Action

After having had a bunch of acting exercises we were back to action - this time for a parkour inspirered action shot, with focus on physicality and strong poses.

This is what I ended with after five days off work:



It was really nice to do something else, than the extremely labour intensive acting shots, and just go all out with line of action and cool parkour stuff - plus gathering reference was quite a joy - these guys are AMAZING!

I didn't do as much planning in turns of thumbnailing, as I usually do. I found some really nice reference on youtube, and pieced my animation together, with a combination of that and imagination, and I found it more usefull to just go into maya and work those poses out - plus I'd have to do so many drawings in the thumbs to get a feeling for timing, that I might as well just plot them into maya, since I had a clear vision in my head.

A lot of work went into preventing gimbal lock and multiple rotations in wrists and stuff, but once you know to look out for them, it's pretty straight ahead.

I think I had around 30 poses when I turned it from stepped to spline. Normally I'd like to go to spline sooner, but as there is such a big difference between the poses, I couldn't really use what maya gave me, and had to do it all manually, so it required a few more keys in stepped, I found, to keep the animation from go too crazy in spline.

Hope you enjoy it, it was sure a lot of fun to do!

Cheers

Midway test

Half way through the year and half way through the school. This meant midway test.
We had a week (5 days) without teaching to do a 6 second lip sync piece.
The five days included brainstorming, video reference, thumbnailing and all.

There was a lot of time pressure.
As far as acting goes, I think I've learned a lot lately.

I never really got the hang of the lip sync'ing unfortunately. Especially the ending is quite weak in that regard - I'm pretty happy with the rest.

Billable Hours from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Acting shot

Hi there.
After a two day workshop in acting (introduction to Improv) and three days of set modeling and we started on our next animation assignment: The acting without dialogue.
Under guidence from Michael Berenstein (Pixar, PDI, Academy of Arts), we were introduced to a new economic way of animating, which was really great.
Below is a progress video. I went into splines a lot faster than usual.

Animation progress - acting shot from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

After animation (two weeks), we had a two day workshop in lighting and rendering. That was a lot of fun! Amazing how much you can give the shot with lighting.

Cheers

Dialogue piece

Hi there.

As a major step up in difficulty we had our first dialogue piece.
It was a two week process where we spend the first few days creating a character and a backstory to support our acting choices.

This is by far the toughest challenge untill now.
Acting is a huge challenge for me and I think it'll take years of practice to come up with solid choices.
I hope you enjoy it though, as it certainly was a lot of fun to do :)

Dialogue shot final from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

a walk and a lift

Two new animations.
First up a quadroped walk transisioning into a cantor.

four legged walk/cantor + transition. from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Next is the classic box lift.

box lift exercise from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Both of which was under guidence by Sidney Padua.

Cheers

The cycle weeks

Last last 2 weeks was spend on cycles - walkcycles and runcycles.
We had some great lectures and demonstrations from both of our teachers: Magnus Møller and Erik Scmidt which was a huge help.

Maybe cycles aren't the most fun in the world, but it was certainly very challenging and after working with them for two weeks I feel like I've learned a lot on both how to do it, and how NOT to do it :)

So here is the result. First up is the standard walk. This is by far the toughest one to do I think.

standard walk from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Then the character walk based on the standard:

Character walk from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

and finally the run cycle:

runcycle from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Cheers

The bow

The first "long" assignment this year, where we had a full week to make a bow, how ever we wanted to.
This was a super fun week for me, where I was able to relax and have a good time, while still being productive.
I think I'm slowly finding a workflow that suits me well, which of course makes it all a lot more fun and less stressful and frustrating.

I decided to render it out, so that all my animations aren't just playblasts.
The fact that there are contact shadows and stuff, reveals things that aren't visible in the playblast.

I hope you enjoy my super serious knight, bowing in front of his mighty king! :)

The Bow from Christoffer Andersen on Vimeo.

Cheers