with his fancy emblem in the bg. hooray!

clean

color soon.

enjoy!

Snake Eyes ninja run.

Clean/color = soon.

Enjoy.

Every now and then, since I don’t get to do it at work on a regular basis, I get an urge to do some acting animation. The 11 Second Club is a perfect chance for that. The competition gives animators the opportunity to challenge themselves with an eleven second sound clip that typically contains dialogue. What’s perfect about the 11 Second Club is that you get great feedback on your work from all sorts of animators with different backgrounds, and there is a time limit. Constructive criticism is invaluable, but without the drive, motivation, and that all important deadline (and submission showing it to a community of animators); then you’ll never get the feedback you need to push yourself further.

I’ve entered the competition once before here. This time around I decided to do a bit of 2d animation. That alone made it enough of a challenge to complete, but the other kicker was that I started working on it only one week before the September deadline. I really had to push myself, and work as hard and as fast as I could to complete the animation in time. Especially since I only had my spare time, which included after work hours and twelve hour animate-o-thons on both Saturday and Sunday.

After listening to the dialogue a billion and one times, I drew out some thumbnails for my idea of an upset nun dealing with an unruly child in a harsh way. I tried to figure out the highs and the lows of the dialogue, and what I could do with the pause. From the start, I thought that the nun needed an outward action (something for her to react to) during the pause, to justify her hauling the girl off to detention by her ear. In the image below of my thumbnails, I thought of the child blowing a bubble and it popping.

That idea of a nun and a child interacting came quickly for me, and I moved just as quickly to get some seriously rough blocking ideas down and timed to the dialogue using my thumbnails as a loose guide. Despite my idea of having something for the nun to react to during the pause, I didn’t put it in the blocking because the pause was too short for the timing I had in my head for the bubble gum bubble. So I scrapped that idea.

From there, I really tried to clean up my drawings (nothing perfect, especially since I’m such a poor draftsman and I didn’t have a model sheet.) I also worked with the blocking making it a bit tighter. My wife also gave me the great idea to have the child stick her tongue out at the nun during the pause. I thought it was perfect, so I added it in right away. This stage moved really slow for me, because I had done all of the blocking drawings in Photoshop, but (long story short) after I imported the drawings into Animate (the 2d animation software I use) from ToonBoom I had to redraw and trace all of the blocking. Lesson learned on that one.

After I was happy with the blocking, I moved onto adding in my breakdown poses.

Then my inbetweens.

After that I added the overlap/drag/followthru for the hair and backpack of the child, and the robe and habit for the nun; which is shown in the first video. Along with the help of my friends, I tried to direct myself along the way in an objective manner to keep everything concise. There are things I wish I had done, such as add a background layout drawing; however, considering the time limitations, I’m happy with what I produced.

Technical tidbits:
24fps
shot on twos and some ones where necessary
after blocking it was pretty much straight ahead animation the whole way
slightly larger version available here under personal @ 480×270

There are two animations I want to focus on in this production diary. I want to highlight these because I took time to thumbnail and choreograph them; which is typically something I don’t have time to do at a video game studio. So, I really tried to get it right. Both of these are exploratory animations developed to have a loose visual guideline for what the fatality system would look like. Fatalities in Halo Wars happen when one awesome melee powerhouse, such as the Arbiter, kills one of the other infantry units.

The first exploratory animation I was tasked to do was the Arbiter taking out a squad of marines. I soon got the idea that I would portray the Arbiter as an unstoppable shocking killing machine. And the marines would be dumbfounded and unable to react because they were paralyzed by fear and the ferocity of the Arbiter.

I was going to do a lot of drawing/thumbnailing to plan out my shot and I wanted to make sure that I knew how to, at least, crudely and quickly draw the Arbiter. That’s where this first page comes in as it was my attempt to understand how to produce quick gestures that I could read.

The next set of drawings was a loose choreographing of the massacre. I had the Arbiter twirling, twisting, spinning, and all other sorts of acrobatic movements that would make him appear graceful and bloodthirsty.

As thumbnails go, they are just a guide, and as much as I adhered to the drawings I also strayed from them. The Arbiter is pretty much pose-to-pose animation, and the marines are all straight-ahead animation. Here is the result:

From this animation we learned that all fatalities will be done one on one: person killing person rather than person killing a squad or groups of people. It would have been too much unique work to animate the fatalities in such a way where multiple people are killed. The fatalities also locked the attacker and victim in game while they played their animations. And only once they finished could the attacker be selected and moved by the player. (Which is really the only way you’re going to see the animation.) So, on average, we limited fatalities to three seconds, but never going over five seconds. This gave us enough time to create something worth seeing, and thus, losing control over your character for 3-5 seconds.

The next task in fatality exploration was to pit hero against hero: Arbiter versus Spartan. I wanted to make the Arbiter as swift and savage as in the first animation, but this time, his foe would prevail. Portraying the Spartan as instinctual and reactionary rather than purely dexterous: he moves fast and hits hard.

Once again this first image was done to get to know the subject, and to be able to draw him to quickly plan out the fight sequence.

Again, these thumbnails were a loose choreography guide to follow while animating.

The attacker is pose-to-pose and the victim is straight-ahead reacting to the blows. Here’s the result of the planned work.

Unfortunately, the animation workload over the course of the project never allowed us to do special case (hero vs. hero) fatalities. Rather, we had to reuse the victim’s animation and copy it on to the different heroes. Though, if we did have the time, animating hero vs. hero would have been really cool to do!

Neither one of these exploratory animations was ever taken to a true final stage. I only took them to a certain quality level of animation; setting the bar as high as I knew I could reproduce under actual production deadlines.

A great blow has struck the animation community today. Three… yes, three animator’s desks have gone to the dumpster just last week. Here’s a story pertaining to my discovery of them and their subsequent demise:

Ensemble Studios had three (maybe more) pristine animation desks since before I started working there in 2005. Whoever figured out how to persuade the people with the money to purchase such desks is a greater man/woman than I am. Nonetheless, my entire time at Ensemble I had eyed those desks, wanting them, envying those that had them; and, mind you, these desks were rarely used.

ANYWAY…

Robot, (one of the companies formed from the Ensemble closure), retained ownership of everything, including those desks. Last week, was the end of the storage period, and anything that wasn’t wanted would be dumped. Trust me, if I knew these were lying around I would have grabbed ALL of them. Hell, I would have PAID for all of them considering they are so hard to find, and the one from Chromacolour is too expensive. With communication amiss–as well as my memory to even think to ask about the desks–no one wanted them. Now they are gone forever. Dead. In a landfill somewhere; wishing they had a good home.

Expletives are flying from my mouth.

Here’s a rough logo I animated for WAC-E Animation Studios.

24fps (shot on ones)
running time approx. 10 seconds

This is still a WIP due to the cleanup and color stages.

You can check out a larger version here.

The premise behind NEXT was essentially a fight scene between Super and Baddy, something that I could animate quickly, and leave in the rough stage. With that in mind, I pretty much knew the end result would lack quite a bit of luster: sound, cleanup, color, layout drawings to name a few. But, I’ve been content with that decision allowing me to do exactly what I wanted and needed: to finish.

I came up with the idea of the fight sequence the week that Ensemble’s closure was announced in September. I thought that I wanted to “wow” potential employers when they visit my website. Having the video be on the home page making that the first thing people saw. I was pretty ambitious and wanted to get the animation finished ASAP. Over the next few days I drew large extreme drawings for Super and thumbnails for Baddy for only the fight. (I’ll scan those drawings and post them at a later date.) Utilizing timing charts, I got a rough idea about the timing of the entire animation and each individual action that was going to take place.

After about a week of working on my extreme and thumbnail drawings I was ready to animate, or so I thought. I naively told coworkers that I would finish the animation over the weekend. Lofty goals for someone that had only done a few hand drawn animations over the past three years. When that weekend hit I, for some foolish reason, essentially redrew my extremes starting to tie down the drawings. At the time I thought it would be a good idea to have cleaner extremes and work with rough inbetweens. Needless to say, I wasted my time that weekend and accomplished nothing.

Somewhere between that weekend in September and January, I drew Super’s extremes into the computer. That would be the last time I touched the short until January.

So, fast forward a few months to January, and I finally start animating full-time, on average 6-7 hours a day four days a week. For the fourth time, I redrew my Super extremes, and drew my Baddy extremes into the computer. From there, I pretty much ignored my timing charts and animated straight ahead (within the extreme poses). For the most part I knew where I was going, but that didn’t stop larger or smaller drawings from cropping up: straight ahead animation can be tricky.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that the short needed a little story. Animating a fight scene that has no purpose to it can only be so fulfilling; so, I can only imagine how boring it would be to watch the fight without even an inkling of story or characters. Initially, I was going to have the fight scene loop: Baddy would get vaporized into some sort of smoke cloud, reform, and it would start all over again. Though this was in the planning from the start, I hadn’t actually thought about how I would animate the smoke. Since I don’t consider myself an amazing effects animator, I promptly ditched the smoke idea. This is where I came up with the idea for Super to say “Next!” at the end of the fight.

My mind started rolling, and I came up with an idea of fallen enemies in the background. But, I didn’t want to do a background layout drawing. Then the line formed (pun intended) for the first shot. A bunch of baddies waiting in line to get a crack at Super. It was a gamble: pay some cashola, and if you beat Super, you reap the huge rewards. Then Wes Boddie, a brilliant story man who always comes through, thought of the end where all the Baddies scatter after they witness the biggest baddest being vaporized with ease. But there’s still one left peeing his pants, while the booth attendant motions; insinuating that he’s next to fight.

About a month and a half later, I’m done. The drawings are terribly crude, there is no sound or layout drawings, but I want to move on. I set a finite goal with what I consider smart limitations, and I feel as though I accomplished everything I set out to do. As unpolished as this short is I feel happy knowing that it’s complete. I hope you enjoy my little rough animation!

Here are some specs:
12fps (shot on ones)
580×247 highest resolution
running time 1m26s

Visit my website, chuck-o-rama to see the full resolution version!

This is my animation show reel from Halo Wars. It showcases experimental/prototype animations used to define how specific game mechanics would look and work. Overall it is the best portion of the thousands of animations I created for the game.

For a higher resolution video click this link.

I’ve entered the below animation in the 11 Second Club October 2008 competition. This is my first entry ever, but I didn’t necessarily do it because of the competition: I wanted to do some character performance animation again, since it’s been quite some time. I had a lot of fun and I can’t wait to do some more. It took about four work days to complete.

Larger quicktime version can be seen here.