to delete all the animation I had done that day, and start over by fixing the storytelling poses in stepped keys. Everything was going great, but after 2 hours I noticed something strange with my rig.
Somehow the foot had been twisted and there was a gap between the foot controller and foot. I had no keys at all that made this happen, I carefully went trough the entire animation 1 frame at the time.
So when I couldn't find the reason behind it, I manually twisted it back and lowered the entire controller to make the animation normal again.

Phew, crisis averted I thought! Not at all, somehow the foot I had problems with would not go out of stepped animation. At that point I almost had a meltdown. I had been sitting at Uni for 10 hours animating and fixing, and I could not get rid of the last problem. I saved one more time and went home to get some sleep.

On Sunday I woke up fresh and ready to tackle the problems and finish the project. Even though I did not fix the problem, I got through it in the end. I sat for over 20 hours, only taking one break to get some food.

Wow, what an eventful weekend this was.
So here it is in all its glory!

Almost death by "piano" WIP 5

Today I continued to work on my breakdowns. It is going slow, but I am happy with the result.
Only a couple of days left before hand in, so I need to work faster! But faster often means less quality.

Here is the work so far:

Enjoy!

Almost death by "piano" WIP 4

Today I have been working on the run and walk of my character.
It is fun to do, but it takes a lot of time. i have never done a run before, and certainly not a run into a walk before either!
I am learning a lot, and I am trying to keep the animation clean and neat without to much stuff messing up.
Under you can see how far I have gotten, and you can probably see where I have not done anything yet.

See you later.

Almost death by "piano" WIP 3

Today I have been working on the bouncing ball, added the piano and fixed his fingers to match each pose.

Here you can see a picture of the piano and a small clip with the bouncing ball.

See you later.