I plan to post an updated reel soon, and do some posts about film vs. games.  What I can definitely say right now is that in film its about YOUR shot.  Do people laugh when they watch YOUR shot, are people impressed by YOUR shot, is YOUR shot the best shot in a sequence?  At Turtle Rock (won’t speak for all game companies, because this place is one of a kind) its about the game.  You have your parts that go into it, but if the game isn’t fun or satisfying for the player it doesn’t matter if you just animated the next coming of Jesus.  Now its about the project, its about the team, its about working hard to collectively create something people will want to play.  Never got this feeling from film.

I’ll be back soon, life’s a bit crazy, but I have some new animations from last year that I’d like to upload and share.

Hey 2012, lets do this.

Dave

Also, Red Fog reached its goal and will become a real life comic book!  Thanks to everyone who helped Chris and Mike get the chance to make their dream a reality.

Happy New Year!

Dave

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 5 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 24 posts. There were 31 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 13mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 18th with 192 views. The most popular post that day was Cloudy With A Chance Of Eyeballs..

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were tvtropes.org, animatorsresource.blogspot.com, cartoonbrew.com, animatorwork.blogspot.com, and arcreferencepage.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for baby brent, david anthony gibson, cloudy with a chance of meatballs animation workflow blog, head shapes, and gummy bears.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Eyeballs. September 2009
44 comments

Cloudy Animation…now with more Meatballs. October 2009
36 comments

Baby Brent’s, Baby Brent July 2009

Cloudy Animation Reel! October 2009
4 comments

Room 1403 Blog! September 2009
2 comments

Do you like Zombies?  Sure you do, how about graphic novels and supporting independent artists?  I knew it.

Red Fog is a graphic novel developed by a good friend and colleague of mine, Chris Williams.  He’s teamed up with artist Mike Docherty and editor D.J. Kirkbride to create an awesome 150 page book filled with “Allied soldiers battling tons of zombies.” Need I saw more?

Together Chris and Mike bring a wealth of combined film and comic book experience.  Chris has an extensive resume of major Hollywood films including the Spider-Man Trilogy and most recently Alice In Wonderland.  Mike brings over 30 years of comic book and storyboarding experience, working for many amazing companies including Marvel, Warner Bros, and Sony.

Chris is using a service called Kickstarter to help raise the funds needed to complete the project.  Its a pretty cool idea, you pledge to donate a certain amount from $20 to $500+.  And with each set increment you get cool stuff in return.  So as an example: if you pledge to give the project $40 you’ll receive a printed copy of “RED FOG” signed by the creators with your name included in the acknowledgments.  Seems pretty awesome, you get a book full of cool artwork signed by the artists and your name is printed as being part of the reason it even exists!

Now if you’re still on the fence about this Chris has given me the go ahead to release a handful of exclusive, hi-res images to wet your zombie appetite for human flesh!

Check out the gallery for ultra high resolution (new desktop wallpaper for sure) images:

ALL IMAGES AND CONTENT COPYRIGHT 2010 C.Williams/M.Docherty

If you want to be a part of this project and help Chris make this book a reality then head on over to the Red Fog Kickstarter page and pledge your support!

Kickstarter page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1623839531/red-fog-nazi-zombie-graphic-novel

Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Red-Fog/135727629785128

I’ll be back soon with some new animation type stuff to talk about.  I’ve been working on a fight animation, wanted to use it as an opportunity to talk about planning from thumbnails to finished animation.  I’ll post something soon!

-Dave

I do have some blogs to pass along while I’m here:

All of these guys are animators/supervisors at Tippett Studio in Berkeley, CA.  Most recently completing work on Eclipse and Cat & Dogs 2.  I’ve added their links over on the sidebar so in the future you can keep checking them out.

Jim Brown

http://jbr0wn6.blogspot.com/

Geoff Wheeler

http://geoffwheeleranimation.blogspot.com/

William Groebe

http://williamgroebe.blogspot.com/

Tom Gibbons

http://gibbysdowntime.blogspot.com/

I signed up and downloaded a couple rigs, and these characters are solid.  I highly recommend checking this out, even if you don’t have time to do the contest take some time over the next month and play with the rigs and tools.  These are professional level and worth a look.

I’m going to try and throw my hat in the ring for this contest.  Not sure yet what I’ll do, but if it ends up being halfway decent I’ll post it.  And if I win an iPad, sweet!

Link to the Anim-Mates main page: Animationrigs.com

Link to the contest page:  animationrigs.com/contest/

-Dave

Two good animator friends have recently arrived in Japan to animate for about 6 weeks on a project I cannot say anything about. Melissa Hawkins and Emily Rule seem to be working hard and having a good time, or at the very least trying every weird snack they can get their hands on. Watch as they explore Tokyo, eat food, and buy cute things!

http://morboispleased.wordpress.com/

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I received a few comments about people liking my dumb drawings, so for the 3 people out there that actually care I’ve scanned some of my recent doodles for your viewing pleasure.

(I didn’t watermark or alter these images, if you use them for anything or share them, please give me credit. If I find these on a t-shirt or something without my permission, I will hunt you down and make you eat said t-shirt.)

All images, copyright David Gibson 2010

Hope everyone is having an amazing 2010 so far! Look for updates about Arthur Christmas coming soon!

Dave

I hope everyone picked up a copy of Cloudy on DVD!  Be sure to get the 2-disc edition, the single disc doesn’t have any of the extra goodness and you have to see the original twister fight scene.

I don’t have anything new to post so I’m going to plug a friend’s blog:

http://boginkasbasket.blogspot.com/

Anna makes amazing homemade crafts of supreme awesomeness.  From making your own stamps to cinnamon pinwheels, there’s something here for everyone.  Enjoy!

-David

(I am also not an english major, so please excuse any grammatical errors or excessive use of commas)

Don’t talk trash about another studio, always support the industry as a whole.

I worked for a year at EA Tiburon cleaning up motion capture. As a key frame animator I do not like mocap, BUT I understand that it has a very important and necessary place in certain parts of the industry. I do not agree with Zemeckis making very photo realistic mocap movies. If they were any good I would support it, but lets face it, they’re not. And even Monster House which was the closest thing to a good movie still would have been better shot live action or hand animated.

Now this is where I become conflicted. I do not support that this movie was made, I think it would have been much better to take an original idea and spend millions of dollars creating that. Haha, anyways, this movie was put into production, which meant a lot of jobs for people in the San Francisco Bay Area. A handful of my friends and former co-workers from Tippett went to ImageMovers and have been creating amazing art and supporting their families.

Now that this movie has been released into theaters I do not want to support Zemeckis and his terrible ideas for movies, but I do want to support my colleagues. So even though I haven’t gone out to see the movie, I will not talk ill about it or the company that created it. This is how I’ve decided I can support the artists there, but not give my money to Zemeckis. Unfortunately this won’t help if the studio decides to close because they didn’t make enough money from the movie. What I’m trying to say is no matter how you feel about what a studio is making, don’t talk trash about it because you are putting down your fellow animators/artists and their hard work.

Don’t make assumptions about a movie based on its trailer.

I have to be honest. When I first saw the trailer for Fantastic Mr. Fox I was not impressed, but thats because I didn’t get it. I questioned the style, the craft, and the quality of the animation. But I would have been a moron to pass it off as a low quality, poorly made movie that doesn’t deserve to be watched based entirely on one trailer. I was able to see it last week and was very impressed. Other colleagues of mine were still passing judgment on the film from the trailer. Even after I tried to convince them it was a great movie and the style fit the film, they kept mentioning “crappy animation,” and “a low attention to detail.”

I have a feeling this same conversation was had around the water cooler when the trailers for Cloudy were released. Something you have to realize is that the majority of trailers are not created or controlled by the film makers. If you don’t like a trailer then chalk it up to not liking how the marketing department made the trailer. But if the idea of the movie, or the style, or something still interests you…go see it and then form an opinion based on the movie itself rather than the trailer. On a related note, I can’t wait to track down a screening of “A Town Called Panic.”

You don’t make a movie to win an award, if you win an award its just a perk that comes from working hard and having fun.

Since the list for animated movies being submitted for Academy Awards was released a few weeks ago there has been much discussion online and off about Cloudy’s chances. Sure, it would be incredibly awesome to have worked on a film that wins, or is even nominated for an Academy Award. But I didn’t work on Cloudy so it could win an award. The director’s didn’t make the movie so it could win an award.

We all made the film because it was fun, it was a great story to tell, and contained great visuals we all wanted to create. No one can argue that a studio would love for their film to win, but thats not why we make them. Well, on a grunt/artist level thats not why.

(Penelope, you can call me Oscar.)

I guess what I’m saying is that as artists on a movie, you can’t let yourself become distracted with the award stuff. Just focus on the task at hand and do your best. Sure, everyone in the industry knows that automatically one of those slots goes to the Pixar movie, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Fox or Coraline took it this year, or even Kells (which is excellent, by the way). In the end we all win as animators when there are so many qualified films entered in for the running. But we have to remember why we worked on the films in the first place, we have to pay our rent somehow-ur, I mean…its for the love of the craft!

blah blah, end of rant. …back to Modern Warfare 2!

-Dave

I was responsible for the animation on Flint, and Alan Hawkins animated Sam.

-Dave

PS…have a new post almost ready detailing a quick animation using Flint.  I’ll put it up soon!

First of all I’d like to thank everyone for the comments and feedback I’ve received from my last couple of posts. I had no idea so many people would be interested in the specifics of animating a shot and the animation in Cloudy.  I posted my Cloudy reel a few days ago and I will use some of my shots to discuss, in more depth, how we approached the motion for Cloudy.

Here it is again if you missed it:

I’ll start off with the slow motion Flint shot, rui37.

Once I nailed down the placement of the bg characters and roughed in the basic timing of Flint it became all about the motion of the wave through his body.

I started by moving his root to his chest so as I rotated his chest everything below would rotate with it. With the chest I animated what I felt would be the correct speed, because the shot starts and ends in realtime, but the middle is slow motion. Once I was happy with the relative speed of that movement I started to work my way down his body…this is starting to sound like a sleazy romance novel. Everything was pretty straight forward as you’d expect counter animating the follow through, but once I was finished offsetting everything down the chain to his feet it still wasn’t crazy enough.

Flint had what we called “noodle” controls on his arms and legs. There was an attribute on his knee that controlled how much noodle-y-ness that leg had and then there were two controls, one for his thigh and one for his shin. These you actually translated in space and would pull or push the geometry of that specific section to move the bendy shapes further.

So I ended up animating these controllers throughout the shot to push the curves further. You can see it in the frame to the right how completely broken his legs are to push the wave motion through his entire body.

This shot also contains a good example of the pupil treatment we used on Cloudy. In the sequential images below you can see how his pupil is almost perfectly round and slightly begins to squash as it presses again the edge of his eye. This is everywhere in the movie and I can’t imagine doing a “cartoony” animated film without this.

I didn’t just squash his pupil though, I also subtly changed the shape of his whole eye socket to help show where he was looking.

For the animation on Flint’s face I animated a group of cheek puff controls in conjunction with some blendshapes I made to get the skydiver cheek ripple effect. Its a little hard to see the detail, but its there. For his tongue I created a series of flapping poses and randomly copied them throughout and then cleaned them up to get some nice overlap.

As flint leaves the screen I knew he would become a blurred mess so I stretched his legs like mad to help sell that the FLDSMFR was pulling him.

On Cloudy if you were assigned a shot with background characters you were responsible for animating them. So in the background I had to make sure everyone was doing something interesting. Unfortunately I got in a bit of trouble because I thought it would be funny to make one of them mouth(in slow motion) “What The F#*K”. Haha right? The producer didn’t think it was funny.

MEE19

I want to point out some very specific things in mee19. This is the first time in the film that we see Earl. Because of this I had to establish how his character moved and what his role was in relationship to Flint.

Immediately I had to show a dominant/submissive relationship. This isn’t really rocket science, but I had to choose how to show that visually.  I decided that Earl needs to take up as much of the frame as possible. He also needs to force Flint into as small a space as possible.

Storyboard panels:

Mentally Flint is dealing with a lot in this shot. He’s surprised, he needs to hide what he’s doing, he needs to lie, he needs to appeal to Earl’s sensibilities, and he’s afraid of what Earl might do. I’m not saying this is the most incredible bit of acting ever in an animated film, just that that’s a lot to think about while animating.

We always described Earl’s neck as a piston. It would fire in and out accenting his dialogue. Earl’s movements were always quick and precise: no anticipation and an abrupt start to the motion, followed by a long feathered settle.

To keep the character alive during long holds we would put in a quick and small adjust. In this shot as Earl holds his pose I have small adjusts during the long hold where he inches closer to Flint.

Many times the curves for these quick moves would look like the image to the left.

No anticipation and a very quick change into the next pose with an incredibly long settle.  No over shoots, get about 90% of the way to the next pose and then just settle the last 10% over about 10 frames.  Of course this would be different for different moves, but this is a good example of how the majority of the quick adjusts were animated.

Sometimes the motion blur would give away the quick movement with its preframe blur.  To get around this and to create a more pleasing feel to the “snappy” move I might add a few frames of ease into the start of the move like the curve in the second image.

Cutaway Mouths

If you look closely at mee19 you’ll notice that anytime the character is profile to the camera you can see through their open mouth to the building in the background.  This was another style choice that the directors wanted throughout the film.  At times it was difficult to achieve, but there are many shots in Cloudy where this is implemented.  The idea was to achieve an extremely clean silhouette while treating the mouth as a two dimensional element.  If you could see the other side of Flint’s face its terrifying, the skin is pulled back almost to his ear wrecking all the geometry on that side of his face.  In the end it didn’t matter as long as you could see clearly through his mouth.

Facial Detail Examples

There were some very subtle things we did to make the characters more appealing in Cloudy.  First of all, asymmetry.  This is no secret and without it any character is as appealing as a parking ticket.

We were able to manipulate the character’s head shapes on Cloudy with ease.  So the first thing I’d do is throw the default head shape off by moving the top of the head in one direction, or stretching one side of the face.  The size and shape of each eye was very important to support the shape of the head and help show where the character was looking.

I had to hide the change in Flint’s head shape within his head turn.  During his head turn his nose changes its direction, and the kidney bean shape of his head is pushed in the opposite direction, also the shape of his eyes change.

(animated .gif)

Sam was much more delicate when it came to breaking up her asymmetry.

Also good examples of the pupil treatment in both of these shots.

Sam’s Glasses Treatment

With Sam’s glasses the trick was to never intersect her eye with the frame of the glasses.  If the glasses intersected her eye as she turned her head it really accentuated the fact that the front of her face was pretty flat and its much more appealing to have a clear view of the character’s most prominent eye.  To keep this from happening we would animate the glasses to turn against her head, there are some much better examples of this in the jello sequence.

GUMMY BEARS!

We screened a rough cut of Cloudy in December 2008, mostly storyboards with about 20% final animation.  But when we got to the part of the movie when Steve finally realizes his purpose I knew what shots I had to animate.  This was the first time I even contemplated requesting shots.  I’ve been pretty lucky letting fate do my shot assignments, but I knew when I saw these I had to animate them.  I didn’t care so much for the fighting with Gummy Bear shots, the shot I really wanted was Steve realizing whats happening.

I approached the animation director, Pete Nash, and he said he would certainly see what he could do.  A few days later I found out I was going to get to animate bly32, Steve seeing the Gummy Bears and as a bonus I get to animate the tripped out happy Gummy Bear shot as well!

BLY32

For this shot Phil and Chris explicitly asked if I could animate Steve as a 2D card moving upward.  They didn’t want any fancy animationy stuff, just Steve poking his head up moving at a constant speed.

So thats what they got, the only other trick was having to get his voice translator lights to clear the top of the door so you can see them light up as he says Gummy Bears.

I referenced the storyboard drawing for this frame extensively.  I pushed Steve’s facial rig as far as it would go with the built in controls, but it only got me about 60% of the way there.  I created several custom blendshapes and groups of clusters to help push his mouth into that final shape.  I had to reconstruct some of the geometry around his eyes as well because scaling his eyes so large started to break the surrounding geometry.  I threw a slight wiggle on his mouth as if he couldn’t contain himself, but then I just let the pose and Steve’s insane expression sell the rest of the shot.  I figured this was a moment for Steve and the audience to all realize together whats about to happen.

Remote Control Television

Before I wrap this up there’s one more thing, Flint’s failed invention the Remote Control Televsion is everywhere throughout Cloudy.  Sometimes its more obvious than others, but anytime we could fit him into a shot the director’s loved it.  I only have 2 examples of it from my reel, but here they are.

(he’s living in a cardboard box!)

I hope you enjoyed this post and please leave a comment if you have any questions and I’ll be sure to reply.  Also if you have any questions about my other reel shots ask away and I’ll reply, maybe even with some fancy pictures!

-Dave

and of course:

(animated .gif)

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