Character Animation Projects - Lip Sync

Fred rig downloaded from animationbuffet.blogspot.com.

This was my final project for Character Animation. I am rather proud of this one, I think the character rig I choose is very befitting of Nathan Lane's voice. The audio clip I choose to animated is from one of my favorite movies Birdcage! However, I would like to make one grievance, only myself and two others in the class the day we presented audio clips we'd like to use, knew the movie Birdcage. SO DISAPPOINTING!!!! These young kids...tisk, tisk!

I first shot a reference video of my self acting out the scene. I am no actor, my acting is embarrassing, but the world can feel free to have a good laugh at my expense and watch my reference video below. (My dog Oskar got in the way a couple of times, he wanted to be apart of the process!)

  

Using my reference I extenuated some of my acting bits that were much too stiff to give the character, well, a little more character. I set key poses for the body mechanics and then moved on to secondary poses, and splining. Once the body felt like it was a pretty solid animation, I moved on to set the facial expressions. The character mostly is angry but he has a few small moments he needed to be shocked or sad. With the expression on the face in the proper place it was finally time to move the mouth to sync to the audio. This is a pretty hard process, plus you have to make some pretty embarrassing faces while looking into a mirror to analyze what shape your mouth makes for certain sounds. For instance, when someone says the word "that" they may not even realize that their tongue is sticking out between their teeth to make the "th" sound. It was a tricky process, but I think I was pretty successful at my first attempt at a lip sync. 

Character Animation Projects - Pose to Pose

This was my first project in Character Animation this semester. We were to animate a character do a step and a jump across a few objects. I shot reference to get a better view of what the body mechanics should look like. The process for animating this was first to set Key Poses, these poses established when the character made contact with the ground or was up in the air. Key poses are the poses that make the movement the most convincing. Once those poses were set I did a second pass which is referred to as Secondary Poses, these poses are what establish a smoother movement in the animation. The next set was a Splinning pass, this is more refinement of the animation with in the graph editor of Maya. A final pass of Polish to make sure all of the curves in the graph editor were creating the proper time within the animation.

The Feeder - Animation Pass

This is a very rough sketch of the entire animation, no worries about color, that will all change. I will have to go back through all of these frames and do the final drawings and color. Some of the timing will be increase when the animation is put together in AfterEffects.

We are making headway!!!

The Feeder (update)

Things are starting to happen....

The Feeder

This Semester in Advanced Raster we were assigned to create a project for the Adobe Challenge. There were many categories to choose from, Laura Osteen, my partner on this project choose to create an animation. We will utilize each of our skill sets to the fullest to complete this piece. I will be focused on the animation of the main characters using Adobe Photoshop and Flash. Laura will be modeling a 3D background in Maya that we will later put into Adobe AfterEffects to compile all of our elements together to tell our story. 'The Feeder' is a cute story about a dog that befriends a group of friendly birds at a bird feeder.

The Animation above is the rough storyboard for this animation that we will be using at a guide to create our final animation.

Lucky 7's - A Stop-Motion Animation

Lucky 7's from Julie_Woodburn on Vimeo.

It's finally done!!!! This was certainly a struggle project. I dived in enthusiastically and left battered and bruised. I had many issues with my lighting sources. I struggled to set them up to give the green background even light as to remove it later. Many shadows were cast which created an inconsistent color, problematic for keying out in post. My problems didn't stop at shadows, heat from the lights caused the Plasticine to melt, making it very difficult to animate the characters in the scene. (Side bar; the lights also melted the blinds in my apartment and that's no good!)

Once finished with animating all of the clay parts the post production became arduous. I created a few additional effects to tell the story. Morty, the male character, after suffering a heart attack is enveloped in coins over his dead body. It was a meticulous process to image by image animate coins to cover him. I edited over a hundred images to add the coins into the scene. This was done using Photoshop. All of the images, I then imported into Adobe Aftereffects and cut together and keyed out the green backdrop to create a white backdrop. 

I found sound effects using some free royalty free services, www.freesound.org and www.bensound.com. Using my final sequence from Aftereffects, I imported it into Adobe Premier to add the sound and music.

Finally, done.

I learned a lot. I tested my patience, A LOT! In the end, I think it was worth it and although the look of the animation isn't up to my expectation, it still looks pretty darn good for having never attempted this type of animation before. I would be remiss to not thank the professors at ETSU who helped guide me to create this, so, THANK YOU, Jonathan Hounshell and James, Livingston. Also, I received helpful advice from my fellow classmates of the New Media Foundations Class, Karahann Kiser and Laura Osteen. This was an interesting project to tackle but quite rewarding in the end.

Just don't ask me to do a stop-motion for like, another 5 years or so.

Drawing Final

This is my final for my Graduate Drawing course with Professor Andrew Ross. I decided to get a little political and after some recent comments made by the Trumpster, it couldn't be any more relevant. I won't get a soap box, but it's absolutely distasteful and disgraceful many of the things Donald Trump has been saying. Jesus would most certainly be saying "DaFaq?" to all of this hullabaloo. 

Fundamentals of Animation Final Project 2015

I am done using Ben Bot. He's a good little rig and this final project for Fundamentals of Animation turned out rather well. We were assigned to pick two action from a long list provided by Professor Greg Marlow, I kind of picked three. With those actions we were to make Ben Bot traverse an obstacle course. My actions were jump across objects, jump down from an object, and jump through a ring. The course may resemble a course to those familiar with the TV show Wipeout. I think that got canceled, I wish I could have been a contestant it was an awesome show. 

Ben Bot Animation Project

For my Animation Fundamentals class we were assigned to animate the character Ben Bot to travel under an object. I choose to challenge myself and rather then have the character simply step under an object, I decide to have it crawl. This was very challenging to do, I had quite a few technical problems but was able to relatively get what I wanted.

Drawing Class

This series of images uses a character from a previous image and depicts their mundane life and how they amplify it via social media.

The Segway In The Park

The Tinder Date

Watching The Big Game

Drawing Class

This series of images uses a character from a previous image and depicts their mundane life and how they amplify it via social media.

Shopping With Mom

Beach Bod

The Soccer Match

Drawing Class

This round of drawings for my graduate level drawing class revolves around the topic of narcissism, more specifically narcissism in the advent of the mobile phone. 

Death via Smart Phone

Like Mother, Like Daughter

The Last Selfie

Drawing Class

This semester I have been taking a drawing class with Professor Andrew Ross. He has been pushing me to make a greater statement with my work in regard to concept. Keep it funny, but challenge the viewer to think about the topic.

Below are a few beginning of semester works. A fat squirrel eating Pal's Fast Food and a Hungary Hungary Polar Bear. Clearly the squirrel is in America....  

Expectation Verse Reality for Slots a Stop-Motion Animation

Boo! This is hard! I was hoping this would look and feel like what's in my head but unfortunately and admittedly, I am a little in over my head. 

The lighting in my room I can't seem to get just right, so there are always shadows in my images. I can't seem to remove all of the green screen just right. The color of the objects doesn't look right. My rigs keep falling apart. 

Oh well, it's disappointing but I am on the journey to learn this stuff. Work in progress....

Slots - A Stop Motion Animation Production

What am I getting myself into? Stop Motion Animation.

Meticulous? Yes.

Time consuming? Of course!

Going to look awesome when it's done? You bet you ass it's going to look awesome...I hope.

I admire animation in any form it's presented, one way of animating in particular has always captured my attention and that's Stop Motion Animation! As I was gathering all my supplies for this venture I kept having to explain to people at Lowe's, Home Depot, and Michael's what the heck Stop Motion was. They still looked completely confused until I listed all the movies using this method. "You know you've seen em', The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit, Box Trolls, and...Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer!!! for Pete sake you see that every Christmas. It's all Stop Motion Animation!"

Picture by picture, moving the characters slowly across the stage, what seems like magic when you see it all done on screen is a boat load of work!!!

So it is time to hunker down, lock myself in my apartment and go absolutely bonkers playing with these clay puppets I created.

The story, I think I will title "Slots", the plot goes like this, two old folk sit down at the slot machines both feeling lucky. One wins a little here and there and is happy with her winnings, while the other has no luck and goes down to his last coin. He pushes his last coin in, the reel spins and spins as if to never stop and reveal the result. Cherry, cherry, click, click, click, ever so slowing coming to a stop and BOOM, three cherries, JACKPOT! lights, noise, the old man grips his chest and collapses as the his winnings are spitting out of the machine covering his incapacitated body on the ground. The old lady is clam and looks over the pile of coins, she slowly reaches over and grabs one from the top, places it in her machine and continues to play....She really has a gambling problem. Any who, that's how I plan for it to go.

I've gotten quite a bit done already. So below is an on-slot of photos I have to share. Also, a small note, I've named them; Blanche and Morty.

Sketches....

Building their base structure/rig/armature.... 

Next, flesh i.e. Plasticine...

I gave each character an additional head so I can have a different emotion on their face.

Time to animate!

Pendulum in Space!

Another round of practice in Maya, this time our professor set up a pendulum for us to animate. We were to work on how the pendulum would move and carry it's weight as it swings. The door was kind of left open as to how you wished to animate your pendulum, so I decided to send it off to space! 

I wanted it to be animated as though there was no gravity as it would be were it actually in space, so I used the platform as the driving vehicle and the ball was more likely to be dragging behind and reacting to the platforms movement. Look out for the asteroids...

Bouncing Balls

Another exercise from my Fundamentals of Animation course. This exercise was to practice in the graph editor in Maya's software. Each ball was to represent a different weight of a ball. In my clip I went with a lacrosse ball and a soccer ball. Plus, for bonus points I added in a see-saw. One effect used on these balls is squash and stretch, this is one of the 12 principles of animation. When the ball hits the ground or another object, the force of it's impact will make the ball look as though it gets squished, when animated this way the bounces look more believable.

Fundamentals of Animation

Putt Putt, this was an exercise for my Fundamentals of Animation coarse. This is one of my first attempts at working in Maya. Our professor set up most of the parts and we were assigned place obstacles on the course and believably animate the ball.

12 Principles of Animation

Assignment #1 for my Animation Fundamentals course was to create a 2D animation featuring at least two of the 12 Principles of Animation. I choose to create my animation using Flash and draw my animation straight ahead. The principles I choose to demonstrate were arcs and solid drawing (character).

Firstly, I drew a character I felt I could animate. I had a person fly fishing in mind.

Another thought I had was for the fisherman to catch something, but there's a twist. Just watch...

Fly Fishing from Julie_Woodburn on Vimeo.

Resurrection of the Blog!

Life is full of distractions and I for one have had far too many distractions to even count. Thus the reason I have not posted to this site in three years. That must change, not only because it is a requirement to my current program of study for grad school but because I feel regularly posting current work will help in the way of regaining my focus and trajectory of my career.

This past week was my first week of school at ETSU where I am pursuing a graduate degree in New Media Studio M.A. There I hope to learn and become competent in 3D animation software and a broader under standing of New Media as an art form. It is a two year degree, which means a lot of work in a very short period of time. I hope and believe I am up to the task.

In the meantime check out a 2D animation I did in preparation for this new venture. It is titled S.U.P. Duck. A paddle boarder and a duck meet; calamity ensues. More work to follow!

"The road to success is always under construction."