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