End of term coming up again, just got one more project to go before the summer. Not much to show for this year, apart from 10films10days, since a lot of work was for external clients, and it's up to them when and where to publish online. I've cut a new demo reel together, though, and updated it with some new(ish) work:

Practical Research Project - Day 5

As you may have noticed, I quickly abandoned my plans to make a daily record of my progress after I spent the better part of Tuesday thinking and writing about what I'd done on Monday.

From there, having realised that I needed to return to the basics, I went over rigging a character for animation using Maya's own "getting started" tutorial. (http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/Maya2012_Getting_Started/index.html) I'd already gone through the modelling, texturing and animating parts of the tutorial, and I find that they're a good introduction to the program, although they really do only cover the basics. Unfortunately they're not enough to let you successfully create, rig and animate your own model, as I found with some interesting results...

After much perseverence, I managed to get something that looked a bit like a bear trying to jump, so I went with that, and ended up with this:

 

Shocking animation and terrible compositing, I know. I found animating in Maya frustrating, because I got a much poorer result than I would have done in 2D, despite spending a lot more time on the work. Setting up the model for animation was particularly time-consuming, and even then it didn't deform the way I wanted it to, and was difficult and unrewarding to animate.

I do intend to continue trying to learn 3D software for animation, but I've realised that I severely underestimated the steepness of the learning curve. Although the basics can be picked up relatively easily, making anything which actually animates well and looks good is much harder. While looking for uselful resources, I came across Digital Tutors (http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?cid=5) which offers some free video tutorials, and then the rest on subscribtion only. I didn't use any of the tutorials, but they seem to have a lot which go into depth on rigging and animating in Maya.

Memory Project - Part 2

Also just finished (well, nearly finished) the Memory Project, a short film about my first pet. I'd still like to go back to it and add some colour, but for now this is how it stands. In retrospect, I think I tried to fit too much action into the film while trying to keep up with the narration, making it a little bit confusing to watch.

Here are some screenshots to make up for the low-quality video:

Apex Project - Part 2

Just finished work on the animated short for a project with the Apex hotel chain. The video will be officially launched online early next year, but for now here are some screenshots. Sorcha unfortunately left the project, so I ended up completing  it on my own. The shooting was done in seven days in the studio, and I made the film with as little post-production as possible, since our original concept was to focus on the fact that we were interacting with the same physical object that hotel customers would find in their bathrooms. The animation process actually ended up being more of an exercise in special effects than anything else - I spent more than half the studio time on the snowing section. Lighting the scene was also a challenge, as I wanted the light to be bright enough to erase the gap between the platform and the backdrop, but not so bright as to erase detail on the duck or cause multiple strong shadows. The solution I came up with wasn't perfect, but time restraints meant that it had to do.

eca Animation 2011

Short title sequence I made with Alex and Gavin.

Some stuff...

Been pretty busy lately, but here's a few things I've been up to at eca:









And a little preview of something I'm working on now: