Wreck It Ralph – review

This last Disney movie fascinated me. For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s the trailer:

Trailer

I think the animation of this one is really something special. It has beautiful tones than differentiate each character and each game style. At first I thought it would be difficult to integrate so many different games and styles in a movie, but Wreck it Ralf proved me wrong. I think they pulled it off beautifully. And I believe its thanks to the producer John Lasseter, who brought us The Incredibles, and some other Pixar movies that are brilliantly animated. Though the story was nothing I can say to be really fantastic, I really like the way it was animated. I’ll show you what I am talking about through these examples:

As you may notice, there are huge differences between the animation of the building characters and the main character’s from that same game: Ralph and Felix. I just LOVE this. Is a great way to illustrate how a pixelated game would move in a 3D world, in the case of the tiny characters, jumping from one pose to the other without fluency, but still, works too well, it would have seen as a mistake if it was badly delivered.

In this second example, I’m delighted about the animation flow each character has, and the subtlety of Ralph’s big hands in the moment just before this video, and how the action grows with the poses ad soon ad Ralph looses his patience. The fluency of the arms and the fingers, the overlapping action and the follow through are perfect. Also, Zangief’s movements are hilarious and greatly achieved. He has all this fighter essence, and still, the arm movement (when he’s explaining that being bad is not a bad thing to Ralph) is just amazing. This is my favorite scene in the movie for sure.

Presenter Task – Animation and Final touches AP2

As I explained in my last Presenter post, after I was done with the blocking part, I started adding in-betweens, moving keys and adding overshoots and follow through and overlapping reactions. I had to really dig into this part, because my animation ended up looking robotic most of the times, and what I was told in feedback was to clean those things up. This is how it turned up until the last feedback session:

Animation: 

Here are some drawings from the life drawing class and a couple I did while waiting outside: 

I found this short-film in a webpage that has a lot of great ones:

The Hand Of Nefertiti

This is an example of how the acting can be showed without any dialogues, even though there’s use of sounds, the important thing is to achieve feeling in non-human characters through animation. Each character has a lot of personality. Nefertiti’s hand has a great development in feelings as it goes from furious to sad and to happy and flirty.

The parrot has cartoony resources to communicate its thoughts to the audience, that was not really necessary, but it adds a comical feeling to the short-film. As well as the part where it speaks to the hand’s ear, even though we know it doesn’t have any ears. This shows that the animation does not have to have any sense at all as long as the message is being delivered.

Every part of this animation has great secondary actions, the particles on the hand while being destroyed are also great.

And as a last thing, the way the story runs with excellent use of cameras and composition that help you know where to look next. And the cameras used when the hand is being electrocuted, the action is shown only once and you know that is happening several times without having to show anything else but the expressions on the other two characters. Good way of avoiding the use of the same camera several times.

 

This new Autodesk invention of a mobile application that catches pictures and creates a 3D model with it, is worth a look:

http://www.123dapp.com/catch

Quadruple Practice (Elephant) Final Render – AP2

I was having this weird flashes of lighting in the renders, so what I ended up adding a soundtrack that fit: 🙂

 

ORANGE Ô DESESPOIR Shortfilm

There are really fantastic things about this short film. First of all, the facial expressions are brilliant. Is great how they were able to deliver the story just by the face and the use of squash and stretch. Though in the animatic the characters had hands, I’m glad they changed their mind about this, or it might be done this way so the action could be understood.

This shows how important the eyes are in an animation, being the first thing people see, and they are REALLY expressive and beautifully made here.You can see how the eye movement is linear and fast from one point to another. Also, the orange’s eye rigging has influence in the eyelids, they move with the eyeballs. this helps the animation look more expressive and real, though is a very cartoony animation, is a matter of selling the feeling. And they manage to give an unanimated object a personality and to make it conect to the viewer.

Right at the end when the orange turns around, there’s a moment of “anticipation before the anticipation” in each turn, and also it is great the way it turns, stops and turns a bit more. I would have look weird if it turned only once.There’s a great sense of physics.

The colors and the lighting are another important fact, I liked them a lot, it brings a lot of life to the scene with the tropical feeling that corresponds.

Here’s the animatic and the layout, perfect example of the animation process. I noticed some of the animation changed from the initial idea till the last product.

Animatic

Layout

Adam and Dog short-film

This other traditional animated short-film nominated for the Oscars is very beautiful, though I have a few things to say against it: Most of all I enjoyed the story, but I got tired of the same use of cameras when the dog runs around, since it becomes obvious that is being used as a resource to avoid animating a hard animal walk. And also it seems a bit too long.

But the art behind it really beautiful, so I still appreciated it. I do think the animation flows beautifully and it’s a great example of traditional animation. Take a look here:

http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/adam-and-dog-short-film/

Browsing the web I found this Illustrator that is worth the look. He has very amazing sketches:

www.martinabel.com

 

 

Presenter Task – AP2

For this task, we had to do an animation based on a clip. I could be a presenter, which had to talk towards the camera, or it could be a comedy performance. I decided to go with a comedy sketch from Saturday Night Life. This is the audio fragment i picked:

All I have to do now is add in-betweens and smoothing the curves to add decay. I also had to finish animating the face expressions as well as the eyes, which play a very important part of the acting. If the animation is right, everything the viewer will be noticing are the eyes and eyebrows expressions of the characters.

As a detail, I thought of making the “dead guy” breath and open his eyes as well.

I also found this tutorial on acting with various characters which I think is worth a look, specially, because they talk about using references (also because there’s a part that’s spoken in italian and it would be difficult to animate the lipsync without any references), how to block as a base and the importance of eye animation:

There’s another important thing is the eye blinks, the basic knowledge that eyelids close faster than they open and they must stay closed for a couple of frames, to be noticed. The same thing happens with lipsync.

Here’s a few sketches I’ve been doing so far:

I thought I might also share some of Chris Sander’s story boards from the upcoming movie “The Croods”. I just love how well done they are, and how specific the poses and cameras are.

http://www.chrissandersart.com/2013/01/29/the-lost-boards-part-4/