Pushing CG Further - "Kirkev Park"

I think the animation industry is suffering from a "Safe Zone" epidemic. Companies are investing 100-200 million in CG films now and they are scared to take risks. And when or if they do, they are so scared they do not invest in marketing the film and they lose money and reassure themselves the safe-zone is the best-zone.

I was inspired by this Fauvist, Matisse Painting below and wondered what it would look like if we took it into the CG world. So I changed to composition and "Rendered" it to a place  I liked. In hindsight my representation could be pushed further in set design, shape language, and broadness of color.

Check out this Eyvind Earle (Top) and Maurice Nobel (Bot) illustrations from the 1960s, that would be super cool to see in CG vs the randomly generated realistic trees we are use too now.

Orianna Fan Art

Orianna Fan Art by me.

Jinx_Painting

 

Finally Got around to painting/finish painting this. It was inspired by Benjamin Zhang's artwork below. I am no where near as pushed as him, maybe next time I can land closer.

Value was definetly hard with these saturated and extreme colors, I viewed  it in black and white mode several times to try and push the value (helping me avoid getting distracted by colors/saturation). I tried using saturation levels to add darker tones, and I chose to keep a black line around the tip of the gun barrel to help show contrast (plus it made me feel like the gun was firing more). I did my best to avoid using black as it flattened the image; but used it to push the background back underneath her legs. Well I hope you like it, It was a good learning experience, I can't wait to share my figure artwork I have been doing. 

Smear Study

In preparation for a shot I am doing with a lot of smears, I went back to Chuck Jones' masterpiece "The Dover Boys" made in 1942. I chose what I always felt like was one of the funniest moments in the film and copied the animation onto a simple ball with a Latice deformer till the smears felt right.

Trying to get the whole body gesture into a simple ball was really fun, and somewhat more enjoyable than animating a whole body. I would like to elaborate on what I learned from this*, but first I would recommend finding another Chuck Jones short (or a different clip from this film) and trying the same exercise to learn these things first hand.

The first thing I noticed was the spacing in the graph editor was a lot tighter towards the apex and the trough than I had been previously doing. This may be why my animation feels floating or a kill some timing, because I'm making pretty curves no one will ever see.


Around frame140 you will notice a RIDICULOUSLY cartoony arc. I think this is what Eric Goldberg was touching base on in his book "Animation Crash Course" where animation is in the A to C to B. The ball could of gone anywhere on the screen, but the animator pushed such a harsh "U" shape in comparison to my soft " C "s. This lead to way more interesting spacing.

Speaking of Arcs you can see around frames 360 that the animator pushed a down arc towards the camera, and an up arc leaving the camera, adding more variety and flow to the shot.

Around frame 60 , I would of never tried doing that extreme spacing, but I feel it's working. Other things I caught were how still and how long the original animator would leave the character in his pose after the smear, to balance out the extreme motion that just happened so that way the audience had a time to enjoy it.

Finally the last thing I would like to make a note of us the spacing on the front end and the back end of each smear frame. Before I thought smears where formulaic (keep one edge exactly where it was, stretch the other edge out, stretch both sides, repeat but in reveres). However I felt the original animator was Thinking of each side as it's own ease-in or ease-out. Sometimes he/she would chose not to drag it behind and spend 3-4 frames cushioning in on the smear. Other times both sides would ease our, or only the back side. They all created different spacing which gave a different feeling.

Thanks for stopping by and happy animating!
*=Where edit/revision starts

Quick Gesture - 5m

Found this awesome website to practice figure drawing with (http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/) and took a quick break to do a gesture. I didn't time it well but it's  about 5-minute or less.

Jinx Fan Art - Line work

Since the ranked servers were down, I figured I'd get going on one of the League of Legends fan arts I've been wanting to do (master-yi is probably next after I paint this girl).

I love Jinx's viral campaign and all of her animations, she has a ton of personality which I haven't really seen since Draven.

Goals here were to push gesture in a forced perspective like in FLCL (I feel like I'm closer but haven't nailed it quite yet), make her look appealing and creepy, and try to show her personality.

Inspirational music for this piece;
The Cranberries - Zombie
Pixies - Where is My Mind?
Wombats - Girls/Fast Cars

September Figure Dump