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

Here are some production drawings from my rough short NEXT.

The first set is me exploring Super’s extreme poses of the fight scene:

This next set is a combination of the Baddy rough model sheet and rough thumbnail and timing drawings.

And if you can tell from my last two posts, I was finally able to scan in some drawings.

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.