SOUND LOCK!! (Animatic v17)

Sound is LOCKED and it feels so good!

 

Now, I have a confession to make — I broke the rules of Picture Lock. In the past week, I took the edit of my film and revamped it pretty heavily (aka I shortened a lot of the shots) and the whole film is now 30 seconds shorter!!! And on top of that, the sounds are all different! I know, right?

 

With such radical changes made to my film in such a last-minute time period, you HAVE to check out my ~latest animatic~~~~

 

Woo!

 

Also, the music track is finalized and in the edit as well, and if I don’t say so myself — it’s a fabulous piece of work! Created by DJ Irias, I couldn’t be happier with the end-result.

 

Anyway, right now I’m focused on finishing all the animation of my film — I’m devoting tonight to getting all the 2D animation clean and ready, and after that, all I’ll have left is a bit of lighting, and a handful of little animation-bits I need to fix up before my final Thesis Review arrives on May 8th. AAaghh!! It’s all so soon! But I think I’m on schedule…

 

Anyway, yeap!

 

And as always, there is MORE TO COME! (but not that much more… we’re almost at the end!!)

Ways To Keep Yourself Going

So this isn’t gonna be a post about animation, or techniques, and it won’t have any fancy images in it, but rather it’s just a list of things I do in order to keep my motivation up when it comes to working on my thesis film. It’s a Friday afternoon right now as I type this, and I suddenly found myself thinking out loud, “Wow, I don’t feel like working today! On anything! At all!”

But I need to press on, because I plan on putting together my 15th animatic by the end of today, and I’m also almost done animating the 3D assets for Picture Lock!! (I’m working on the last scene, woohoo!)

So I figured I would procrastinate a little more by making a post about how I keep myself from procrastinating. Ironic? Yea probably.

1. Play music: I find that this works but it needs to be done right. And by that I mean you need to set up a whole playlist, or take an entire ALBUM of songs and put them into your music player. Just putting in one song won’t work, because then that’ll end in 3-5 minutes, and suddenly your attention span disappears without the flow of tunes, and you’ll lose motivation all over again.
2. DJ Playlists: You can especially find good ones on Youtube. Here’s one for example: Mixes are great though because they provide over an hour of constant, bumpin’ beats to keep you focused on your art!
   
3. If You’re Lipsynching…: Unfortunately though when you’re doing Lip Synch animation, you can’t really have loud music playing in the background, because you need to listen to the audio track you’re animating to. One way around this though is to play light music QUIETLY in the background. You can also toggle Windows’ sound mixer to make the internet audio low and Maya’s audio high, so you’ll always hear the track you’re working with. However this still only works to some extent, and I have yet to figure out how to make Lipsynching animation not like pulling teeth when it comes to staying motivated.
4. Stand-up Comedy Performances: Standup Comedy is great to play in the background, because it’s entertaining, it’s light chat, and depending on the comedian, it’s not something you necessarily feel the need to look at. Like for example, Maria Bamford or Margert Cho are good comedians to listen to in the background because most of their comedy is driven by the funny voices they puts on. However, Dane Cook, or Carrot Top aren’t as useful, because they depend more on physical/acting for their routines, which makes you want to look away from the Maya window and will therefore kill your motivation to keep working.
   
5. Interviews: I’ve lately found that putting on an interview in the background is also really great, but has to be something that interests you (duh, because otherwise you won’t want to listen to it at all). One example of an interview I like are these Drag Race At Sea Q&A sessions that come in 8 parts and are ~20 min long each: 
6. Work With Friends: For me, working alone causes me to go stir crazy, and when that happens, I suddenly stop animating for ~2 hours and I’m instead dancing around my room to “I’m So Excited” by The Pointer Sisters. But if there’s someone you’re friends with in the room with you while you work, then that alone can keep you focused. Some people can also do this with complete strangers (hence why many people go to the library to work) but I don’t find that that helps… instead that just makes me feel claustrophobic. This method, though, reminds me of back in High School when I first started animating, and I remember my dad would always walk into my room, sit on my bed, and watch me animate. He’d very rarely ever say anything while I worked, but he just watched. And while he wasn’t actively doing anything to engage me, just having him in the room there somehow kept me focused, and it also made me feel loved. And so whenever anyone else sits in the same room with me quietly while I work, that reminds me of those times with my dad back in High School.
   

But come to think of it, I think that the main cause of procrastination/losing steam while you’re working… is fear. Fear that you’re not doing your work right, or that you’re not doing it well-enough, or if you’re in the situation I’m in right now, fear that you won’t get a good job after college, or that your film won’t turn out well, or as well as you hope it will. But the opposite of fear, as we all know, is love, and luckily love can come in many different forms, whether it’s music, comedy, listening to people you admire speak, or even just silently being around someone else while you work.

So I guess I’ll conclude my post with that — especially since I should probably get back to work now — and I hope that you all have a great Spring Break/Weekend/whatever you’re doing in the future!

Also, if you want, I’d love it if you post in the comments ways that YOU keep yourself motivated to keep working. I’m curious to see if anyone else has any suggestions for me/other people who read this. I know people are subscribed to this blog, so maybe that means people read it? I dunno.

Peace out, y’all! And of course, there’s more to come. 🙂

Picture Lock Revelation

Happy Wednesday everyone!

 

Today, I learned that the animation for my entire thesis film does NOT need to be totally-totally done by April 4th, like I originally thought so!

 

Also, it turns out Picture Lock is April 3rd, too, but whatever.

 

As it turns out, all that needs to be done by Picture Lock is the EDIT of my film, and that all the animated motion be put out in basic form, so that I know when everything happens.

 

As for when everything DOES need to be super-duper final-animated, though, that is for the Final Thesis Review, which will happen some time in early May. Which is over a whole month from now! WAHOO!!! This is sort of the greatest news ever, because it doesn’t mean I have to cut as many corners with my film as I thought I was gonna have to!

 

I still have to do a fair amount of animation before April 4th, however. But not nearly as much as I thought. YEahahahhahahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

 

Booya booya booya booya booyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

 

More to come! Also I’m about to post something else in a minute so talk to ya soon~

Animatic v14

That’s right, new animatic! But before I get to it, lemme tell a quick story.

 

So I had office hours yesterday with Michael Patterson, with the hopes of getting advice on camera direction/cinematography/editing of my piece to have the storytelling flow better. And what I got was that + even more!

 

For you see, one thing that Patterson noticed right off the bat was that my animatic was kind of unreadable, what with how none of the final locations had been imported into any of the scenes, and how a lot of the establishing shots were still just flat pink photoshop drawings that I made literally a year ago.

 

So after getting a fire lit under my ass to heavily revamp my animatic, that is exactly what I did — I spent all of yesterday importing the new locations into almost all of the scenes, and I even started up the Party Room scene of my film! And you get to see it AAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLL together now, which is great because the resulting animatic was something that is one huge step closer to looking like what my final film will end up looking like come showtime in May.

 

But before giving the link to the animatic, here are two funny images:

 

This is a still from a scene with the OLD school-yard model (the stand-in version)

 

….And this is the exact same still, but with the old school model deleted, and the more finalized school model imported.

LOL. So yea, that’s the main logistical difference between the two models of the Schoolyard — the ground isn’t level in the new model. Which ultimately looks better, but it’s just funny because it meant that for a couple of scenes I had to re-position the God-Nodes of the characters so that they were standing correctly on the ground. Uneven terrain! Fun stuff! (not really, but it’s not really a big deal at the same time)

So yea, enough talky talky I guess. Here’s the 14th Animatic of my film. Look at how far it’s come!

And of course, as I always say…

…there is certainly more to come. 🙂

A short text post

Hey! I haven’t posted in a week so I’m just gonna put out some words.

As usual, I’m just chugging along to the best of my ability. Right now I’m working solely on the shots that I plan on putting in my reel that I’ll use to apply to animation jobs after I graduate, so that’s… stressful. To say the least. haha. Those shots in question, by the way, are:

– Pretty much the entire scene when the hero is at school for the first time. It has a lot of great acting, dialogue, as well as a great shot of the Mean Girl kicking the ball which demonstrates good physicality

– The shot where the hero climbs over the wall, because as far as physicality goes, that’s pretty damned difficult to animate

– The shot where the hero gets thrown into the monster mansion, which I revamped actually, and made it better for a reel; instead of getting thrown into the house and then getting up, he instead does a double-take, gets up, runs back towards the door he flew through, bangs on it a couple times, pushes against it with his whole body weight, and then gives up and turns around. Bam! Animation.

Aaaand that’s actually pretty much it. The funny thing with an animation reel, is that really all you need to show is that you can animate body mechanics well, and that you can animate acting/dialogue scenes well. And as an added bonus, if you can animate both of those things in more than one animation style, then that’s even better. Right now, the animation style I’m going for is a more realistic, less-cartoony motion, so I may go and do some extra stuff to kick it up a notch, but we’ll see.

I also updated my animatic with a new version of Scene 23 (aka the scene when the hero is in bed contemplating after he runs away from the monster mansion) and I think it’s finally working this time around. Woohoo!

So yea. It’s weird to think that school has only been in session for 2 weeks, because it feels like it’s already been at least a month. I feel like I’m going to die of old age before this semester ends, haha. And I don’t wanna get too emotional, but the fact that my performance on these specific shots of my film will eventually determine what kinds of jobs I get once I’m out of college…. it’s something that haunts my mind every day, and I sort of wish I could fast-forward through all of this stress. But alas, this is life, and this too shall pass.

Sorry there aren’t any images in this post! I try to keep it visual but this time around I’m just sort of slowly losing my mind and don’t wanna have to spend the time racking up screencaps and stuff.

Well, OK fine, here’s ONE screencap I made:

This is a shot of the re-done roughing-out of the shot of the Hero climbing over the wall, and I noticed that this one particular pose he made was very… pin-up. So yea. Clearly I am losing it.

Anyway, that’s all for now! More to come. Especially very soon, since I have a new animatic that I’m not showing you right now for some reason, haha.

 

OH, AND SIDE-NOTE! I noticed that my computer was filling up to dangerous levels of information, so I decided to clear some shit out, and I deleted all the playblasts from Maya that I had made. And you know how much data that ended up getting rid of? Over 14 Gigabytes. I had created over 14 gigabytes of playblasts in the last few weeks. If that’s not proof that that I’ve been working hard, then I don’t know what is!

 

OK, that’s really all for now. More to come!

The Last Few Days: Schoolyard!

The Schoolyard is where a lot of stuff happens in my film, and it’s also the most object-heavy of any of my locations. Also, it’s an exterior, which posed a whole other set of problems, such as making sure that you can’t see the edge of the ground-plane in any horizon shots while also making it not look like there’s absolutely nothing in the world around the Schoolyard area. Anyway, all I can say, really, is thank god for Trees!

So let me start from concept all the way to the so-far finalized status!

My work was cut out for me when my amazing and talented concept artist, Theo Aretos, did concept paintings for the Schoolyard environment:

This painting was done just to get the color scheme down, and at first I found it interesting considering how dry it felt, but then I realized that that’s actually a smart choice, since I want the schoolyard to feel like a sort of unwelcoming place. Also, this entire time I imagined the ground being covered in grass (because at the end of the day, I am a very very uncreative person when it comes to visual design…), so the idea of having it be a DIRT ground was simultaneously new to me, interesting, better than my original idea, AND it’ll make rendering easier (because fuck if I know how I was gonna render an entire field of grass!)

I then asked him to change up the design of the school-building and to also do a few more playstructure designs, as well as a topographical layout of the ground, and I then got these beauties:

And so my work began. First off, I started by modelling all the things I knew I needed: a picket fence, a stone wall, the school building, and whatever else I could think of in the way of playstructures to fill the area. Check them all out!

Picket Fence! (this was real easy to do, just a lotta copy and paste)

Brick Wall!

(To make the bricks seem authentic, I made a brick-randomizer thingimajigger that basically had clusters attached to 42 different points on a lattice surrounding a base brick shape, and over time those clusters all were programmed to jiggle around in 3D space. As a result, it made… a bit of a difference.)

Monkey Bars!

You can’t really see it from this angle, but this structure was meant to look extra terrifying because the bars go up and down very sharply over the length of the structure.

Sandbox!

Complete with sandcastle, shovel, and bucket. 🙂

Basketball Thingy!

I legitimately forget what it’s called.

You like the hoop, though? Yea, that was fun to make. 🙂

Play Structure Thingy!

This is actually the only play structure that will actually be USED in the story in an at-all important way (it’s what the Mean Girl Gang sits on as they watch the hero enter the monster mansion) and I ended up using the same model as what I’ve been using before since it looked good enough to begin with. I just wonked it up a bit to make it less perfectly straight and symmetrical, I got rid of the swing-set next to it, and later I plan on texturing it so that it looks like it’s actually made of wood and not perfect 3D cubes. (I also plan on texturing everything else in the play yard, but that goes without saying I guess)

Terrifying Slide!!

True story: my dad walked into my room at one point over break and saw me modelling this, and he said “You know, slides aren’t supposed to go up …” Anyway, my point in bringing that up is that the physical nature of these objects are not meant to serve their function, but rather serve the overall stylistic purpose of the play-yard, which is to be a sort of intimidating, terrifying place… but not in a super overt way. Really, though, this is the most overtly creepy thing in the entire schoolyard, I think.

Aaand of course, THE SCHOOL

With a little flag on top~


So yea! Once I modelled all these things, I then had to choose one more thing: TREES.

Luckily, Maya comes with a collection of built-in tree types that you can just paint into your scene, so I went through all of them and went with these Birches:

Cute, non? Also I looked up Birches and apparently they’re wide-spread all over the Northern Hemisphere in temperate climates, and it’s the national tree of like 3 different countries I think…. so I guess I did a good job of making my film be location-ambiguous!

Anyway, once that was all decided upon, it was time to painstakingly put all this shit together. Why painstakingly? Because this is a lot of memory for my computer to handle. But thank god for Layers in Maya, so I can turn on and off objects to make the program’s running speed faster! Woo.

And there ya go. Oh, and if you need further explanation of what will happen where in my film, here you go too:

Bam~

Oh and one last thing about the schoolyard — if you’re concerned that some of the play structure objects seem a bit low-res, then let me defend myself with two rationales behind the relatively short amount of time I spent on modelling everything (this entire thing was put together over the course of like 3 or 4 days):

1) A lot of this shit is going to be waaay in the background, with the exception of the play structure that the mean girl gang sits on

2) I don’t have much time left so I gotta cut corners somewhere…

So yea. Hope this was interesting to read! And as always, there is certainly more to come. 🙂

Reference Mishap

So the last time I showed a reference mishap, it was one of my fraternity brothers slapping my face when my eyes were closed.

But this time, it’s completely my fault.

This time, I was shooting reference for this one shot where a monster is holding onto a chandelier and swinging it around as he laughs at the main character.

Here are the storyboard panels that explain what I’m talking about:

Yea. Top-notch drawing skills there. (Also, this is the same shot that I modelled/rigged the chandelier for, btw)

Anyway, luckily there’s a bench-swing outside of my house that was perfect for getting reference for this shot on.

However, when I tried to hold onto the chain with only one hand… well, shit happened. And it was entertaining as fuck.

More to come!

Happy Halloween!!!

With a thesis film as spooky and ghost/monster-oriented as mine, I’d be stupid to not make a post like this. Happy Halloween, everybody!

 

(It’s a Jack-O-Lantern with the Mean Girl’s face carved into it) (“Carved”)

Anyway, in more official news, I did my voice actor recording today! It went really well! It got a bit stressful though when I had like, 2.5 characters left to record and I was suddenly informed that I had only 50 minutes left… but I managed to get it all in!!! It was funny, I got all the actors to do their lines and I finished that at EXACTLY 6:59PM (one minute before my time was up) and as I was about to pack up, I was like “Oh I can just do the lines that I’m voicing next time” (As the main party monster) and the ADR booth technician I was working with was like “How many lines do you have left?” and I’m like “Just 3” and she was just like “Eh, whatever, let’s record them anyway.”

So I really did get everyone’s lines recorded!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY. All I need left to record are the party monsters, and lord knows that’ll be a hoot, haha!

Woo Woo WOoo Woooooooooooooooooooooo!

Happy Halloween! And MUCH more to come, now that I finally have my audio!!

Mean Girl Day!

I titled this post “Mean Girl Day” because today was ALL about the Mean Girl in my film! And by that, I mean, SHE IS RIGGED! And I now officially have 2 rigged characters in my film. Which is also super great because when you combine the Hero and the Mean Girl in my film, they do about 90 percent of all the 3D-Animated acting of the film. Because after all, the Mean Girls’ friends (of which I plan to have 4 or 5) collectively have 1 line of dialogue (one of them asks the mean girl a question and that’s about it), and the Mother appears in like 2 shots. So, yea.

But in my process of making the Mean Girl the wonderfully beautiful bitch that she is, I took a lot of screencaps, and I wanted to share with you, dear reader, my journey in creating her. And to be honest, my reason for devoting a post like this to her is because her character design really is the greatest I’ve ever done for any character I’ve ever designed — I’m extremely proud of her, and she continues to support my theory that VILLIANS ARE ALWAYS THE BEST CHARACTERS, design or personality-wise. I’ve always fucking loved villains, whether it be the Borg from Star Trek, or Madame Medusa from The Rescuers, or Madame Dubois from Madagascar 3 — Villains are just always amazing.

So here you go:

As all character designs must, the Mean Girl started off as a drawing.

Once I had decided that I liked her having big cat-like eyes, large eye-lashes, a small nose, pouty lips, and a heart-shaped face, I went and sculpted her out in Sculptris, a free 3D sculpting program. And as you can see, this image is NOTHING like what she ended up looking like, and she certainly had some weird fucking beginnings.

But as I worked into her more, things improved, and as I’ve already shown in older posts, I used this hi-res mesh as direct reference to make a Quadrilateral Polygonal model that would become her final face.

Thankfully, I had the sense to soften her brow ridge though, because it was way too fucking intense.

(New head on the right)

And then I had to decide what kind of hair she’d have! I knew I couldn’t have that long voluptuous hair, because it would be impossible to animate. I went with a short ‘do with a large swooping bang, but I knew it needed an accessory to make her more unique looking.

At first I wanted to give her a cute, youthful, girly hairband with fake plastic flowers in it. But then my friend said “No, give her a bow like Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl!” and I was all “Who’s Blair Waldorf?”

But I then looked her up, saw how awesome the bow was, and went with that instead.

I mean duh. The bow is way better.

It became clear at this point, though, that I was NEVER going to escape the Jimmy Neutron comparisons with this film, because not only do people see my main character and think he looks like Jimmy, but now people will look at my villain and think she looks like Cindy!

But really, I like to think of my Mean Girl as a mix between Cindy and Blair Waldorf….

So it’s sort of like a more bitchy, more mature, more stylish version of Cindy. So ha, take that!

But then I had to give her clothing. At first I was going to give her a long-sleeved shirt with a deep v-neck and some blue skinny-jeans. But then I realized that that wasn’t bitchy enough. (And I also consulted some actual females about what middle-school girls wear, and they all seemed to agree on one look:)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand yea! And then I rigged her, and now here you have it! A mean girl.

And before anyone goes ape-shit about the colors, let me say that THESE ARE NOT THE FINAL COLORS. Of anything, really. I mean the final version will probably be like this, but nothing is certain. Her clothing colors will most certainly change, and her lip-stick will become a lighter pink, and her rouge will be toned down a lot (because she still looks a little too mature with that makeup) (I won’t tone down the mascara though, because according to my lady-friends, Middle School is when women go Hard As a Motherfucker with the eyeliner and mascara, so there), but this is what her body is gonna be like.

Also, just as an extra fun image, this is a screencap I took while I was weight-painting her head:

Looks like a shitty iPod commercial, right? Hahaaaa.

OK. Anyway, yea. I figured it would be cool to compile the entire history of this character from step Zero to Finished Product, and it’s really exciting to me that I can create an awesome fucking animated character literally just from my imagination. This is definitely an extremely satisfying accomplishment for me, artistically speaking, and it also gives me confidence that in the future if I want to keep making independent animated films, I still can, with zero budget! 🙂

But yea. As usual, though, it’s 3:30AM right now as I post this, and I’m treating this blog like it’s my fucking diary, so I think it’s time for me to turn on my night music and go to sleep. G’night y’all! I can’t wait to animate this girl!

Peace. (and there’s more to come, of course!)

– Max

Sometimes My Friends Are Assholes

…But I love them anyway. 🙂

 

This just happened though, and I couldn’t help but to post it because it’s pretty fucking hilarious.

 

So I’m shooting reference right now, right? This is the specific shot that I was just shooting reference for though:

 

 

And so I needed help getting reference for this. What I did to get the right reactions though was I closed my eyes, lifted my hand, and had a friend who was standing there grab me by the wrist at a random point (so that it would catch me by surprise) and then pull me by the wrist violently.

 

Sounds good, right? And it was. And I got really great reference out of it, which isn’t really well-exemplified by this screencap:

 

But whatever, just trust me on this one.

 

However, sometimes my friends are assholes though, and shit like this happens:

 

But that’s what I get for being in a Fraternity.

 

Shout out to Geoff Yu for helping me with shooting my reference! And shout out to Michael Borke too, because hey, I admit that was funny.