Life in Animation

ReelFX Apprenticeship

2011-12-31T10:23:00.000-08:00

So it looks like I'm Texas-bound and it feels a little something like this:

Everything is moving pretty darn fast and in just a couple of days I'll be driving down there with my brother. Questions like "Hey, where am I going to live?" and "What is cooking?" have been popping up lately. But I'm really grateful that the good people of ReelFX are willing to take me in for their Winter Apprenticeship. If all works out I'll be starting on January 9th. Exciting times. It wouldn't suck to come to this every morning:

The apprenticeship is going to last for 6 months and I can't wait to meet all the folks there. It's a huge opportunity for me to grow both personally and professionally. Here's to growing up, weee! Happy New Year!

Oh yeah, the current book list.

Recently Read:
The Filmmaker's Eye by Gustavo Mercado
A compilation of camera shots / techniques explained with examples and breakdowns of it being in use. Also shows a case of breaking the technique / rule to great effect and explains that as well. It's a short picture-driven book as it should be and was a nice quick read for anyone new / not-so-new to cinematography. Also Juliette Binoche in Troi Couleurs: Bleu makes for a nice cover. Definitely check out The Three Colors Trilogy if you haven't seen that yet!

Currently Reading:
The Vilppu Drawing Manual by Glenn Vilppu
Cool, Calm and Contentious by Merrill Markoe
Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijll
Save The Cat! Strikes Back by Blake Snyder

Thanks Animation Mentor!

2011-12-16T18:06:00.000-08:00

Today marks the end of the term and the last day of my 18 month trek through AM. I've learned so much during my time here that not only improved my skills, but drastically changed my life.

Example: My niece and I had a terrible relationship. She was scared to talk to me because I was put in a position of "teacher" at the request of her parents. All I knew to do was make sure she gets her work done and that she behaved. That sounds quite normal, but our dynamic was one-way. We would go on days without having an actual conversation, which isn't much of a relationship at all.

Cut to Class 4, I'm learning about pantomime and acting. I read Keith Johnstone's "Impro" and discovered high / low status. I also read Joe Navarro's "What everyBODY is Saying" and keyed in on body language. One day I drove my niece home from school and it was obvious that something was bothering her. When I asked her what was wrong I noticed she had half her body already turned away from me, head down hiding her eyeline, and feet pointed in the direction she wanted to go (away). And I noticed what I was doing, arms crossed, leaning in, towering over her. I took what I gathered from these books and decided to try something new. I bent down on one knee, looked up at her and calmly asked her what was wrong. She took on a whole different attitude and we chatted about it.

It has to be a fluke of some sort, but it only took one single day, one moment to change our dynamic that was pretty much crap for the two years prior. It was amazing, and my niece and I have a newfound relationship. One day during a chat she asked me "Where did you learn to talk to me?" - and it all stemmed from learning animation during my time at AM. I told her that, and she concludes that animation rocks.

There are so many moments like this that came about during my classes that just have changed me as a person. I'm really grateful to everyone at Animation Mentor, faculty and students alike. The classes might be over but the journey stretches on. And damn it's gonna be fun.

-----

Finished Brain Storm - by Don Hahn. Awesome book! Definitely a keeper.

Finished The Perfect Bait - by Bobby Chiu. Very short, but also very good.

Currently reading: Cool, Calm & Contentious - by Merrill Markoe. Thought I'd read some comedy over the break :)

That alone was worth the trip.

2011-11-22T09:38:00.000-08:00

The most common phrase we spoke during the whole CTN shindig. I can probably talk volumes of each of these, but then I'd be old and gray by the end of it and I'm sorta hungry and would love lunch. In chronological order, each of these in and of itself was worth the trip.

1. Lunch at Dreamworks with some badass mentors.
2. Screening of Puss in Boots 3D in the Dreamworks theater, sat in Katzenburg's row.
3. Bill Plympton's Panel. What a way to start the event.
4. Rhinohouse.com - reference gold. Sadly I was worried about having enough cash to make it home... but they will have my money soon enough.
5. Sony Panel - Doug Sweetland was in the house!
6. Andreas Deja / Richard Sherman Panel. Might be the best damn thing that happened that weekend. It was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
7. Ron and Jon Panel - The roast of Ron.
8. Demo reviews - some great notes from the reviewers and great to grab the contact info.
9. Meeting Bobby Beck - He's a hoot haha.
10. Alex Woo / Matt Jones - Pixar Gesture drawing Panel - Mind blown (Space!)
11. Lorenzo / Prep and Landing 2 screening at Disney. Prep was awesome (great animation). But Lorenzo really blew my mind. Also, I got a Winnie the Pooh Mug (Thanks Kitty!).

And lastly, meeting all of my friends in person and realizing that none of them are crazy. Huge thanks to Mike, Marshall, and Reed for not being axe murderers and helping me along through the weekend. What a trip... can't wait to go back next year :)

Currently reading Don Hahn's Brain Storm. A great fun read, lotta fun little stories if you're into that thing.

CTN Reel

2011-11-16T12:51:00.000-08:00

Posting from Burbank! This is what I've come to CTN with as far as work goes. So far (and it's only been a day here) the trip has been fantastic.

Heading towards the finish line.

2011-09-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow marks the end of the term and this one in particular just flew by. Other than the facial on the 1 person dialogue, we spent all term doing a 2-person shot. My mentor Greg Kyle suggested I try this piece out and this was what I ended up with:

Even just being away from it a few days and rewatching it now, I notice some bits I can fix / tighten up and we'll be continuing work on these shots in the Polishing / Portfolio class, but boy this one was fun to work on. There were a lot of fun ideas being tossed around and even just trying them out was a hoot. I genuinely enjoyed animating this and felt that I learned a lot from it. Lots more to learn and I'm eager to do so!

On the book front, I picked up "Cult of the Mouse", which has a negative connotation in the title... but was a really great read. It talks about the stifling of creativity and how it's leading to a trend of unimaginative / boring films. But the author also cites examples of what's working and why it's working. This was written right when Pixar's contract with Disney was about to expire and having worked at Disney for a number of years he had first hand experience with this stuff. The message of the book though isn't "Suits Bad, Artist Good". It's about finding innovation within yourself and generating ideas. This spreads to someone making car models to an animator trying to create a fulfilling shot / story.

I put The Art Spirit on hold for that, but now that break is coming around I'm jumping back in.

And I leave you with this really cool article by Nick Bruno explaining how he studies an animated shot: How I Study Animation

Inside the Mind of Jaws & The Art Spirit

2011-08-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Been awhile! School is coming down to it's final months and it's an amazing time. I feel a bit like Heimlich from A Bug's Life. Chubby yet Bubbly.

CTN is rolling around the corner and I'm extremely excited to soak all of the knowledge that'll be exploding in Burbank. It'll be nice to just get away for a few days as well :)

So I came across this Panel that the DGA hosted honoring Steven Spielberg. JJ Abrams and James Cameron chatting along with him. Any aspiring filmmaker would geek out about the behind the scenes stuff he shares on stage. The panel lasts almost 2 hours long and is broken into clips, but the full coverage is on the top left of the little images they show.

DGA Tribute to Steven Spielberg

On top of videos like that (CTN Vimeo has such great stuff!), I've also been piling up my book collection. A friend of mine at Animation Mentor had a substitute come in for his weekly Q&A. The sub was none other than James Chiang - an all-seeing animator who has worked along-side with and even trained some of the best in the business. Marshall shared his notes from that class with me and in the Q&A James mentions a book called The Art Spirit by Robert Henri. The book is coming in the mail today and I'm excited because I hear nothing but good things about it. "A constant ever-lasting source if inspiration". Sounds awesome to me haha. I've got a lot of other books to go through, but I'll mention them when I've actually read through them.

Happy animating / art-making out there.

Old and New

2011-07-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

After the much appreciated break we've been diving back into the 1-Person dialogue shot again. My mentor Greg Kyle has opened my eyes to a lot of problems with the shot I didn't realize existed at the time. Looking back at the old shot and comparing it to what it is now... I can only say: What was I thinking?!

Old:

This was with a few notes added from various folks. New hand gesture on the "I dunno" (thanks Drew!) and a couple of tweaks here and there. What I didn't realize was just how watery everything was. At the time I thought this was snappy. Greg did not.

New:

With added facial animation here. I still think there are bits that I could speed up, but because the animation had become so convoluted there were a couple of areas where it would have been a ton of trouble to shave just a single frame. Learned a lot from these past 3 weeks though. I have to go in and polish this now, but the jist of the assignment is pretty set. Hope to bring this new-found sense into the next assignment :)

Thanks to the plethora of teachers, students, and friends that helped me with this shot.

A Moment to Breathe

2011-06-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

Can't believe another class is over. Class 3 to 4 was the hardest transition since it rolled from one class right into the next. It was tough to delve that quickly into acting and I think everyone felt that. Never-the-less, here's the current progress reel. I just realized I didn't put up any shots of my Class 3 stuff. All is included here in all of it's unfinished playblast glory:

This animjam (Class 3 work) will always hold a special place in my heart because I was taught so many lessons while going through it. By the end of the first shot I was planning to toss the idea out the window, but a quick pep talk by my buddy Mike showed me that the idea was limitless. I tried IK hands on that for the first time, I tried stretching into the more stylized animation, and even added a smear frame in there haha. It was tons of fun. The last lesson I learned from it is to put yourself out there. When we were finishing the last shot of Class 3 up, the AM showcase was taking submissions and because of my personal gripes with the shot I chose not to submit what I felt to be my most successful shot up to that point. Though the chances were very slim anyway, I'll always be left wondering "what if".

But I'm glad that happened. Now I know I won't put myself in that situation again as I move on.

The acting shots were really hard to do. That pantomime shot especially. We'll be going into the facial animation in the next class, but for now I'm just looking forward to taking a breather. What a rewarding class though, just learning about how people work has been such a highlight of Class 4. And I don't think this path of education is going to ever stop. I wouldn't have it any other way :)

Blueprints / Fear of Failure

2011-06-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

An AM alumni by the name of Kelly Perez gave us a lecture / demo of herself planning a shot the other night and it was almost ridiculous how deep she went into each aspect of the shot. She posted the process over on this blog that covers her weekly Q&A stuff:

Kelly Perez - The Animation School Bus

I thought I broke down my reference and planned out my current shot pretty well - but when I was exposed to this, it really showed me just how slack I am at planning. I had a good basis, but I didn't know EXACTLY what I was going to do before I went into Maya. There will always be room to tweak things while you're animating, but having a clear plan first and not just "holds this pose for 24 frames" will save you headaches. In the end I had to improvise a few things that wasted a lot of time, but I'll definitely be taking this with me to the next assignment. And if you're reading this Jero, this goes for your walk cycles too! :)

Check out some of the other topics posted on Kelly's blog as well - very good info there. And congrats to her for nabbing an internship at LAIKA.

Quick switch of topics here, but the fear of failure has been a reoccurring theme I've been seeing lately. Fear is a really nasty thing. Generally you'd want to avoid doing something because it's dangerous. But in animation, what's the worst that could happen? Maybe being new to animation gave me the luxury of not being attached to a specific workflow or have any preconceptions of what animation is / was. I came into this world knowing nothing and was a metaphorical sponge - just soaking up whatever came my way. But especially now, going through with my current assignment, I think we shouldn't fear "fear". With a slight change of perspective you can quickly turn it into a positive.

I've been hit with this many times during my time at AM so far and I look back just a short 3 months ago and see how silly I was. Fear is something that should be welcomed. If you're afraid to tackle something, it's probably because you don't know how to yet... and if you don't know how to yet - then you're going to learn! It's a surefire thing that even if you come out with a total failure of a shot, you'll learn something. The key is to know when you're stuck and search for the answers whether it be on your own or with help from someone else (and this is why we have mentors!).

Don't be afraid to try new suggestions, new methods, new styles. Use common sense of course, you don't have to try EVERY suggestion that comes your way, but if there is a decent reason for it - just be open to giving it a shot. Embrace failure, it will always lead to you becoming a stronger animator. Don't let fear cheat you out of the learning process.

Put a Lid on that Iris

2011-05-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

Last week I learned a very fascinating fact about eyes and I haven't been able to stop looking at eyelids since.

When looking at eyes, generally the upper eyelid will keep in contact with the iris. Unless you're going for a specific expression; frightened, crazy, disgusted, dopey and hopeful etc. Something where the eyes are locked to a target (usually angled down) and the brows are pulling up, taking the lids for a ride.

Otherwise, in most cases you won't likely see any white of the eyes above the iris.

Now this might seem trivial, but it's just an extra step in giving the audience something they can relate to... even if they don't know they're relating to it. A step towards believability. Personally though I find this a very important aspect to be aware of, since the viewer pays attention to and connects with the eyes the most. Even more so at AM since we're dealing with a character that has such huge eyes.

Kevin Koch's Article on Saccades / Fixations

Check out the video at the top of this page and see the eyelid moving in sync with the eye darts (actually everyone should read all of Kevin's stuff about eyes, he's got a few articles that focuses just on eye movements). One interesting bit is that when the eye moves at the very end, the eyelid reacts pretty accurately to maintain it's relationship to the iris. There's sometimes a frame of drag or overshoot, but they're pretty spot on.

I've never taken that close a look at this before and when I heard about it (source being my Class 1 mentor David Weatherly, relayed by my study mate Michael Amos), I went around looking at AM assignments and animation at the 11 second club, the white bug eyes are rampant. So go study some eyes, read Kevin's articles, and infuse that gold into your animation!

The Love for Learning

2011-05-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

Long time no post. It's been pretty crazy at the Animation Mentor scene and just when I've sorta grasped the current concept I was learning, ten more concepts show up right behind it.

Sounds like a complaint, but it's really awesome. This part of my life has been missing since I was a kid: The quest for knowledge. I've always done well in school but there was no direction. I just aimlessly tried to get good grades because I was told that was the right thing to do. It wasn't until a few months ago that I started to get really excited about absorbing the knowledge of how humans and animals work in order to create more believable animation. I've been constantly digging deeper since.

I woke up today, sat down at my desk, and realized there are stacks of books surrounding me now. Before AM, you'd never see me with a book. It made me realize how much I've changed since opening that stopmotionanimation.com webpage.

Some of the books I've read recently that I found quite interesting:

Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone

This book probably got the ball rolling. There are really crazy bits in this book and some of it was admittedly hard for me to sludge through. But the meat of this book is pure gold. And not just from an animation perspective, but a life perspective.

What Every BODY is Saying by Joe Navarro

An Ex-FBI Agent (who the TV Series "Lie to Me" was based on) deconstructs his process of human "tells" of the body that give away our inner thoughts and feelings. He goes through from head to toe and explains what, why, how. A very interesting and fun read.

Directing Film Techniques and Aesthetics by Michael Rabiger

One of the first books I read when I was just digging into film making. It delves into very specific examples and explains why certain choices are made and how structuring and planning the scenes ultimately makes it clearer to the audience on both a conscious and subconscious level. Clarity, can't work without it!

Hope to get back to this more regularly, with actual progress and tips to share :) Till then, have a good one!

Stewfasaaa

2010-12-19T22:56:00.000-08:00

Blocking 2:

Changes:

His leg poses were reading too human-like so now he lands hands first; more of a tigery fashion.

Changed the other poses accordingly to accommodate the arc he creates in the air. Added a breakdown before and after the land. Kind of does a gallop to settle.

Added anticipation before the jump.

More neutral starting position for more reaction in the spine when he spots the bird (still pondering about this).

Still lots to clean up. But I've already learned so much about workflow and the importance of showing your work at it's blueprint stages. I showed a friend of mine 9 poses and I had to go back and drastically change 6/9 which totally changed my entire shot. So on that front... woohoo!

Time has wings.

2010-12-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

Continuing the adventures at Animation Mentor, these past 3 months just flew by in an instant. Overall the difficulty is rising, in part because I'm choosing to do harder assignments. My mentor even ended up stating in my overall assessment that I overextended myself :) But he quickly followed up with "... but I don't hold it against you."

One thing I've noticed that I've been lacking is follow-through. Whenever I hit an obstacle my motivation meter depletes exponentially. This is something I've been working on all term and I'm glad to report that there is progress. At the end of the day, here is what my Class 2 ended with :

It turned out okay but I'm not 100% satisfied with my performance this term. And since we have a good amount of days off on this break, I've decided to buck up and go for another test. This time with some goals in mind:

1. "One shot, one thought" (thanks Brian!)
2. Do first pass blocking with a minimal amount of poses.
3. Try IK Spine (and in this case IK hands).
4. Experiment with creature-like behavior.
5. Cartoony - break the rig like crazy. Defy physics (just a little)
6. 100 Frame limit.

Plan: Stewfasa is stalking a bird as it's flying around the area. He notices it turning around, springs from atop his ledge and swipes him out of the air - landing on the ground in nothing less than an awesome fashion.

Here goes pass 1:

Test Tweakage

2010-09-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

Messing around with that test a little bit. I touched on the timing and the arcs a tad, toned down the legs rotation of the 2nd revolution on the 2nd bar, and started on the end spin. Here's the update:

On-Break Test

2010-09-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

A friend from the 11secondclub sent me a link to an Animator's site by the name of KC Roeyer. On it was this neat little gymnastics test he did with a cylinder that had a pivot point in the center. I thought I'd give it a shot! I ended up not planning it's bones out well (I'm not sure how KC had it done) but it was quite a chore to get it spinning in the air correctly. Hopefully there's a shortcut out there to make animating flips easier! In the meantime here is my attempt:

It's cool how after posting it up I want to fix so many things haha. Maybe tomorrow. I tried doing this all the way through without looking back at the original as reference. If interested you can see KC Roeyer's test here:

KC Roeyer's Gymnastics Test

What a Friggin' RIIIIDE

2010-09-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

This Friday marks the official end of Class 1 at Animation Mentor and it's quite a bittersweet end. These past 3 months have very much flown right by me supporting the phrase, "Time flies when you're having fun". And it's been a whole lot of FUN for sure. I've met some of the most interesting people who come from the most interesting places / backgrounds ... then we all got together and formed a study group haha. I knew I would appreciate the school but after going through this term... I am enjoying the hell out of it. It was a bit more work than I had imagined but I really didn't mind. I also noticed how empty I left this blog for awhile but I didn't think a bouncing ball would be too exciting to post :)

Here's the progress reel for the term (starting with most recent):

A big big thanks to my mentor David Weatherly from Dreamworks for the attentive feedback and gratuitous links. It truly was a pleasure.

Don't fear the 3D Smear

2010-07-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

One animation piece that blew my mind came from a student at Animation Mentor in 2008 by the name of Henry Sanchez. I remember hearing Eric Goldberg talking about a smear in CG - but this was the first time I saw it in action. And it was done well! Up until watching the Summer 2008 showcase, I had a pretty rigid viewpoint of how CG Animation looked. Sharp, clean, and clear. So when I was watching this... it opened a third eye for me when looking at CG Animation.

I'm glad I saw this very early on when I was considering to pursue animation. Everytime I look at this piece I remember to think above and beyond. Once you get grounded (a far road ahead for me) in the fundamentals, take some chances. There's so much to this artform to learn and as the next week brings our first assignment... I can't wait to soak it all in.

What the hell is happening?

2010-07-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

When I look back on life, I feel like I've always been more good than bad. My intentions were never purely evil no matter what I did. I'm not a genius, or an important name, or a very learned individual. I'm sort of a regular Joe... who happens to be named Tony. And I've always believed in the good in people. But every time I look out at what's happening in just these United States - that belief gets smashed time and time again.

I doubt this is going to reach anyone, but I'm gonna rant anyway just for cathartic purposes. There are three major problems that the Earth faces:

1. Global Warming. It boggles my mind that this is still in debate. Over the past decade the Summers got hotter and hotter hitting new records each year. What better proof than to walk outside and get burned by the evidence. We've lost over half of the world's ice caps and will soon be at a point of no return. With them gone, there won't be any stopping of the gradual rise in temperature and we'll slowly be cooking the planet. Oil companies are rooting for this to expand their offshore drilling territory. Russia is breaking apart the North Pole to extend their reach for the oil down under. We all know how awesome offshore drilling can be.

2. The Oil Spill. It's pretty obvious that this whole system is jacked up. What many don't know is that the cause of the oil spill was the result of three consecutive screw-ups in a row. For one, they knew their equipment wasn't up to sound - yet they went ahead. Secondly, when someone spotted part of the seal showing up on deck, the BP Manager commanded them to continue. After the seal had broken, they called in Halliburton to plug it up. This plugging process takes three plugs to seal shut. Before the third one was in place, the BP Management had the crew proceed with the drilling. That was the moment the rig blew up. The response was slow, there were no emergency programs running, everything a mess. BP had an HD Camera down there but didn't even show the footage until 3 weeks into the spill. They gave everyone a crappy video feed instead. Energy companies cannot regulate themselves. Which brings us to:

3. Gas Land. Many people hear "natural gas" and believe it to be the answer for our energy woes. It comes from the U.S. so less dependency on foreign oil, it's "cleaner", and more immediate. Except for the fact that it isn't clean at all. More than 30 states now have an immense amount of natural gas extraction happening. This process is called Hydraulic Fracturing. Hydraulic Fracturing uses over 500 toxic chemicals (something like 596) with a mix of millions of gallons of water per well to retrieve all of the natural gas in a particular area. The chemicals are seeping into the water supply and now tap water in homes everywhere are contaminated.

This was posted over a year ago on youtube, which means that with the time it took for someone to notice and then for someone to actually do reporting on it... it's been around for quite some time. This same lady was featured in a documentary called GasLand. Now over half of the United States is facing these problems. New York is in a battle to fend off Hydraulic Fracturing to save their unfiltered water shed. Contamination there means the entire city's water supply would be instantly poisonous.

I've always wanted to get into animation to tell fun and uplifting stories. I always thought I'd be going around and picking these fun stories from my own life. But at the moment I can't help but think of my brother taking a drink of water from his house in Texas - a state rifled with Hydraulic Fracturing wells.

A lot of people I know are in California and when I bring these issues up, 95% of the answers go something like this:

Well if it isn't happening in California then I don't care.

The world is being affected. If you're living then it affects you. It's sad that news isn't news and that politics is money. It's sad that people who aren't directly and immediately impacted by the situation aren't even sympathetic to what's going on. We're facing a global long term crisis, an immediate oil spill crisis, and OUR SINKS ARE PRONE TO EXPLOSIONS. What the hell is going on?

From the Ground Up

2010-06-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

Good ol' Ball. Back to the basics.

Now I need to reformat my laptop in prep for schoolio! Yahoo~

Spline Spline no friend of mine

2010-06-25T15:17:00.000-07:00

Well I've about run out of time to continue doing this ball kick piece and in all honesty the drive of finishing it has almost faded away. I've been catching myself falling into a pattern of starting with something simple, over complicating it, speedily racing to the finish line, and then falling short at the very end.

I've been critiquing a ton of stuff at the 11secondclub, but I always have to remind myself that I too am just a newbie. 7-ish weeks of Maya does not make a great animator. I guess I'm just a little disappointed with this latest piece as it was going so well until I hit the spline button (or autoTangent).

Finished Blocking:

Half-way done Spline:

It turned out okay so far but it just wasn't what I was after - the punch of it is definitely gone at least that's how I feel when I see it. My relationship with maya is still pretty rocky. But as always I've learned a ton from this (first time using parent / constrain). I might need to stop getting ahead of myself though.

Well Animation Mentor starts this Monday and I'm extremely pumped for it. Toy Story with the family this weekend as well. Good times ahead :)

The ol' Toss the ball and then kick it very hard

2010-06-18T21:40:00.001-07:00

Found decent time to practice animating today. Here's 2nd blocking pass - only halfway through the piece. I feel like it's almost animated already - am I blocking wrong :/ It feels more natural, but that just might be a cover for "I'm new and don't know a thing".

Gotta watch Toy Story 3 this weekend! (And Disney's Tangled looks really awesome too)

A Kick in the Ball and Rushing Waterfalls

2010-06-13T15:58:00.000-07:00

I've been delving into the works at 11secondclub.com as a means of self-study and came across someone's reel with a guy kicking a soccer ball. I've always thought this was a great exercise and after picking his piece apart I thought I'd try my own.

This is blocking for the body and feet:

I've yet to finish the end but I'm still deciding what I want him to do before I go any further. I was going to just animate the torso / legs but maybe I'll go all out and add the rest of the body parts. I was also thinking about trying locators and constraints to have him hold the ball and drop it in place for the kick.

In the meantime I think I needa cool off for a day or two. It's great fun though.

On a completely different note, I recently went to Yosemite with some of the family including niece and sister of my sister in law. It was my first time there and I was expecting a long walk basically. We were going on one of the shortest trails there so I figured a 5-ish mile hike would be cake.

Calm and cool on the bridge. That's my sister and niece.

Brother and his wife.

So on we go until we notice that the path is wet. My niece gets scared and wants to turn back. So sister in law walks back down with her while the rest of us press onward.

At this point I'm thinking, "WOW this is awesome!" We're getting sprinkled by the mist of the waterfall and it's like we're in an action movie. The winds were picking up and it was just the right amount of dangerous to get your heart pumpin'. As I snapped this picture a Russian man tapped me on my shoulder, pointed to my camera and said, "IT VEEL DIE, TURAAHST ME". The camera is weatherproof so I wasn't worried, I didn't want to argue against a cliff so I just said okay. I'm never going to forget this very short conversation though haha. About 10 minutes later, under the cover of a small overhead cliff, I took this picture:

Completely drenched! At this point we went back to get my sister in law and the niece. Next time we'll be more prepared. In all honesty that climb up those steps was RIDICULOUSLY dangerous and scary. Especially going down the puddled steps, yikes. But it was still fun.

Speaking of which, since I wasn't prepared I was wet until we got home about 4 hours later. It was the most comfortable car drive ever!!! :( On top of that I thought that inside the camera bag was still dry... turns out it was completely soaked and the camera had been sitting in there moisting it up. I was worried so I dried it out a bit and took a test picture. I now use this as my desktop wallpaper.

I had a blast and I hope to continue the trend of actually going out and living life a bit more.

Walking before I crawl.

2010-05-31T12:33:00.001-07:00

First attempt at a complete walk cycle. It's a lot tougher than it seems! Well known problem that sticks out in CG are the knee pops. It's weird that 2D drawings / stop motion doesn't really lend itself as much to the issue. I spent about as much time on the knees as I did the rest of the animation - and its still noticeable!

Although... the knees were quite jarring without tweaking it. I wonder if professional rigs just have a button to fix this :)

On another note I spent 11 hours yesterday putting hardwood floors in at my uncle's house and through doing it I have discovered a very important fact:

I am not made to do construction work of any kind.

It just made me want to pursue this animation stuff harder and faster. No more construction work! Ironically four people boarded my cousin's room and he didn't even bother to show up and help. And to Steven Tran I say: What the hell?

Lastly, if you're an animation geek and haven't listened in on any animation podcasts yet - you are missing out! Interviews range from layout artists to directors to animators to producers from all mediums.

Spline doctors, Animation Podcast, Speaking of animation... just to name a few. Time to start walk #2!

A New Adventure

2010-05-22T02:16:00.000-07:00

Welp, the past half year has been a doozy. It's funny to come back and see the last post I wrote - how excited I was about a newly purchased FZ50. And right after I got it, I ended up selling it. But past is past and now we're here.

Only 18 months ago I was just starting to mess around with film-making and animation. And only 2 months ago I decided I was going to pursue this thing! I just got accepted to Animation Mentor's Summer 2010 Term a few weeks ago and I'm truly excited about starting this crazed adventure. I know they use Maya at the school so I tried my hand at a test piece in order to familiarize myself with the program.

Here's a playblast of my very first CG piece - ever! (never got to the polish phase though)

* Edit: Gotta give credit to Shikkin and the choreographer "shota NOPPO".
Here is a link to the referenced video I used:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-LXclD6TFk *

Before this I never touched an "IK" control before. And my friend Gimbal Lock visited me every 20 frames. In retrospect this dance piece was extremely ambitious as a first test. All the twisting and rolling created a lot of problems, but I'm slowly starting to understand the workflow. I hope I don't get a lot of flak for switching to CG. Animation is animation after all... right?

Right guys? ...

Magnificent Monday

2009-10-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Never thought I'd say that! Here is what I woke up to. I check craigslist each morning and evening for a camera and today I found one for sale for $275. Good deal, but problem is it's coming from Miami. Craigslist users usually say no when shipping is involved. I inquire anyway, couldn't hurt to ask. He accepts - 10 dollar shipping charge. I send the money, he ships the item. In a matter of 90 minutes of waking up I've purchased my FZ50 at a pretty darn good price (comes with card and original accessories). I have unbranded knock off remote shutter + AC Adapter coming in next week for an added $20. If my DV Cam works as a converter, thats 305 for the entire setup... whew!

There's a seller on ebay selling his right now for 245 (15 dollars for shipping) for a total of 260. I've talked to the guy because he has no feedback yet, hes a new member. He seems legit though and even took close-up pics for me.

I had just paid for the craigslist Lumix right before this ebay seller sent me his message so it's a bit too late for me now. It looks really clean and if you're in the market for one or know someone who is... I suggest you contact him and decide for yourself. Here's the link for anyone interested:
Panasonic Lumix FZ50(ends sometime tomorrow).
Comes with everything from the original box and maybe a bit more. Fantastic price!

And that's not all! I spoke with Chuck Duke about a possible interview with him for Stop Motion Magazine (after talking to John about it of course) and they both gave me the go ahead! Really excited about this. I hope I do justice when presenting Chuck's story. I've mentioned him before, but I really didn't grasp just how seasoned he is. Shot from his independent film:

This man is quite the stop motion beast, as well as a Visual FX artist and CG Animator. A Renaissance Man! And his name is just cool. Honestly, if we were given jobs based on how our names sounded, Chuck Duke would definitely be a superhero.

So today was an extremely pleasant day. I wouldn't be surprised if a certain someone who owed me a certain amount of money surprisingly sent me a certain transaction that fell upon this day. *Checks outside for mailman*.

While I was searching for the Lumix FZ50, I took some time to revisit some old movies (I say old but they were released in the 80s / 90s). I watched some Ron Howard movies: Splash with Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah

and Cocoon with Don Ameche.

When old people actually looked like old people and not plastic messes. Another reason why I've always adored "Grumpier Old Men" with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

I REALLLLY miss movies that have that whimsical heart-felt feeling seeping through the film. Cocoon made me weep like a baby and I'm not embarrassed to say it.

Also watched some Richard Curtis films: Four Weddings and a Funeral

and Notting Hill (again).

Notting Hill has some of my favorite movie moments of all time, including a fluid non-stop track shot depicts passing time through visuals and song.

I'll be striving to revisit the days of compelling dialogue and story telling in future projects to come. Stop motion is usually tied to these crazy really-out-of-the-box ideas and themes... maybe a "normal" film in stop motion wouldn't be bad :)

This is argue-able of course. Anyway, I'm happy to be part of the FZ50 club and can't wait to get my hands on Dragon Stop Motion.

Goodbye D70, Hello Lumix FZ50

2009-10-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

Welp, I didn't think that saying farewell to a camera would be so hard... but it surprised me. I had really come to love the look and feel of the D70 and it pains me to let it go. I wasn't sure if my uncle was still in the market for one and as soon as I brought it up today when he visited, he paid me cash right then and there and took it home. The best thing about it was that I had finally gotten used to it's controls and interface, but on to other news.

I'm now shopping for the revered baby of stop motion cameras:

Panasonic Lumix FZ50. I've been hearing AND seeing too many good things from this baby at SMA.com. Prices are very decent right now and I'm hoping to snag a steal! The good news is that the Analog/Digital converter (to allow video assist on the computer) is considerably cheap on a PC. Actually, I may even be able to use my Mini DV camcorder as the converter. If not the cable will cost me an extra 40 dollars... I can handle that. Then I'll need a remote control button and (if I don't go for the wireless eye fi card) I'll be set! Basically switching the Nikon D70 body for a complete Lumix FZ50 package. Not too shabby.

Before letting the D70 go I did manage to get a decent test I was happy enough with to continue using the Green Screen. That means I'll be leaning towards CG effects as well. I'm not great at it but I'll do what I can and hope to learn as I go. I was also able to get a decent dolly test done too, glad that worked out well hehe.

And the last note. I'm owed a big chunk of change at the moment. Since the FZ50 will allow me to not shoot blind anymore, if the money comes in I think I'll splurge on Dragon Stop Motion as well. I hope it comes in, hah! I think the video assist will really step up my game and process. Looking really forward to holding this camera in my hands. Everything else has arrived and I got no more excuses, once this camera is here, to just DO THE DAMN THING!

Have a good day / night everyone.

Stop Motion Magazine - and killing the green screen.

2009-10-09T22:29:00.001-07:00

John Ikuma, Chief and Editor of Stop Motion Magazine, announced to everyone he could that he would be issuing a FREE magazine two months ago from his website: http://www.stopmotionmagazine.com/

Tomorrow he launches his next issue (it's a bi-monthly deal) and I'm pretty excited. I'm a behind-the-scenes junkie and this magazine is the ultimate treat. I really admire John for doing what he's doing... for the love of the art. If it continues to flourish with each issue, he's got a lot coming his way. I wish him a lot of success with this and hope he becomes madly rich. Can't wait to download it! (Remember folks it's free - Spread the word!)

On the animation front... after doing so many tests with the green screen I have concluded that I hate it. All the realism of stop motion - dealing with real objects, real sets, real interaction... it's all gone! So today after my last test, I decided that even if I couldn't edit out all the rigs and get perfect non-flicker / lighting, etc. I could just do it the old fashioned way... nudging the camera and using whatever I can to do in-camera effects. I'll do a small 10 second intro test with Chun Li that I've already planned on the green screen, but if I'm not satisfied with the result I'm going to abandon it. I believe tomorrow (if not then monday), the last of my supplies will arrive and I can set up the shot. Time to break out the dolly and play around with that :)

Out of the Ebay hole.

2009-10-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

First to Justin: The test I had planned (after doing a few movement tests) was for Leia to jump off of a high ledge in the distance, whip down to the floor as she lands hard - right in front of the camera, pulls her electrostaff from the distance using the force, figure 8s with the staff walking towards the cam and ends with a revolution above and behind with the staff into a pose.

Then stuff happened haha.

Over the past few days I've been playing around with Leia's movements and ultimately have decided that it just won't work to my needs. I did manage to get better movement from me as an animator though which I'm really thrilled about, but the doll's limitations are pretty clear to me now and I'm not trying to give myself anymore excuses to pursue it further. So, I'm going to keep it around for replacement parts and I'm sure the clothing and accessories will come in handy down the line.

Quick update on the green screen. It's actually pretty good now, I got the lights diffused (high five Yaz!) and the screen lights up evenly, the harsh shadows are gone, and everything is looking pretty dandy. Sample shot:

Since I could no longer use Leia, the first replacement idea was Spiderman (comic version). He's well known and the acrobatics required in his animation would be extremely fun and challenging to do. Here was the version I was looking at:

So clean! The comic version takes after the design shown in the game so it would work well with the Chun Li doll. It comes with all the replacement hands that one would need to animate with as well which was very nice to hear. Comes with web accessories shown and a replacement head (Peter Parker human head).

Now the problems. This was produced about 5 years ago and only 1000 were made. It's now pretty rare and some stores are now pricing it almost double what it was worth when it came out naturally. Add shipping and it would easily go over 200 dollars... for a Toy -.- On top of that there are many many many complaints with THIS PARTICULAR toy because the body inside (or plastic armature) is made of this red plastic that I guess is very prone to breaking. So 4-5 years time sitting in a box + easily breakable plastic armature is not a very good sign. Many have had their toy come into their hands broken before they even got to take it out of the case it comes in. Never-the-less, I loved the look of it so much and had planned out shots already that I went after one on ebay. The only one I could find was a used (displayed) one that would come with no box / no shell and it sold for 110 (thats with shipping) and I just wasn't willing to do that. So, more disappointment.

I made a list of potential characters and I gotta say... when I saw this one my knees went a little weak:
... then it sold for 300 haha. The people who work on toys are true artists I have to say. So good at what they do, really. But I finally decided on one that came at a great price (it was discounted AND on sale AT the SAME TIME!) I recently came into a bit of money so I went for it.

That's Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. She won't be as well known to the audience but I think the anime look will meld well with Chun Li's design. I've done some research on the toy itself and she definitely has a good range of motion.

It's sad but just the fact that she can kneel down makes me happy! Leia could only bend half way over before the whole body came with it... very very frustrating. She can do high kicks and comes with assorted weapons / hands. The one problem I have is the package doesn't come with actual closed fists. There's one hand that resembles a fist close enough so I think I can make do. In the mean time I'm waiting for these flexible stands I'll be using as mini rigs to animate with to come in the mail (2-3 days) and then I'll start testing the toys. I'm glad the whole toy-hunt is over. It was kind of eating at me staring at ebay auctions all day. Time to watch some Ghost in the Shell clips / movies to study her movement, quirks, and "special techniques". 'Till next time!

For Leroy: Green Screen Setup

2009-09-29T11:51:00.001-07:00

This is what the picture looks like. The screen is uneven because posterboard came from two different stores. (Wal mart ran out -.-)

Here are the shadows being cast.

Two lights active.

Here's the backup light but it's a bit overpowering.

Spot.

Fill (a little overwhelming but yeah)

Pros and Cons

2009-09-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

To Yaz: If you do end up doing frontlight / backlight take a few snaps of your setup! :) I really love the results of it but I'm just not prepared equipment-wise. I'm doing tests with the green right now and if I end up hating it I may take some time to get a setup together myself. Good luck with yours!

To Shelley: "I find it best just to do what seems right and give up entirely on what 'should' be." Great advice! I've been trying to animate at 30fps but it's just impossible with the doll. The only decent looking animation I've got has been at 15fps. At the moment this seems right, but once this heat wave is over I'll try more at 24.

So this is the first green screen test I did. It's super short... I honestly just cannot deal with the heat right now. It takes me (at the fastest) 1 minute per frame and and average of 3 per frame constantly deleting and retaking shots. Everytime I get 30 minutes into it I'm just boiling and I stop. Come on September gimme some of that good ice cold weather :P

This is only a rough cut. You can see bits of the rigs still showing up, but the jist of it is there. Though this doll has been giving me tons of trouble, I'm starting to figure it out. I think it's possible to do this. I'm very skeptical about being able to animate this in the way I see it in my head... but I'll get something out of it for sure.

Everyone seems to be getting so much done now and it's quite motivating. Admittedly (blaming the heat) I've been slacking a little bit. Time to jump back on the horse.

The Big Two Four

2009-09-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

So I'm 24 now. Looking back I've really only recently done anything worthwhile :) I still feel like a little kid though. Nothing wrong with being a teensy bit emotionally stunted right? Hoho... but I believe the next few years are gonna be real big for me - I just gotta make it happen that way. Which brings us to the animation front:

The past few days I've been setting up the stage for a Leia test and every step of the way an obstacle presents itself. With the green screen in place and figuring out just how much room the toy will give me animation wise, I set out to start the test. I wanted to check just how well the green screen worked first. So here is an example still. (You can click it for more detail but its quite big so be warned!)

With just a bit of movie magic we get this:

So the key is pretty clean. This was just 2-3 buttons worth. There are some color corrections that could be done but for the most part it works and it works pretty well. However, in just 4 frames I've hit a wall. Loose joints, no tie downs, and might as well be liquored up to hell with how much it doesn't balance. The solution now is to prop it up with a full-time arm as seen in the snapshot with the green screen. The arm now needs to be heavier so it won't tilt over, which I have to put together later as well.

Now even after putting all of that behind me, the hardest part is going to be the animating itself. The joints do give you a lot of freedom to pose, but to animate is a different story. Certain joints have to be twisted and pulled during which another joint could be moved. At this point one longs for the rigidness of wire / b&s armatures. I'm not going to give up on this anytime soon but I know it'll be tough to animate this particular toy. I don't think Chun Li will be as much of a problem. The combination of Leia's clothes and joints pose most of the problems.

The last issue (for now) is the act of animating on the green screen. I've always liked not having to deal with depth / scale in relation to the camera. So I animate over the actual space. When the puppet takes 3 steps it will actually move 3 steps and not "air walk". Here's Justin's Dober doing an air walk:

Maybe in this case animating over the same area might prove easier to do. After the heat dies and I weigh down my arm I'm going to give it another go.

Life in motion

2009-09-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

These past few days have been weird for me, but a ton of things have gone on. I imagine this post will be a long one. First off:

This is some amazing stuff. There are a lot of details that can be worked on but the general idea shows how much potential it has. Ron put this video up on Vimeo where you can download it (much better quality than vixy.net rip off of youtube) and I've been studying it frame by frame. I don't want to expose any work secrets but I believe I know how the motion capture was done... I could be wrong of course. I do know how I would do it at least.

Live action camera movement can be tracked in post and applied to any layer (in this case the puppet animation) as well. It's important to shoot higher res in this case because camera shake will involve a black outline until you reverse-track and composite the animation together with the video. I did the exact same thing with the little fireball test, I'm just not sure how Paul did it per-say. But here is the example of the footage alone being motion tracked (and pointing the plots automatically for you!):

Notice the outline. Doing animation and putting it on top of a shaky video will automatically put it out of frame and break the illusion of integration. With the test done by the gang I hope they used some kind of program to track the camera movement - frame by frame point plotting would be really tedious to do. If you use a program all you have to do is plot the general path for the puppet, in this case an L shape around the corner, animate accordingly, apply the motion track to the animation and it should fuse together well. If there are any areas you feel don't fit you can go in and nitpick at individual frames. I've shown this before but here is the animation on top of the tracked footage I did:

Next up is the motion blur and from Paul's posts it suggests he did them frame by frame. That's a lot of frames to individually motion blur. For Moe's Disco Dance I only had to blur out a wire each frame and that was hell to do already. Paul being the compositor though, he could have done something else.

With After Effects you can literally drag a motion blur effect and calculate how much of it you want at specific times and animate it accordingly depending on the speed of the animation. There are plug ins that are already created to near perfection for cases like this - just insane how fast you can get things done now (and with quality I might add). Some say that using a plug-in for motion blur is too "perfect". I think it needs to be pretty darn perfect. It's not something someone can hand blur easily. Motion blur obeys certain rules and it coincides well with the rules given in a program like After Effects.

There are other details like the lighting (which I'm no expert on), the animation, the shadows and color correction, small hiccups with the motion blur and there's actually a split second where the puppet doesn't align with the footage correctly and gives it a floaty feeling. Small details Ron, Paul, Nick, Mike and LIO along with the rest of the SMA.com community have discussed in length I'm sure. Moving on.

This is Chuck Duke on what I assume is his own personal film. He recently worked on Fantastic Mr. Fox and has some hefty film titles under his belt. He joined up at Stopmotionmagic.com like... 4 days ago? And already has given me such great advice and insight into my own future. I feel pretty lucky that folks like Chuck and you guys and gals here would take the time to teach me. He even worked on Mr. Resistor!

If you have a minute or two head over to SMM.com and take a peek at his photos. This guy means business :)

Edit: Don sent me this link: http://rungfilm.blogspot.com/ for this film. Entitled "Rung". Check it out for more info.

Princess Leia arrived yesterday and I gotta say, the detail that goes into these toys is an amazing thing. I haven't even touched it yet I felt so unworthy. 30+ points of articulation. I hope it works well with me in the animation process. The weapon she came with is gigantic. It's as tall if not taller than the doll itself (stretching over 1 foot long). I'm hoping that doesn't cause too many balance issues later on. And the last note is that she only comes with a set of hands. Usually toys come with replacement hands... a pair of open ones and closed ones. There's ways to cheat it of course and I'm not complaining about it - I'm happy with it thus far.

My sister bought Chun Li for me the other day as a gift for the big 24 and it's on the way. To get over the guilt I called it a "career investment". When I was plotting out the shots, there were a lot of complications involved. Transforming 2D into real 3D can be extremely tricky. I want it to have its edge but I don't want to stray too far from the original design. I've always been drawn to the artwork that went into the following:

The gameplay is extremely fast paced with effects left and right. Not only that but they're big and flashy. I don't know if I can or even want to incorporate all of it but it'll be fun to try. Sometimes keeping it simple can yield the best results. Most of the questions are if it should / can it be done during the animation phase or in post. Furthermore, studying the clip frame by frame shows a lot of frame-blending. It's used in the game as a way of keeping continuity because the moves are so drastic. When footage gets to the extremes of slows or fasts frame blending is usually implemented. Here is a single frame:

And here is the next frame with blend:

This was done in the older versions of the game but the new version achieves the fast pace and is completely clean... only it's shot on 30fps. I've seen this game in play for a long long time and never knew it blended frames in it's animation until I dissected the video. It's really interesting stuff and that's another thing I'll have to experiment with. I really hope to achieve the fast pace feel. I don't know if I should shoot at 30fps or not. At 30fps the animation is clean but it is wildly fast. Would using the video as a straight reference and toning it down to 24fps without frame blending be so bad? Another thing to experiment.

After all of that I haven't even thought of exactly how the animation would be handled. I won't really know until I hold the doll in my hands and do some test animations. How do you animate about 20 kicks in a second and keep it somewhat smooth? Are loops possible in this case? How do you integrate the effects with the animation smoothly? So many questions to be answered and only experimentation and practice will tell.

Sidenote: Mike favorite-ed a Sara Bareilles song "Gravity". I really love her but I've never heard of this song till now. So thanks Mike haha, you've got great musical taste! Learning it on guitar and I've just about got it... it's one of the toughest songs I've ever attempted - so many funky chords. The mood of the song really fits how I feel at the moment. Till' next time.

-Tony.

What a Strange day indeed.

2009-09-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

Today I logged onto AIM and as usual the automatic aim webpage pops up. I always X it out immediately, but I caught a glimpse of a familiar picture right before the page disappeared. I went back to it and saw this:

Student Disappears Just Before Wedding

This is someone I went to middle school with and this wave of reality just dropped my heart to the floor. It wasn't like we were best friends, but still it's such a hard thing to swallow. I'm still in shock and don't even know how to react. Annie - hope you're alright.

Edit:

A mere 6 hours later...

Body thought to be missing Yale graduate student Annie Le found stuffed inside wall at college lab

This world doesn't make sense to me most of the time. Sigh~

Is it bad to abandon your plans? Hah!

2009-09-12T22:24:00.001-07:00

So after researching this whole thing along with Patrick Boivin's toy collecting hobbies and animations, I realized a couple of things.

1. The Toy Industry is a monster and doesn't feel bad about taking hundreds of dollars from loving mothers.

2. Mr. Boivin's Bruce Lee and Iron Man dolls are more expensive than my whole camera setup.

3. I want these toys.

I'll be honest I'm sort of cheating my way out of not having to work with Moe. I'm just disheartened with the turnout and not being able to make anymore with a broken mold. But I gotta say this is exciting stuff. I've purchased the cheapest toy I could find that had a costume and maintained the articulation of the Bruce Lee doll.

Princess Leia in her Boushh hunter disguise.

Under the helm is a resemblance of Carrie Fisher. I'm not a big fan of Star Wars, but I do like Carrie :) The costume is pretty well made and I'm happy with the low low price I ended up paying for it. (25 smackers)

Next up however is a wallet-eater. The Voluptuous Chun Li.

This [Toy] originally went for 200 when it was released. Two Hundred! I tell you this industry is insane haha. The lowest I found was half of that, but the shipping costs are monstrous. I may get it as a birthday gift, but we'll see. I feel so guilty even considering this. But the animation would be so much cooler with this doll in it. Growing up I played the video games so I'm familiar with how she moves and her notable quirks.

Yesterday and today I worked on Chun Li's signature fireball: Kikouken. I frequent Videocopilot.net and Andrew Kramer (guy who posts up free tutorials) made a 3D Light Casting tutorial on their site which really resembled what I was looking for. With a few tweaks and a lot of rewinding... I finally made this:

I used the footage that was given on the website. Came out alright! There are a lot of effects to do with these two dolls and I feel capable of doing all but one. I've never done such fast animation as what I plan to do before and I'll have to study a lot of video to get it right. Not only do I need to learn how to animate it, but I need to learn how to add the effects on top of it.

A New Moe Begins

2009-09-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

Welp, a lot of people in the entertainment industry tell me that its all about the small victories. This morning I whipped up a batch of perfect looking foam, got it all in on the first try and waiting for it to slightly gel before turning up the temp. Bang on the money! About time I got back on the production track!

I did try a couple of front light / back light tests but they turned out horrible. I just don't have the lighting system / room to do anything great, at least that's my excuse for now. I did buy some poster boards to try a bit more later on. But for now I've scaled down the size of the shooting area down to a single curved green poster board. No tie downs, just rigs and a camera. This is going to be interesting. Sadly one of the things on the list have already been knocked off :( Welp, gotta keep on truckin' - it's about that time now... to turn on the oven that is.

P.S. Thanks ya'll for the encouragement! Also thanks Mike for all the info you've generously given to me and the whole SMA community!

Edit: Uh oh, maybe I didn't add enough gelling agent because usually after 20-ish minutes it really thickens up, so far it's still whippey. We'll see after 2.5 hours.
----
NOoooo...

The puppet didn't come out as perfect as I had hoped, but it came out intact. The major problem is the mold (which was poorly made in the first place) has broken. I wanted to pop out one more Moe puppet before it met it's demise but the mold has spoken.

There are issues with the foam though, small bubbles appearing on the surface (not too bad), a big airpocket residing in his lower back (kind of bad), and a small rip on under his right armpit (I think it's fixable).

The plus side is it's cooked properly this time, the smell isn't bad at all (proving that my previous puppet had a lot of ammonia in it still) and I can pull off my film with just the one puppet. There's a shot I want to do that involved two puppets but I think I can composite my way through it. Got my cheap priced (and cheap quality :/) green screen poster board and I'll be on my way with this film... once I get the puppet done... starting tomorrow morning :)

The Next Step

2009-09-04T09:35:00.000-07:00

The film I plan on creating has some fast paced action sequences in it (at least as far as I've intended), but I've never done any type of such animation. SO! I'm going to try and do a Patrick Boivin style fight scene. Anyone who's doing stop motion has probably seen his Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee video:

From what I can tell, I'm almost positive he uses a complete green screen for each puppet, inter-mingling some shots that include both puppets, a panoramic background, and a virtual camera. Add in some cool effects, great sound, and an awesome soundtrack and you got yourself a hit youtube video clip. There are a few things I'll need to put together to achieve this. I believe he uses a lot of braces, as if it were rod puppetry, and masks it out later. I've been doing a little of that with Moe but my helping hands can't take too much weight. So I may need a giant support beam of some sort to hang the helping hands from, which hopefully won't cause lighting problems. But first things first, I have to make 2nd Moe, this time with actual bone structure.

Here's the list of the challenges I hope to complete while doing this clip.

1. Try out the dolly.
2. A rack focus of some sort.
3. Slow motion effect (toughy, but try it out none-the-less)
4. Over a minute of animation.
5. Motion blur.

EDIT:
6. Frontlight / Backlight!

Alright! Here goes!

So much has happened...

2009-08-30T19:22:00.001-07:00

Been quite awhile since the last post, I've been caught up in this frenzy of catching up with the news and it has turned me a little bit bitter. Sometimes I ask friends a few questions and we immediately jump into an argument - the beauty of politics. I feel like I've been so detached from the world, sitting inside my little bubble blissfully ignorant of life outside it. It has become such a ghastly place recently - the U S of A and I'm ashamed I didn't make myself aware of it much earlier.

BUT! On the bright side it gave me a great concept for a film that I think has enough merit to pursue to the end. I don't know if I'll be able to tell the whole story in anything around ten minutes though but we'll see... maybe 20 will do (10 minutes is already ambitious -.-). With a few tips from my friend Jim, I came up with a sketch of the protagonist - Milton James Harvey.

This is the evolution of the Moe character - pretty neat how far he's gone :)

Speaking of Moe I did this really small commercial clip using a Butterfinger bar. I'll admit that I had 8 days to do it, slacked off the first 4, got sick the next 3, and did this overnight haha. I am so driven -.- Because of the time restraint I'm not really proud of it, but practice is practice none-the-less. The light was too low, the clip was too short, the list goes on and on... but my dad and I got to make some chairs!

Here it is:

Moe's Disco Dance - Contest Entry!

2009-08-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

During my time practicing the animation with Moe I came across this contest at etsy.com - a place to buy/sell handcrafted goods. What better than a stop motion animation to fit the theme: "A Handmade Moment".

So I tried a couple of different moves and for the past few days have been working on just this little tiny 30 second clip as an entry. It's amazing what you can learn doing something like this and I've certainly gained a mountain of knowledge from doing this minuscule clip. It seemed easy to do at first but post-production (mostly cause of my own laziness during animation) took far longer than I anticipated. Never-the-less after just two normal work days and then two sleepless nights I've completed it and I'm pretty satisfied.

Any tips / critiques about the animation are extremely welcome. If you really like it drop a vote - but I'd love a comment about anything I can do to up the animation game. Thanks for lookin'!

Even More Practice

2009-07-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

This time to some music by Kevin MacLeod.

Moe Practice

2009-07-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

Tried a shot last night, was hot - had the fan on - ruined the shot (watch the screen), but was good practice none-the-less. Moonwalks are tough.

I also found a few ways around the quality aspect thanks to a comment by Rich Johnson! But for these tests I'm going to stick with the slightly blurred videos. (they're only 5-10 megs a piece and makes for superfast uploading to youtube).

2nd try

1st try

Moe Blink Test / Dragon Stopped Motion

2009-07-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

I've got my little set up running now and it's taking a long time to get used to everything. I was hoping to use Dragon Stop Motion on this little 30 second dance animation but the trial wasn't working after I installed it. Dyami from the Dragon Stop Motion team is trying to figure out a fix as we speak. In the meantime I'm using AnimatorDV simple+ for video assist and Nikon Capture NX2 to capture the high res stills. This morning I watched Nick's "The Seventh Skol" short animation again:

Truly great and you can see why so many people have such high regards for Nick Hilligoss' work. It's just masterful stuff! It's videos like this that really pump you up and drive you to keep pushing forward.

So I thought I'd get my feet wet. I got through a very very small test animation:

Does this video look blurry or is it just me?

I'm still having problems with not shooting enough inbetweens. This animation would look better at 15 FPS, which means I have a lot of smoothing to work on. Another problem is that I can't export into true HD (1920 x 1080). Everytime I try to After Effects crashes. Maybe my desktop just can't handle it :) I'll try it all out on my laptop (which is twice the machine my desktop is) once I get a hold of the discs from my brother.

Till then I have a lot to think about in terms of what my animation is missing. Need more subtle, realistic movements and twice the amount of inbetweens. Better to shoot more and edit out later than to come up short and left caught with my tail between my legs.

I have a few kinks to workout with my setup - getting a better picture out of the video assist, learning more about lighting (so far it's just the Par 46 Can... which is awesome by the way), rigging the puppet better, etc. I'm really looking forward to using Dragon Stop Motion if /when I can and hope to figure out the problem with exporting to true HD - not to mention a loss of picture quality (though for these tests I do shoot with JPEGs). However, first things first - I really need to work on animating :/

Subtle, Flow, Real.

2009-07-21T09:47:00.001-07:00

Saw this clip on Vimeo this morning. My goodness. The clip will speak for itself.

The story of Adi Dassler from Dario Nucci on Vimeo.

More inspiration to push me forward! Moe the test puppet is complete. After messing around with him the arms are obviously now way too long (I had to laugh at myself for that making such a big deal out of how long I wanted the arms in the first place). Never-the-less I have a puppet to really practice animating with. Now that the dust is clearing from the party I'll have to get back on track. I'm planning to move my stuff downstairs and setting up an actual shooting area. I'll try and post my tests next time!

Oh yeah I wanted to add: THAT TEA / COFFEE IN HIS CUP LOOKED AMAZING!

Won't... you be.. my neighbor.

2009-07-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

I was getting ready to paint Moe last night when I realized I didn't know what color I wanted him to be. I went back and searched some sweater vest models to see what colors looked well. I knew the shoes were going to be black and the pants dark grey. Initially I was going to go with a black sweater vest via that Ryan Seacrest picture... but after putting it on paper it didn't seem to flow right. It was like he was trying to hide himself in darkness. I was thinking maybe Pink sweater vest to really go bold, with white dress shirt... looked off. Tried green sweater vest, white shirt, red tie - looked like Wallace's long lost brother. Tried brown, red (which was okay but a little over the top), and many others. I ended up going the calm Mr. Rogers route but I'm not sure if I'm happy with it. The colors look fine (though I think the tie is a mistake... maybe a red tie to complete the Mr. Rogers look. I always do this to myself, mess with colors at the last minute. Here it is:

I've yet to do the skin, pondering what his tone should be still. This of course is just a test puppet so maybe I should give myself some lee-way in terms of taking chances and making mistakes. I really think a red stripe on the tie would look better haha. But I have a bigger problem:

Don't know if you can see it but I'm still blotching the paint job too much. I had to use flash to get the details but my paint doesn't come out as smooth as I want it to. It could be the foam I'm using to do the coats. It doesn't do a really great job so I end up using the brush a lot - which I believe creates the blotchi-ness. It's definitely a step up from the Vanni doll though. Next time I may give his sweater vest a tri-diamond design across the belly.

My sister is getting ready to turn our house into an alchy-fest. Her going away party. Had to clean up my mess (which was huge) and won't be able to break it out for 2 days. All dandy though I could use the rest and draw a few doodles for a short animation. Gives me time to think about the colors too. I'll try a crazier color combo next time! Till then~

A Successful Failure keeps me a Smug Sailor

2009-07-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I had an attempt of Moe's Foaming go slightly wrong. I didn't mix enough foam even though the mixture came out PERFECTLY! I baked it anyway to see if the foam would even come out (where the feet / head create slight pockets) aand it did! His head was hollow because of the lack of foam but I was extremely happy that the mold worked haha, phew! I saved the armature by cutting off the foam... which might be useful as body parts in some test animations.

Here is Moe with his split head - notice how it JUST creates his body form, almost no spill haha.

I went at it again when the temperature allowed; 6 AM in the morning it was 70 degrees. Unbelievable! I waited until midnight the night before last to mix some foam but it was still high 70's with humidity and I've had a lot of foam curing way too fast in those conditions to try that again. This time I mixed more foam only to be too confident with how much I had and come out with the same problem. This one however is salvage-able (is that a word?). His left lower leg is a tad hollow but I think I can bulk it up a little during the cabosil paste phase. The rest of the puppet is pretty solid and holds it's shape very well.

I'm very very very happy that I've made friends with Foam Latex - we finally see eye to eye. I'm starting to judge on the fly when to stop and move on to the next step of mixing, etc. While touching up the seams with the soldering iron I kept thinking of how terrible this smell must be for my health via Shelley's comment on the previous post. I took a couple of breaks inbetween each 10 mins or so of working just to catch some fresh air. Felt really nice! Even with a mask on the stuff just stinks while burning. It gets worse if it starts blowing into your eyes. Work with a fan or behind the wind!

I've noticed that I've done a bit too much lately and my hands are really feeling tired and sore. Actually yesterday I was just pretty flat out exhausted. This heat doesn't help either.

I was going to do another armature / foaming right before posting this but I feel like I should take a day or two off and just read up about lighting. I'd like to dodge the whole 500 watt bulb scenario and go with the 30-150 range. I have lights saved from Live Action experiments just incase I need a big powerful light but I'm hoping a long fluorescent tube will be all I need as far as big lights go. My father and I will try to recreate some of Nick Hilligoss' "cheap lights" and maybe purchase a pair of small Par Can lights as pinspots and barn yard window them up with cinefoil. Another project for father and son to work on :)

Hope Nick doesn't mind me stealing and posting his picture here!

I'll take 2 days or so to touch Moe up with paint - get some rest and try to do a few animation tests. It's amazing how just a small little flappy wire in his mouth changes the animation game. I've got my entire camera setup tested and working. I was really worried about the video assist but a little bit of black tape keeps the cam pretty stable on the viewfinder. The picture quality isn't the best but it's great for a video assist. I should have taken a snap and posted it - maybe next time. Finally got all that mumbo jumbo out of the way.

I'm finally moving out of the technical stuff and stepping my way into the fun stuff. For Stop Motion Magic's challenge (a tribute to Star Wars) I was just going to put a lightsaber in Moe's hands and let him loose. As I was drawing the sketch...

All that stuff at the bottom was me goofing around for halfland sea creatures for Shelley's film haha. I'm not the most creative guy :P I wanted to make a creature based on a play on words like "Singray" or "Key Serpent". After 5 minutes I saw how sucky of an idea that was - just look at those drawings haha. I realized there sort of is one already made "SeaLion"

I thought the design was pretty cute but I had no idea how to go about making a puppet like that with the flowing mane and all. So I left it at that and I messed around further with Moe:

I know its hard to see but I like this picture of Moe:

It's probably the closest to what I had originally planned for him to look. Again it's not amazing but I truly shock myself sometimes - the fact that my drawing looks like an actual person haha. If you saw my drawings as a kid you might have this urge to throw up just a little bit. They were hideous. In anycase I'm looking forward to finally animating this sucker.

And speaking of animating this sucker... Dragon Stop Motion is expanding to the PC market. A huge jump for PC users doing stop mo. This is just terrible news for me as I've always loved this program and have fought off purchasing such because it was never available for me. AND THEN THEY GO AND DO THIS. How dare they. My wallet...

So I requested a trial hah and they've sent it to my mailbox which I'll activate as soon as Moe is painted. Realizing that I was instantly ready to drop 250 dollars on a stop motion program really got me thinking about being so new to this and going too far with it. I haven't done nearly enough testing and practice and I'm looking at these lights / rigs / programs as if they were new cars. In the end I'll probably get it - but not until I've done some extensive testing to the point where I can call myself a stop motion animator. That'll be awhile. To top it off I've even discussed taking over my brother's detached garage (like a seperate giant toolshed now) to use as my very own stop motion studio. The space is great - the room is easy to get pitch black and it's seperate from the house so I can be a little noisy if I chose and have a little privacy.

I keep thinking... this is either going to be a giant success or..

a giant success. :)

UPDATE: Today I just saw this Par Can 46 Package (comes with lamp / clamp / safety cord / 4 gels) on ebay for only 11 dollars! The shipping of course cost more than the darn thing itself - total was 27 bucks which I thought was a steal. The lamp is 200w and requires no assembly - just find a place to hang it and plug it in. I really want the Par Can 16s or 20s to use as pinspots but I really need to test the waters first. I can buy 100w halogen bulbs for the worklights I have and force it out of a hole to emulate a spotlight... possibly.

I've been reading Mike's (Darkstrider.net) site and blog with all these lighting posts as well as the threads he made at SMA.com. TONS of information that I couldn't soak all in one day. There's fingers and dots and all sorts of body parts I couldn't wrap my head around. The hard part is I have no goal in what kind of lighting I'm aiming for right now. I don't have a set - just a puppet in front of a wall. So I think it's best for me to try a light or two and figure out what I need first.

My dad is able to do Nick's low voltage light kit setup, apparently it is "SO SIMPLE" according to my daddio. "You just do that and plug that in and done" Haha.

I may try doing one light with the kit just to see how its all done up close... and how a 30w bulb fares with the overall lighting. You guys know how amazing Nick's stuff always looks :) He's doing 'something' right!

'Hard' part is over!

2009-07-11T07:00:00.001-07:00

The mold making process really tires me out. I've been using WED-clay to make the walls for the mold and by the second time around I knew it was the wrong material to go with. I just had this giant block of it now so I'm using it. My little niece loves playing around with water and combined with this clay does miracles in creating a mess - which my niece also loves doing. At least she's getting a kick out of it :) Next time I'm gonna go with Klean? or Kleen Klay as recommended by Ron Cole (Isomer) in his badass mold making tutorial videos! It looks easy to handle and is re-usable so an investment is well worth it.

Over the course of making the initial wall as Kathi did in her video, my energy just gets zapped to hell and by the plaster stage I was really cutting corners which is a huge mistake. I just hope I didn't do too much to create a faulty mold - would be heartbreaking. Normally I have over an inch on all sides of the sculpt but this time parts of it came in just under an inch -.-! All the important details are still intact as far as I know. We'll see later today - I like to let it dry for at least half a day to put my mind at ease.

So I was reading up on the handbook at SMA.com getting some insight on urethane foam and puppetmaking in general and came across this message that I think Mike (Strider) posted:

"Working with foam latex requires a considerable set of skills that must be developed over time... such as sculpting and moldmaking. Before diving in head first and investing in the expensive equipment and materials, it would be wise to develop these skills and familiarize yourself with some of the various techniques and materials involved."

Hah, maybe I should have heeded that warning :) The reason I jumped into Foam Latex was because of Gerald's Last Day. When I saw how capable Foam Latex was I bit the bait and was reeled in. Of course most of it is the animator, I was just impressed how much movement there was and I wanted a piece of it. But I'm pretty lucky I've gotten anywhere with this process. I feel like I didn't have to spend the crazy amounts I had anticipated and I've learned so much throughout - I'm very thankful for all of the info at that site.

Sidenote: Got my whole camera set up bought and paid for. Webcam -> Angle Viewfinder -> Nikon D70 -> Laptop -> Nikon Capture -> Camera Control Pro -> Me. Feels very nice to have the whole set :) Only thing left is the lighting and the immense process of LEARNING lighting.

Relief...

2009-07-07T19:30:00.000-07:00

Finally. Done with the sculpt. It pays off to have a design beforehand. Cause if you're like me and you don't - sculpting on the fly can make your face cry. And I'm not going to lie, I had a few tears to dry.

Here he is:

I'm very happy how the hands turned out. Just gotta put in beads for his eyes before making his mold as well as do another once-over to check for any details. Other than that, DONE!

Moe's Progress

2009-07-05T20:14:00.001-07:00

Morning:
Tried a lot of ways to get finer detail with him. Ended up taping a twisted wire (with loop at end) taped to a pen. 2 more days to finish (I lied before hehe)

Sculpting is really growing on me! Quite fun :)
Starting details:

Left Hand:
Or round fingers better?

Maybe somewhere inbetween?

Now thats 'Moe' like it!

2009-07-02T21:08:00.001-07:00

First off, my father and I were talking about the dolly and he had insulation foam in his hand. He said he had tons of it and would make the camera tray move smoother and more quiet. He was right - but because the design of it all is so cheap it isn't PERFECT although with the foam it runs pretty darn smoothly now. But, he wants to make another one - we might be able to re-use half of the stuff we've already built. He wants a thicker drive shaft, bearings for the drive shaft to remain steady, and possibly foam in a couple of places to try and make the rumble of the dolly almost nil. He likes doing this stuff and it shows. We've always had a hard time getting along but since this whole stop motion turn we've been working together really often - its quite nice.

I guess I take after my dad some senses. I'm reworking Moe - this time with everything I've learned put into action. Moe 1.0 I thought had too skinny of limbs - it wasn't true. His limbs were fine I should have just used 1/16" armature wire. However I did cut off his mouth - which I shouldn't have done either. His design was also very rubberhose-y. No curves except for his dome haha. So this time I've shrunken his head and gave him some more style. He'll be a little bit more dashing this time around. On top of that I was looking up preppy clothing images and Ryan Seacrest came up all over the place. One of the images really worked - Sweater vest!

Here's the progress:

Building it up.

Forming it out.

So what I've come to want:

Long limbs / extremities for better motion control.
Not to work with super sculpey heads if I can avoid it.
More detail.
Facial expressions (brows, mouth, eyes). Clay brows, flapper jaw for mouth, beads for eyes.

I may elongate his legs a centimeter or so - his fingertips can almost touch his toes with his arms just dangling down :D

He'll be wearing a sweater vest on dress shirt with tie and brown or black slacks with fancy shoes courtesy of Ryan Seacrest. He'll also be wearing a much smaller head on his shoulders. I imagine it will take me 2 days to finish this sculpt in full detail. 1/16" wire for the upper body is the key! This time I'm getting it right :)

*Also found out that my sis put the shutter settings on her point/shoot camera for 1 sec - thats why they kept blurring. See the diff between the first and second picture!*

Vanni's Power Drink / Camera Dolly Built

2009-06-30T01:26:00.000-07:00

Man with the failure I had last night and the heat still sweatin' me I would have never thought I'd have the willpower to do another test animation today. But then I did. I saw these grey bricks in the front yard lined up and it looked so much like Justin Rasch's Flea test animation that I was going to do a spoof of it with Vanni. I sketched it out on paper but it got so hot that from the first step I just decided to do a straight ahead animation and get it done with. There were only 3 bricks though haha so I had to use the 55mm and shoot up real close.

The movement is pretty crude at parts and I really need to find a garage to live in so I can animate there - the carpet is just a no-no :)

Feels nice to finally animate my own puppet. Vanni has tons of problems with range of motion but I'll be prepared next time when making another character.

Edit: Fixed my entire blog width to fit the wide embeded video :) Much roomier!

Update: I walked downstairs and my dad comes in:

Dad: You do it yet?
Me: Do what?
Dad: The thing, you finish?
Me: What thing?
Dad: *points to garage*
Me: Oh you mean the camera thing? The wood is still where you left it.
Dad: *walks away*
Dad: *comes back 5 seconds later* Ok let's go.
Me: Alright.

*click pictures to enlarge*

We used a lot of stuff sitting around the house. Pipes, all the wood, screws, washers. I bought that threaded rod + circular casings + coupling nut + regular nuts. It cost about 10 bucks since we had all the wood at home. Pretty amazing. It isn't perfect and we didn't expect it to be perfect - but its way better than I thought it was going to turn out. Towards the last inch on one side it stiffens up (and we found out why).

If you're building a camera track here are things to remember:

-Don't bend your threaded rod (I did haha)
-Don't be fancy and try to make a closed end at each head where the pipe doesn't follow all the way through (Dad really liked the closed look) It caused the most trouble and ultimately lead to that last inch stiffening. Does look nice though :)
-Make sure you know where your screws are going and how thick the wood they are going into are. Buy screw lengths accordingly.
-Sometimes simplest things give the best results.

I'm very happy with it and my dad says he'll make an even better / simpler / prettier one later after learning some mistakes here. He's actually a little ashamed of it and didn't even like that I'm putting pictures of it here. I'm just glad this is one part of stop motion that didn't take me weeks to learn and if it comes to it we can build another one in 2-3 hours.

Feelin' hot Hot HOT!

2009-06-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

The great equalizer: heat. Turns everyone into a puddle of lazy. If you say you're different than your pants my friend are on fire. I just had another adventure. Shopping with my dad is always an adventure. But we managed to grab what we needed in order to build a camera rig. The Jig part (what the track will actually stand on) will be done some other time, we're just worried about the actual track at the moment.

So we get on home and it is blazing hot. We look at each other and say - yeah... another day. As excited as I am to soon have a fully functional dolly. IT IS JUST TOO HOT! I wanna enter John's (castlegardener) little animation test at stopmotionmagic.com, but even at 11PM the heat is just destroying me. I'm gonna try and do it tonight - might take like 4 hours.

I've been itching to animate Vanni, her head turned out really disgusting so I made a Mr. Potato-esque head for her. It looks more 3d and less flat, but it also looks somewhat different than the original sketch. I like it though. However I've only made 1 mouth for it, a pair of glasses made out of a nyquil box - no eyes. So not much happening with facial expressions, but its all good! I'm gonna hit the bed at noon for a long nap, hopefully pass up the heat through sleep and wake up later in the evening :)

Another note, I tried the spycam my brother never used and it just doesn't do the trick. It's meant for a simple "who's at the door" setup, doesn't zoom in nearly enough and has a shiny round lens at the front - kinda like a webcam. So I think I have to go back to the DV Cam sitting next to the DSLR. At least this has color and I can see it on the computer screen.

In the mean time, gonna hit up some guitar!
Playing: Jason Mraz - Mr. Curiosity <- tricky to imitate the live version with solo guitar! Update: Just did a small test animation using the set up, with the DV cam... not what I wanted but it still works fine. What wasn't fine was the animation haha. A lot of tweaks need to be made to the puppet to get a better range of motion out of it. Puttin' down notes for the next character, maybe I'll revisit Moe with a new armature approach. Anyway I got a mere 55 snaps and I'd already bumped my set - which is just two pieces of wood on a table -.-

Felt good to move a puppet again, but sadly I don't think I'll be able to enter into the puppet drinking challenge. We'll see what tomorrow brings. I'll put that little test together tomorrow too and if its even worth looking at I'll post it.

Paint + Me = Suck

2009-06-23T17:34:00.000-07:00

A proven equation. I spent last night painting the beautiful foam latex puppet and transformed it into a MONSTROSITY! Of course it isn't that bad but I'm not really happy with it. Again learning much from it which is a huge plus. The plus side is this will allow me tons of animation practice. Here are a few snapperoos:

Alright those weren't so bad. I think being up close and personal with the puppet makes me judge it more critically. But then I turned off the lights and got down and dirty (G Rated).

see the bulgey non-smooth bumperific seams still showing. The paint job also isn't spectacular. It all started with the woodburning step. I was so afraid to go too far with it. Next time I wont wuss on it too much. Next is paste-patching the seams and smoothing it out. I did a sloppy job there too. Then to put the cherry on top of the cinammon on top of the whipped-cream on top of the ice cream that makes the sundae, my layers of paint weren't thin enough (per coating) and it gets blotchy. At first using the foam to dab the paint on I thought I was doing it wrong. Turns out I started it right then screwed it up as I went along haha. The sweater turned out pretty smooth and the rest got crappier and crappier.

Here you can see the seam line from top to bottom. It looks pretty nasty, but I had to take like 15 pictures at a certain angle to get this seam line to really show. It's not as bad as I'm making it out to be, but its definitely something I MUST fix from here on out. Also I was mixing the pros-aide and the paint in poor proportions. I was messing around with it and its not nearly as flexible as I'd hoped. I guess that means I did every single step wrong hahaha...

All is good though. At least 2 more of these puppets to make :) Waiting on foam to come! and 300 feet of 20 gauge wire <- my new fave wire! After watching a film "Dried Up" by Jeremy Casper on SMA.com which you can watch HERE.
They discuss a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff. They built a cheap yet sturdy camera rig:

That's the next step for me. My dad wants a piece of this action too and once he has a free day we'll head out to grab the wood / pipes / washers and nuts to build this baby. Then it's frickin' animating time. YES! (jump in mid air and freeze frame).

Feelin' like Gold!

2009-06-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

Well first off I want to thank Mike (darkmattr.blogspot.com) and Justin (justinrasch.blogspot.com) and everyone even reading this for the continued support! Here's the story:

After what one would call a "valley" in the stop motion rollercoaster life, I decided to take some time away from it all and recover from the battles that my immune system had fought. Actually my immune system just took off their undies and waved it on a stick in surrender because I was sick for days. During which my niece had a little zoo stage play at school and my brother snapped some pictures. I'm a big fan of candid closed-eyed pictures. Always gives me a chuckle. This is Trinity the Panda Zookeeper:

After a few days of rest my sister started to pack her apartment belongings to get ready for her move to Colorado. She had a few pieces of furniture that I couldn't resist grabbing. Most notably, THE BED.

King sized mattress of heaven. My old bed was a queen size and had been around for years. It started giving me problems with sleep and man was I happy when my sis said she was giving me this bed. It alone has changed a big part of my life haha. Friggin' awesome.On top of that she had this really nifty coffee table. When I first saw this I kept thinking how perfect it was to manipulate specs of gravel / salt / sugar/ powder / what have you for things like water scenes. But to be honest it's nice having a coffee table in my room. I had cleared everything other than a bed and a computer desk to make the maximum available space for stop motion stuff. Whenever people wanted to bring food up here to eat / watch a movie they wouldnt have a place to do so. Problem solved! I'm going to give up my computer desk though and sacrifice it to give that short table in the picture above much more height. My sister also gave us her newer, much nicer computer desk - which is in my brother's room at the moment... buuut I may steal that while he's away at the gym - WUhahah.

So this is the first "successful" foaming that my sis and I did about 2 weeks ago. It looks so promising!

Handy dandy mixer which turned out to work surprisingly well considering how cheap it was (10 bucks)
Moe's mold + really really crappy armature complete with really crappy pro-poxy wannabe putty. Kind of fitting that his mold looks sort of like a tombstone. This thing is gigantic by the way. Thats about 14-15 inches from the bottom to the top.

My clean workspace. This is the sculpt of Vanni's body, the hands always take me the longest so it hurts to see them fall apart afterwards.
Moe's gruesome mutilated sculpt after taking it out of the mold. From the start it had pocket problems haha... poor poor Moe. You shall live again one day!

This was the first baking (2 weeks ago). The problem with this one was that it didn't cook all the way. I wasn't sure what to expect, didn't know how long to cook and at what temp. This was my first time trying to low-temp cook it. I put it at 130F for 4 hours. That was the plan at least. It went on until 1AM though and I had fallen asleep. I didn't wake up until 2:20AM and even then the puppet wasn't fully cooked. I only realized it wasn't fully cooked when I took it out in excitement and basically destroyed it before seeing that I could have put it back and cooked it longer. It was alright though because the armature in this thing wasn't anything to be proud of. It was a definite learning experience though. Cook it at a higher temp!

This was my very own trial. I was sick and didn't want to continue with it... but I had to keep trying. I knew going in that it wasn't going to come out right because the bulk inside the armature was too loppy for the mold to fit in place. I know I should have checked it first and all but my mind was kind of a mess. But one thing I did right was mixing the foam by feel and not by a timer. Either way I wanted to try cooking it at 150 this time just to see how it would come out. 150F at 3.5 hours and it STILL wasn't cooked enough. Came out way better than I thought... but still not right. It dented just slightly. I was going to use this as practice for painting and stuff but because it smelled I left it outside. After I had recovered from my illness it had already been 4 days left out in the yard and it started discoloring and stuff. I got a little practice out of it but no color tests.

Here is the mixing table with a very Kathi Zung-looking armature. As you can see the foam kit is almost depleted, gotta order another one real soon.
A close up of Vanni's bottom-half of the mold.
So first batch gels as we're pouring in the foam into the mold. We tried to go by using a timer again. Suggested gelling agent 14g per 150 foam latex base batch. I used 75g of foam latex so 7g of gelling agent should be the recommended. I used 4 grams of gelling agent here and it gelled EXTREMELY quick. Foam is fustrating.
Here is our dog Jay, trying to console me. And on that note we tried again. 2.5-3 grams of gelling agent this time and going by feel now instead of a timer.
Success, here it is in the oven. While that's baking I'll show you a few other designs I tried.

This is my nephew Thomas. Spending days of the week with him I have to look at this face constantly. One of my short scripts called for a baby so I thought why not. This is what I came up with.

He actually has a shirt like that... haha.

Here's the original sketch of Vanni.
And here is the head made out of baked sculpey. Screw-head in the mouth as a soft-key for the replacement mouths.

And here are sketches of two of my old friends from elementary days:

So with the mold finished baking - 175F at 2 hours 22 minutes.

PRESTO MODESTO! It actually looks use-able! Booyeah!

Blurry backshot!
Here it is after my crude cut of the flashing.
Backshot.
Here is my oven mit. I got this at a thrift store and I was quite mislead. I still say it's the container's fault and not mine. It was on the wall so I couldn't see behind the glove... but I could see that it had something with the same pattern behind it. I figured it was another glove! The label says: "2 Pc. mit set". I opened it up to see it was a little teapot mit + base. It looks awesome and manly to boot.

After cutting the flashing I realized I didn't have a wood burning tool. I almost used an old hot-glue gun to do the job, but I figured I would need something specficially to burn foam and just went out and bought one. First time I ever went to home depot looking for something, going there, finding it, purchasing what I intended to buy, and leaving there a happy customer.

Another shot of it after some slight detailing. I was afraid to go too deep haha... even though Kathi says it's better to go deep and recover what was lost with the cabosil paste. I just couldn't hurt this one.
After I finished (besides the things under her foot).

I'm really happy with this wood burning tool. It's pretty thin at the tip which lets me make the burns more accurately. Also it wasn't tooooo hot allowing me to actually touch parts accidently without making a scratch.

My dog expresses my feelings. *sighhh* time to relax. I'm letting the foam cool for just a tiny bit before I wash the mold release off and let it dry till tomorrow.

Above it all I've been getting back into being more active and healthy. I've realized how taxing stop motion can be and it doesn't help to be a giant flubbering mass of procrastination. I kind of missed the old days of just hanging at the courts till the lights shut off at midnight, camping, swimming, just enjoying the world. It's not for everyone but I think it'll actually help me maintain my momentum in this crazy stop motion world.

Hope to post more soon. Thanks again for the support guys... it means much more than you know! See ya next time!

One Fever to Another

2009-06-12T10:06:00.001-07:00

So most people who know me personally can attest to the fact that my immune system does not exist. Nickname: Bubbleboy , me, has been struck with fever down to me just sprawled out on the bed for days. But I think I've finally overcame the situation and it's time to jump back on this out-of-shape horse.

Complication 1: Did I mention I hate home depot. They don't carry pro poxy! Oy... I'm positive they have what I need... at another store location in another city. It's like there's this imaginary foot behind my butt constantly swinging forward every step of the way. Anyway, I ordered the pro poxy and it's arriving tomorrow.

Complication 2: Crappy armatures are my specialty. I've had much practice at them. But just to change things up I made something useable. I tried Mike Brent's hand wire configuration but all I could conjure up was a pile of poo. 1/8" wires were also a bit too thick for my puppet being so short (the shorter the wire the harder it gets to animate / bend). I've worked my way around a few problems and I've found what will work out for me in the end. But the big thing I'm missing to make the armature much easier to build and handle is the pro poxy - which should be fixed pending Complication 1.

Complication 3: Foam is not my friend. But like most desperate outcast kids I'm going to force it to become my friend. I figured out what I was doing wrong and got the mixing times almost down to a science. I took pictures of my most successful foam trial yet but my sis has it on her camera (left it in San Francisco of course!) and I'll get the pictures off of that later tonight.

As far as puppet making goes I think I'll finally, and I know this has been a long time coming, be able to get out with a fully animate-able puppet complete with head. Heads are always nice to have. I still have to do the replacement mouths but honestly I'm just looking forward to getting the foam part just right. It'd be nice to not have to worry about foaming in the future.

I'm also writing up a small story around Vanni. When the puppet (x3) comes out complete and painted I'll be doing animation tests with it while I make the secondary characters. One of whom is based on myself as an infant.

I'm going to limit this first short bumper-status film to 3 characters max. I think I'm speculating a little too much when I need to get these hands dirty with animation. The puppetmaking hump is almost over... CANT WAIT!

Side note my sis is about to move away - accepted to Pharmacy school in Denver - and I wish her the best of luck. She's taking this weekend to look at the apartments over there. I'm putting together a small story pitch for when she gets back. A good feeling getting back into the habit of making small goals and reaching them.

Post some pics soon as I get em!

Officially back in the game.

P.S. Go watch Up! (first act is classic)

The Death of Moe, but another says hello

2009-05-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

I'm grieving! Oh man... the last week has been such a nightmare. As I was making the mold of Moe (which I still have) I realized my brilliant plan of keeping it simple but slightly rough was actually slightly naive and stupid. The bulges of his shoes / head / nose / bowtie etc, protrude into the mold and create a deeper pocket for the foam to rip as you take the puppet out. The arms were too skinny to get a nice surround of foam around the wires, the eyes / buttons did come out very nicely though. The solution would be to just slice off the head and use a body, stick a sculpey baked head on it and start painting... but the arms are giving me an immense amount of trouble.

It's sad to say but I think I have to scrap Moe.

I worked 4 days straight from the mold making to taking the final baking of foam and I gotta say it's rough to come out of all of this without something to animate. However, I didn't come out of it empty handed. I learned everything I needed to fix for the next design and one of the most important things I've gotten a hang of is MIXING THE FOAM.

My goodness. That foam just hates me. My sister and I made half-batches (half the recommended 150 grams) and the mixture was just SO SENSITIVE to everything. I ended up using 1/3rd of the gelling agent and cutting down the refining time... it was just a mess. It took 4 batches until we got something at least USEABLE. But you know, it's been said and done - foaming takes time to get used to. So I can't be angry at it.

To top it off, in the middle of all this I've gotten so sick that I've been in bed for the last 3 days doing absolutely nothing, until last night. Quite a rollercoaster and I don't think I could have even gotten through it the first time if my sister hadn't been there helping me. So to pay a tribute to her I designed a very dorky version (not much difference to the real thing) of her as a kid. I call her Vanni. I made a head out of sculpey and cheated the eyes to where she's forever wearing these big nerdy glasses. It's nothing fancy, just a replacement mouth head without other expression changes... I may regret not giving room for eyebrows but we'll see. Can always make another :)

I'll post pictures next time around, my illness is finally fading away and come tomorrow I'll be making another, much smaller, much simpler mold. Same set, same equipment, just different character for the first film test. Can't let anything bog ya down! Till next time!

Shopping Sickness and a lesson learned

2009-05-23T20:10:00.000-07:00

So today I checked the list as I was getting ready to head out to grab the oven. The drive was an hour away but that didn't really seem to matter. The shopping list has almost been completely checked off. I only need to grab a scale and a mixer and I'm done. Or so I thought. We got to the guy's house where the oven was and my heart cried a little... and in the midst of crying was able to let out a little "ha ha".

It wasn't in the greatest shape, but that didn't matter either. I just wanted an oven to continue the process, especially since I haven't done much for the last 4-5 days. I made sure to ask my parents if they knew how to work around the wiring if it didn't come complete with a neat little plug. I made sure to ask a couple of times before even inquiring about it. Of course when I brought it home nobody had any idea what to do with it. On top of that the model was old and most ovens these days have a 4-wire connection vs. the 3-wire from decades past. I liked the size of the oven and it was the only reason I went as far as I did to get it. Needless to say it's now most likely 50 dollars worth of trash.

I hit a small snag today though in the midst of this whole journey, I was actually angry about all of this and quite tired of the whole shopping experience. Art stores here just have absolutely nothing in terms of puppet making supplies and it gets a little fustrating sometimes. The whole oven deal really riled up my Dad and I, but after about 5 minutes of arguing I had to just remind myself what the big picture was. It's cool to know that I can get that heated up and can shut it off with a simple reminder that hey, making a film isn't smooth sailing. You're gonna hit some bumps and the quicker you get over yourself, the quicker you get over it, the quicker you get some work done, and the quicker you can create some magic.

I did learn one thing today. Don't do something unless you're satisfied with it. In this case my heart knew not to take that oven, yet my brain channeled a gigantic wave of procrastination that kept saying "just get it so we can check it off".

On top of all of that, my Dad doesn't even want another oven hooked up around the house. "Can't wire it up" he says. It would have been nice to know that before I spent so much time looking for one, but hey it's all good. I'm going to use the low-temp baking method inside the house that Dave Hettmer at SMA.com stands by. Since I'm going to only be baking one character thrice times I think it'll be okay. It'll just take about 4 hours a piece.

Tomorrow is a big day... I'm going to screw up my very first foam latex puppet :) Stoked! Till then I'm going to just relax with guitar in hand and vocals out loud. Life is good when I'm just singin' the night away with these songs:

Melissa Polinar - Meant to be
Jason Mraz - Live High
Rynten Okazaki - City of Tokyo
Komatsubara Shun - Kujira
Kotaro Oshio - Angel's Sunday
Mariah Carey - My All

Smoothing Sculpt / Minding Mouths

2009-05-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

Smoothing it once over with citri-solve it turned out okay. There are a lot of bumps and marks still obviously seen but I kind of like it like that... a little rough. The bumps on his head actually look nice. There's a pathetic attempt to give his arms form, dent at the elbow and small bicep bulges... but I sorta failed there haha. I think I'll keep it this way for now and see how the molding process goes. If the puppet comes out crappy then I'll know maybe to smooth it out at this stage more. Here it is!

I'm probably going to slice off his bottom lip tonight. :]
I needa start to get down how I want the wire armature to be formed and plan out the different mouth shapes. These past 2 days I haven't done much and I feel slacky already... the next 2 days are just waiting around for matierals to come :/

The Sculpt, The Room and The Whirlwind

2009-05-18T07:06:00.000-07:00

First off, apologies for the blurry pictures. I was messing with the shutter speeds and hand-held shot these with 1.5 second shutters and thus, the blurry effect. Starting off with the sculpt:

This is an early shot. I ended up giving him a collar and propping the bowtie forward a little bit.

The 28mm lens really skews the dimensions a little bit, it's a lot more lanky in person than in these pictures. I had a few ideas for his outfit. It started with a magician get up, then a tux, then a shirt with a tux painted on it. In the end I just made him wear a dorky desk-job outfit and I plan to put a piece of fabric (imagine wearing a towel cape) behind him. If that towel thing doesn't work his getup still seems fine. I think I'll color his outfit in the ways of Dwight Schrute.
I'm extremely proud of myself for even being able to do this, as simple as it is. I thought for sure that I was gonna have to ask a friend to do a sculpt for me. It may be a little ugly and crude, but it turned out way better than I first imagined. This was a crucial victory for me as now I know I can do the entire thing on my own. Help is definitely appreciated but I know at least that I won't get stuck anywhere if I'm going solo.

I know that the shoes are no special feat but I'm so proud of them haha. Maybe it's because they were the first things I've ever sculpted in my life. Ever.

Here are a few snaps around the room, again sorry for the blurries.

These are the only two tools I use. I should get a few more but these are working fine for now. The rubber tipped brush is my favorite. Here is the rig I work on.

And the camera I shoot with:

Hah. Just kidding. The guy I bought the d70 from threw his box away when he bought it. He recently bought a d90... get this... "for fun" so he didn't need the "leftovers" that was his d70 anymore. My sister picked it up for me and told me of all the cameras and lenses he had at his place. A spanish camera enthusiast he was. He kept the d70 in pristine condition. To be honest I was afraid of handling the camera because it looked so nice and I didn't wanna mess it up.

And... the final curtain:
The Whirlwind Effect. Here is how it works. When someone asks you what the hell happened to your room to make it look this way. A whirlwind did it. In the next 2-3 days I'm going to clean this whole place up and organize my tools / materials.

The foam material is coming soon. I'm grabbing my oldschool oven on saturday and the only thing left to do is grab a mixer, preferabbly 3-speed, and possibly a pin-spot light. I'm thinkin maybe a 16 Par Can that'll run about 15 bucks.

After cleaning up I think I'll be ready to create some puppets and set up the camera for animation. Just need to citri-solve the sculpt and smooth it out after I finish the hands.

Another major concern is the mouth. I want to go with replacement mouths but the only reference I have is Justin Rasch's little girl puppet . He uses a flat foam surface with baked clay replacement mouths... I think. I don't even know how they can stick together so well... foam and clay. For Moe I would have to work with the flat surface of the upper jaw and replace the bottom lips. I don't know how heavy baked clay ends up being but I'm hoping it'll work out for the best. But all in all it's a blast.

Excitement she wrote!

Testing the waters

2009-05-16T11:13:00.001-07:00

Here is a very uninteresting picture, I took about 5 pictures but didn't realize what kind of power a single open window had in shadowing the room. Check this out - this is right under a lamp that in person blasts a pretty mean light. But the natural sunlight to the side dimmed it so much. Just goes to show how little I know about all of this.

I've been waiting for a design, but decided to just go ahead and try sculpting. Turned out quite well. I made most of the lower body, just need to bulk up around the thigh a tiny bit, smooth it out and add a couple of details. I'll take pictures of it later tonight along with the room im working with at the moment. It's really clean... -.-

I thought sculpting wouldn't be that bad, but it is toughhh stufff... I knew this was going to be the hardest step for me but jeez lah weez. It's still fun as hell to do though, I'll get back to more tonight!

Update:

Update again: It took 2 hours and 100 actuations, but I have a feel for the camera and configured a lot of settings to my liking. It's late and stuffy, just gonna head to bed - post some of the pics tomorrow.

The Foam Latex Adventure

2009-05-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

Alright, things are stepping out of the realm of fantasy and coming into reality. Camera and lens are soon to be set (shooting on a Nikon D70 - excitement!), ordering a plethora of foam latex / sculpting / mold-making products from FXwarehouse, storyboarding a very small short and waiting on a design fix from good ol' Jim Truong.

As early as I can remember (we've known each other since pre-school), Jim has always been THE artist to compare to. I was sure that he was going to be huge in the art world but life led him down another path. I was always sad about that but I'm going to get another taste of that creativity again and I'm pretty stoked about it. If you're reading this Jim, isn't too late to change!

I was expecting to spend a small fortune on doing this, but I dug into my RED Scarlet fund and just went straight for Stopmo materials. Camera(d70) + Lens(Macro 55mm lens / 28mm wide lens) + Puppet making process kit(the whole shabang) will add up to cost about 750 dollars. This includes an oven, a mixer, 50+ puppet making items and the whole camera setup. I think I came out pretty lucky with a price tag like that.

The best part about all of this is that everyone seems to be turning the corner in the support area. I'm not getting anymore of these:

"There's no money in this!"
"I hear Pharmacy is the new cool thing."
"You're crazy."
"Uhhh....."
"You know your cousin just got a new job. He's such a great knowledgable person."
*Stare* "..." *Walk away*
"I was drafted into the army to witness the most awful things and live through unimaginable situations for my youngest son to fiddle with paint brushes and make little doo-dads"

That's right folks! That last quote was just a joke but sadly the rest were not. I've gained a lot of momentum in just a month's time and I don't expect to slow it down at all. Watching the guys at SMA.com really fuels my drive to keep pushing forward.

An even cooler aspect about this stop motion adventure is that my dad and I have been able to work on little gadgets together (we built the armature together as well). We've never really seen eye to eye on my choices until just recently and it's a real pleasure to just work together on the same side for once. Next we'll try to construct camera rigs together and practice using them on Moe.

My little cousin is getting into stop motion too and from what my uncle says, he's been doing it since he was 6-7 (about 4 years ago). Little showoff! Haha, but even he is asking about the process - how to capture frames and edit wires / rigs out, and loved the armature we made.

So what I need to do now is:

Find the rest of the items on my checklist (about 20 miscellaneous items to go).
Track down an oven and make sure I have a place to put it (as well as deal with the power issue - 220 for an oven).
Finish storyboard.
Get design from Jim and start on sculpt.
Make sure I design the wire armature to get the expressions I want.
Make a damn film!

Huge huge thanks to Nick Hilligoss / Mike Brent / Justin Rasch (and his family) / EVERYONE at SMA.com for posting their process' and answering a bajillion questions (to which I could just search and read). And also to Kathi Zung for her awesome video: I've seen it at least 10 times to make sure I'll get it right. Hope to snap some pictures for the next post!

Till then,
Tony.

Super Simple Set!

2009-05-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

Alrighty. I wanted to make a film but soon realized that it was way out of the park ambition-wise as there was just too much set-building / design and puppet creation to go through to achieve what I planned for. So I wanted to make a short that would help me grow as a director/animator without having to worry about all of that. I decided that I would make it all about the character's action and as little as possible about the set.

Here we go:

The curtain - just a piece of material I poked holes into and hooked onto a thin brass rod. It's supposed to resemble a shower curtain :)

The sign - I wanted to make it a low budget sign (thus made of cardboard) but it turned out a lot nicer than I had anticipated. This sign took an entire day to make... quite sad I know :)

The only thing I'm missing is a table that I think I can just pick up at a toystore. I may just nail together a craptacular mini-table from balsa wood. If you hadn't guessed yet this short film is about Moe's magic act.

And here is what Moe might look like:

These are from two different doodles I made. I'm no artist. Just this very simple drawing took me awhile to come up with... haha. But I've never made any characters before either - first time is always slow in progress I guess!

I'm planning to make this guy out of foam on top of a wire armature, but I don't have any of the materials to do it yet. The plan might change and I might use clay... or something else. Lots of options though my first pick would be foam latex (I'd love to go through the process so I can make puppets later with more ease for future films). I'm also waiting to snag a Nikon D70 body to shoot this film with. I'm pretty excited about what's to come but I'm guessing it'll be about 2 weeks before I can start animating this short.

Homer's Run n' Spasm

2009-05-02T18:51:00.000-07:00

Couple of hours on the floor is not good for your back. I started making these noises in the video towards the end of the animation... the end is a little rushed.

Lenses are in!

2009-05-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

I've been getting dizzy just staring at ebay / craigslist pages for the last 3-4 days but they've certainly paid off. I just got my nikkor 55mm f/2.8 micro (macro) lens in the mail yesterday,

and my 28mm f/2.8 lens is coming in 2-3 days.

All I need now is a d70 body (saw a great deal on a d80 but that was gone literally within 2 hours of the owner's posting) and from there I can get accommodated with my new partner in crime. There are tons of stuff to learn still: building a set, building and using a camera rig, lots of animating tricks to learn, animating with glass, character / set design, armature building, puppet sculpting, puppet clothing, scenery creation, in-camera effects, lip syncing, and much much more.

Stop motion has me hooked though, and I'm just taking it in a bit at a time. Today I'm attempting to animate on top of a sound byte for which I created my armature for. About 12-13 seconds of animation. It's just body movement without having to worry about the extra bits of animation (fat/blubber, hair, clothing, etc.) so I'm hoping I can just dedicate one day to it and come out the other end in one piece.

Till then...

Running again!

2009-04-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

A much more successful run trial. Pretty happy with this one and I'm starting to get the hang of the flow now, though I'm only animating one aspect of one subject :) Despite the long tedious work, the finished animation is always worth it.

Seeing runs built on 6's but that are drawn on paper seem a lot more smooth than when I do it on camera. I attribute it to mostly myself being sloppy but I think I need to know when to use that particular run... I don't think one could go any faster (unless the guy has extremely short legs). But the 8's feel somewhat between a run and a jog... I don't know maybe it's just me and my fuzzy eyes in the morning.

The shiny bits are from the third hand tool.

First Run Test

2009-04-27T11:52:00.001-07:00

Getting a fluid motion out of the run is darn difficult and I ran out of table space a bit too soon. I should make him turn around and run back and forth next time.

The frame where the armature has both feet in the air was hard to maintain. My third hand helpers weren't being very helpful! I just need to weigh it down a bit and it should be fine. Anywhoo, here is the clip:

More Walking

2009-04-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

Had a bit of time this morning so I thought I'd give it another go. This one has shorter steps and a slight swing in the arms.

First Walk Cycle

2009-04-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

So it begins. I've promised myself to do at least a cycle a day, possibly changing each cycle up - from a normal walk to a feminine walk... maybe even a strut. I really want to do a double bounce and a dance... but I've got a lot of practicing to do before I can attempt that stuff. I did my very first walk this morning and the results are... a little mediocre but not too bad. I did a slightly exaggerated walk on 12s, shot on ones. Maybe I'll continue with more later today. It's nice to see it move at last.

The video works fine for me until I hit the HQ button. Then it chops up a bit... kind of odd. Nevertheless:

Homer hath arrived.

2009-04-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

Day 1: Decide to create an armature.

Day 13: As tired as a pile of poo. But an armature is born.

It took almost a week of reading up on and researching the how-to's of armature building, 4 days of shopping (finding small stuff sucks) and 5 days of trial and error to come out with a finished product. This was my first venture in creating an armature (probably should have started with wire) and I just dived into a ball & socket design with the help of the great info archived at www.stopmotionworks.com - linked there is a step by step tutorial of Sven's Brass/Steel B&S armature-machining adventures. Without that I probably would still be lost.

Even with all of this knowledge in my hands, building the damn thing was really tough. The tools I had were pretty crude with the exception of a decent drill press. I spent a lot of hours sawing metal rods/bars and hand-filing tiny square blocks of brass. The biggest problem I had was the brazing. I used 1/16" soldering wire as was recommended in Sven's tutorial, but my father also stuck this goopy looking slop that he said was necessary to meld the pieces of metal together. As we torched the brass trying to melt down the wire inside, the slop would boil and the rod/ball wouldn't sit still. In the end we would just stick the rod into the ball, heat it up, poke it with the wire, and file a little of the silver away afterwards. I don't know if you can see it in these pictures but the brazing job was really crude - haha.

In any case, we're pretty proud of the armature and to be honest we're really surprised it came out as well as it did. We knew coming in that this being our first, we would probably run into all sorts of problems and possibly even have to throw it out in the end. But it works.

The only thing I was nit-picky about was the foot. I wanted to try to make a joint at the toes as I felt that it alone gives a much more fluid look in walk cycles. I planned to have this armature done so I could practice as many walks as I could and I wanted as much motion as I could get. The feet took a whole day in itself.

It has been a looooong ride from planning to shopping to building... but I've learned so much from these past 2 weeks and I feel really privileged to have access to such great resources as LIO's www.stopmotionworks.com, and www.stopmotionanimation.com filled with great animators just feeding tips and tricks to those hungry for it.

I named this armature "Homer" for the inspiration of creating him came from a small scene of Homer Simpson that I wanted to try and animate in stop motion. Here he is: