In preparation for my dialogue animation piece I decided to create a set of phoneme shapes ready for the lip-sync part of the animation. After watching David Latour's demos I found his style of animation was really effective for lip sync - an area I have always struggled with before.

For our first submital I decided to rough out some poses and basic shapes I would like to use in my character performance piece and whilst its still very rough, you do get an idea of where I want to go with the character and the acting in general.

Some of the main feedback I got was where the character should be looking and who the character is talking to. My original idea was to have the character look at the camera as if talking to the audience, emphasizing the eeriness of the dialogue and the imposing nature of the design. I think I will continue with this idea just  to ensure more of the poses do look into the character and grasp the personality I want - the image below is a glimpse of what I want to achieve with this animation.

First submittal is very soon so I decided to render out my animations and compile them together in Adobe premiere to show them to the tutors. All the animations are still work in progress but as you will be able to tell, some more so than others.

Overall, I am fairly happy with the timings but I feel the poses on a few of them can still be tightened up, so in the next few days I really need to blast through the polishing stages of those almost complete and keep going on with those that need the work.

With the project in general I am still behind, especially in regards to my character performance piece, but fortunately I still have 3 weeks left to go so fingers crossed I can pull it all together soon and start entering crunch time hours with a few sleepless nights thrown in for good measure.

1st Submittal from Matthew Watson on Vimeo.

When thumbnailing for the Ultimate Image a few key themes and designs were my initial inspiration. I produced research sheets detailing each idea or piece of research and how I may incorporate such a design into my own work. Initially I planned on creating an aesthetically simple design, using minimalist colours and shapes to create a movie-like poster showcasing the character I am working on for our Echoes game project.

But as I researched more I found myself veering away from this idea struggling to thumbnail designs that would successfully incorporate this theme and instead began to work my way towards the idea (as seen on a few of these sheets) that using a series of characters in expressive poses would be a more effective way to display my ability as a animator.

Continuing on from my Ultimate Image design, I thought I would post a few of my early ideas and slight variations I considered when designing the whole piece.

After various thumbnail testing with the movie poster design I decided that a piece showcasing a characters various emotional states would perhaps better showcase me as an animator. Originally I decided to use a rig by Max Norderfeldt to initially place ideas downs for various images and angles of the characters until I finally deciding to use Ozgur Aydogdu's Cenk rig. With this rig I could achieve the great, exaggerated expressions I needed to to portray the character's emotions and thoughts and with just a little more tweaking of composition I created the final piece that i posted a few days ago.

What I have learnt from this process is simply that ideas and designs are a fluid creation never staying with one form but instead evolving from previous thoughts into (what is hopefully) a more effective and interesting piece of art.

Recently, as part of my Business studies module  I created an 'Ultimate Image' which essentially showcases my art and animation ability in a single image. Difficulty with that is, as an animator, my work is usually shown through video and multiple frames so picking that single image or pose to show was going to be tricky.

I went through various iterations on the design first showing my the characters from Echoes in action poses or in interesting layouts but quickly realised that this kind of layout was likely to be cluttered with perhaps too many different shapes and poses.

I eventually got to the idea of creating a series of facial expressions using the Cenk rig. Each head or expression would interact with the next creating something of a little narrative. In the end, I went through with the idea as best I could and am overall fairly happy with the result although now looking back at it some of the poses could be pushed a little further especially on the first and last head which feel a little subdued compared to the extremes of the other poses.

I mentioned it briefly but forgot to ever post any info up on the bow and arrow rig I created for the centaur. Its a fairly straightforward setup but I certainly had some issues creating it in the first place, trying several different ideas with nothing useful being made. But then my fellow friend and student Joe Hornsby had a tinker with it and showed me an idea that tied all the bones together under a single hierarchy and weighting it in such a way the string will effectively deform. So, using this method I went about creating the rig and voila! a nicely working bow and arrow that any centaur would love to own. 

Just spent a couple of hours cleaning up the controls on the rig making a few custom shapes with the CV curve tool and applying them to the various parts of the rig. The controls are easy enough to use and follow although some more variation in colour would be ideal, something I will have to improve upon next time I am working with the rig.