Stuart Coutts

Some really great stop motion stuff from Stuart Coutts, check out his blog for the making and more!



The 11 second club 5th Place Entry
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Got Appeal?

Apparently I don't, well not in my animation.... physicality polish means nothing if an animated shot is lifeless and uncharacteristic and just down right boring to watch. Need to go learn some appeal. Any way, got 12th place for last months entry, mediocre but you guys have got to check out The Winning Entry by Abraham Aguilar, it's really really really one of the best 3d entries I've seen on 11 second club and it sure has appeal.

Very (x6 months) Late Submission.

Hi!

After putting the Dec2009 entry on the shelf for a few months and finishing it off recently, I thought I'd just throw this up and see if I can get some comments, crits and opinions from you guys. Was experimenting 2d with 3d as well as manual 2d camera panning. The 2d character tends to go off model, didn't pay enough attention to my model sheet. I did however add in some subtle SoundFX and slightly adjusted the original audio track though.

Might take a while to load, its about 13Mb.

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Will post the WIP breakdown soon.

Me

Well it's been a while I've updated anything personal on this blog, so how much more personal can one get by updating a photo of oneself.

The following photos were taken back in Dec'09 while working on my 11 sec December entry (which is yet to be completed). I was shooting my completed 2d frames at that time when I was suddenly zapped in the head and had this ridiculous idea of a 3rd person view self portrait. I was about to update it in Feb but came across the KL Photo awards which I thought I have a go at...... wished I'd spent the 80 bucks entry fee on buying DVD's instead.

Helpful Hints

A really really really good animation article by Eric Scheur & his friend actor/teacher Chris Murray;

Acting It Out

Enjoy!

Kyle Balda Critic

The other day during the Master Class I asked Kyle Balda if he could give some feed back on my animation for 11 Second Club Nov '09 entry, and being the nice guy he is ~ he said yes, so here it is for your learning pleasure :)






Hi Marcus,

Unfortunately this particular piece of dialog doesn't allow much in the way of subtext or changes. he says what he feels and there are not really any emotional changes. So in terms of acting, its hard to do anything REALLY interesting other then what is obvious. having said that,. the only suggestions I think I can offer on this piece is that the lip-sync feels just a little bit off. It might be a good experiment to make the audio play a frame or two later. I understand the filmic reason for cutting away to the other characters but sometimes when the principle character is NOT talking is the best opportunity for the acting.

I guess the main thing you could ask yourself with this piece or if you are moving forward on another is "what is it the character is NOT saying, but is feeling and thinking" And show THAT! It will be far more interesting. And I think for that you need context, a situation. I think your work is good, there is not much to say technically, just think of the "story" for the next one. and what is the un-obvious and complicated emotion or idea that you as the animator can simply communicate?

Hope that helps!

Kyle

Also check out his tutorial for 3D World;

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If you guys got anything else to critic just post it up in the comments, I'll be refining this entry.

Happy New Year 2010!

11 Second Club November 2009

PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

Woot 6th, again. Thanks for the votes and comments !



Initially was thinking of animating an alien in a cocoon, so I did some character exploration sketches, the bandaged dog with the cone of shame was inspired by my own dog which had an ear infection and had to wear that cone, the other reason was to limit the animation to just facial.



I ended up going for Pac Man because I had one week to play around and I wanted something simple to animate as well as practice more on facial animation especially the mouth area, so what better character than a round sphere with his jaw half his whole body mass.

Also wanted to experiment gesturing with a simple sphere, it's limited but you'd be amaze with just some squash, stretch, tilting and timing of the sphere, one can portray some simple body expression of deflated, disbelief sadness and directness, add it with a pair of eyes and a mouth and viola, you have facial gesturing.



Also experimented on full motion distortion and distorted eye darts, I thought it would go horribly wrong but it came out quite alright I guess, except for some places....... but that's for you guys to find out :)

Crits & Comments are most welcomed.

Enjoy!


Final Animation for now....
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Break Down!
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By the way the collaborated Pac Man skeleton sculpture is created by;

Le Gentil Garçon
François Escuilié (paleontologist)


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Some of the more constructive comments & critics by 11second club members;

Kashif:

"Haha Packman addicted to the cream. Wow. Great concept and wonderful lipsync. I love the weight shifts on Packman. In fact, after noticing this I wished you made the Ghosts shift their weight when they looked at each other. Either way, tops in my book."

Ryan Hayford:

"The expression in this is excellent, and the reveal is great. I thought this was gonna be a talking head facial animation excersice and then the ghosts jumped in... maybe you could have given more backround, like more dots or part of the maze so we know right away it's pac-man."

Justin West:

"Wow, that's some really impressive 2D! Very bouncy and expressive! The only thing that didn't look quite right to me was the sobbing at the beginning. I'm not sure what it is. Maybe there's movement in the mouth, I don't know. Sorry I can't be more specific. Great work, otherwise! I won't be surprised if this wins. The ghosts are a great touch, btw!"

Robert Holmen:

"No cliched arm gestures in this one! extra star for that.

This is a great study in just "face"

Some of the gestures seem not to be timed quite right, like the last one for "whipped cream"

Jett Atwood:

"Finally! Something original! Great idea, well drawn. My only suggestion would be to layer the ghosts blinks a little bit. It's jarring to have them blink at the *exact same time.*

Great stuff and shows that good character animation can be done with something as simple as a sphere."

Emmanuel Vergne:

"The lipsync seems off."

*Note; I'm not 100% sure if the name links are linked to the right people, if it isn't please let me know immediately, thanks!

Thanks again for all the C&C you guys gave, I've read them all and just posted these selected few for readers and me who want to learn more on what works and what not.

Till the next round, December's clip sounds WILD!

6th Place, Thank You!!!!!

Woot! I was not expecting to get anywhere near top 10 with this entry, but thank you all for your votes critics and comments for 6th place!


Thumbs and sketches

Last months entry took me about a month to complete, I haven't done a proper 2d for so long that it took me a while to get use to the x sheet and all. And true to what I found out is that the x sheet really helped out in the timing and the lip sync as well as reduce that overwhelming feeling of endlessly drawing frames, the more you draw the less empty frames left to draw which you could visually count on the x sheet :)

Most importantly what I learned is that the amount of exaggeration you could pull off in an animation, well in 2d I felt that I wasn't restrained to rigs which felt liberating and just draw out where and how you want the character to move. And the more exaggerated I made the animation the more lively and fleshy it became. When I started off for the first half of the process most of my posses were very very stiff to the point of limited animation and animating just the head, during the second half of the process I decided to just go all out and apply more SQST all round and really squash that face and then stretch it in a way that it's grotesque and imagining it to fail miserably...... that part of the animation came out to be the best stuff of the whole clip.



The thing that made it so fun to watch was not because you could see the really squashed and stretched face but the overall feeling of it being really elastic and fleshy in sequence because of the exaggerated posses or shapes of a character. After all, those frames passed by 1/25th of a second each. It felt really squishy and pliable giving it more realism in a way to the character that her face was a real fleshy face.

Could have worked better with the overlapping of hair and cloth as well as volume and on model control, if you go frame by frame you can see the chin grow bigger and then smaller when she stands back up. Could have explored more with facial expressions as well. The second bang SFX in the clip was added in after and not from the original audio clip. I just felt like animating her slam her fist on the book and didn't really cared if there wasn't any audio for it.

Final Animation
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Work Progression
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It was a fun month to animate, killed 2 blue pencils though.

2D

Last month I decided to take out my really old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old old ...... old .... stack of punched B4 animation paper and have a go at it, was wondering if I still knew how to do 2d after working on 3d for so long. The other reason was that I was too lazy to mod Norman into an old hag for Septembers 11 sec competition and thought ~ "Hey, here is a great opportunity to see how badly I'll fail in 2d" :)



~Mee make shift light table, got a back ache after a few days of hunching over it....

Anyway it took awhile to work out the work flow and how to tie it to the x~sheet and a while longer before I got used to drawing . Used Premier to get the audio timing using frame count instead of the usual time counter, jotted down the audio on to the X~sheet and worked on the Roughs.

Took a month to work things out, a wee bit too long but it was sure fun and for some reason relaxing inbetweening those drawings though really tedious.... but relaxing. Also found out that you could really get away with very exaggerated posses Squash and stretch, crazy distortion poses which I would never/couldn't have done in 3d, I should look into that and see how far I can push Norman before he breaks.... sounds sadistic.



~What a 150pcs stack of B4 paper look like :)

Anyway will go through the whole 2D Shabang in a few days time once the 11 sec results are out. Finally my hard~earned~manually~punched~half price~stack of B4 Animation paper put to good use. Still 2 boxes to go......

11 Second Club August 2009

Great works this month and BJ Crawford won first place again with his amazing 2d work, check it out.

My work stands at 28th, average. And watching it now it just feels so dead, I need to find ways to inject it with some life...

11 Second Club June 2009

I just wanted to get my hands back into 2D and break away from 3D for a while. It was refreshing and interesting. Firstly, I'll admit that it's horrible, it's off model, lack of frames, generic posses etc.... but it was sure fun and a hell lot of work :)

Oh got 34th/137 position with an average vote of 5.38. June's competition has a lot of great 2D entries, check out the excellent 2D animation winner ~ BJ Crawford.

The only thing I think is the best part of the whole animation is the sleeve drapery, even then it's lacking on frames, on 3's mostly :) Lip Sync is out of the window so is the lack of expression and jaw. Because I was just going to do it without thinking too much, I didn't bother with an X~Sheet and just churned the whole thing out. Now I know why the X~Sheet is like sooooo important for 2D, without it it's just so hard to plan the amount of frames for motion and lip sync, you're like groping for the timing and just guessing where the mouth shapes should be placed. With an X~Sheet it would feel less work too I guess, there are just so many frames you have to draw locked off and its all planned out in the sheet compared to straight ahead the whole thing and wondering if you will ever get it done, it's like a never ending flow of empty frames.

Anyway enjoy my crappy 2D :)

The Votes Are In!

Just barely reaching 10th place with a rating of 6.59, guess have to try harder. After not watching it for the past 2 weeks and seeing it again with a fresh eye, I could see all the mistakes and wish I held some poses longer here and there to give it a bit more snappiness and added some subtle gestures etc. Currently it flows too linear from one pose to another which is one of my weak points in animation.

Well what's done is done, move on to the next one and try not to repeat the same mistakes....... like being hypnotized by the previews and believing that its the best work eva! ... because its never, there's always something to improve on.

Below are some of the more interesting critiques to consider, the Break Downs and Final.

Daniel P. Lane:

Great subtleties! Nice, clean motion. Very, clear staging and silhouette. Feels like he might be missing an antic before "and better still" I like how he interacts with the prop and the hand gestures. It might be cool if he does a little extra somewhere maybe thumbing the plane back and forth while he looks at it and thinks. Also, maybe at "well it's..." he could to a little side-to-side head shake as he finds the words to describe the experience. Over all I think you're matching the energy of the scene and character very well. Good job :)

~(Did do subtle thumbing in the beginning, guess not clear enough)~

Sam Caudill:

Very good! My only critique (and this is really nit-picky) would be to make the left hand arc for "see 'em fly" snap on fly instead of flowing into it.

M. Strohbehn:

Well done. His expressions appear genuine. From 80-120 it gets a little busy with hand motions. Love the juke box in the background and the setting.

~(I was afraid that was the problem, tried to hide it and some one caught it, proves that you can't get away if something just isn't working right)~

Richard Vaudrin:

Nice! I like the psychology of the character, great poses all the way through.

~(This would be the deepest critique I've gotten, thanks!)~

And to the rest who commented thanks for the feedback.

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Break Down
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Final Animation
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Funny that nobody commented on the Eye Dart at frame 167. Initially there wasn't any but I decided to add that in just to add some small antic/details to break that monotonous head turn from looking at the plane all the time to the bar tender with the Front Profile, it also gave off a bit more mystery to the character like to question if he was really sincere or not.... maybe that's what Richard Vaudrin's comment was about.

Way Behind.

Lots of excuses and procrastination, besides that had to send dog to vet a few times the past week as well as make a round trip down to JB and back on the same day.

Anyhow, I've still got 50% of animation to be done for 11sec May competition in the next 10 days, another scene of Reservoir Dogs to study by this week and my monthly animation practice to be done, not to mention reading up more and doing more figure studies. Looks like I have to study overtime the next week.

Just some rough sketches and thumbs for 11Sec May :




Will be posting work progress at the end of the month.

House is still in one piece, changed a living room light bulb if anyone's interested.