Pen Drawings: Meerkat

These are some really quick character roughs, exploring different expressions. 

Flight: Meerkat Movement and Expressions

So a while back I created a post centred around birds in flight with heaps of links to potential reference videos.  Today I am doing the same, but this time looking at the movement of my other character, Meerkat.

These clips have some really nice Meerkat moments:





Another consideration in my animation will be creating expressive characters while still maintaining the animal quality- especially as my designs aren't especially stylised in terms of the shapes and appearances of the characters.  Because the forms of the characters are quite true to real life I need to find a good balance between this and the characters expressions.

Disney has approached this issue many times with the large cast of animals in their films, and often solves it by stylizing the characters.  Some good reference I have been looking at are the expression sheets from films like Bambi which has a level of realism in the characters but still makes this work.

Figure 1: Bambi Expressions. 1939. Walt Disney Productions.  Retrieved from http://andreasdeja.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/marc-davis-talkes-about-bambi.html

In this clip, Marc Davis talks about how they manged to create Bambi's expressions by looking at human children, and translating these onto Bambi.  This can be seen in the stylization of Bambi- the shorter snout and bigger forehead mimic that of a baby, whereas a fawn does not have these features.  Strangely enough this is also something I applied to my young Meerkat design without even thinking about it. 




Since I am animating a Meerkat, I obviously can't not look at Timon's expressions from The Lion King.  Timon is a very stylised Meerkat, and constantly walks on two legs.  While my Meerkat isn't as stylised as this it is useful to look at how his expressions were achieved. 

Figure 2: Timon Model Sheet. 1993. The Walt Disney company.  Retrieved from http://blogs.disney.com/insider/2014/06/19/throwback-thursday-modeling-the-lion-king/#banzai

One of those weeks

What follows is a rant.

So I have had a decidedly unconstructive week.  I started off the week well, working on my water simulation which was due soon.  I was reasonably happy with how it was looking.  But then the issues began.

First up I had a computer crash almost every night while simulating.  This meant that I lost simulation data and had to begin again.  Once I began to get closer to a decent amount of frames simulated the computer ran out of ram.

Meshing took longer than I thought it would, around 26hours before the computer crashed.  At this point I had had a headache for around 24hours which was developing into a migraine.  I decided that enough was enough.  I would just have to use what I had.  I still needed to mesh my foam and splashes so I set this going and headed home to rest.

So unfortunately my water simulation is one of those projects that I feel quite disappointed about.  Initially I really enjoyed working with realflow, but not allowing enough time to get everything right really soured the experience.

Between Realflow and headaches I didn't manage to hardly look at anything else this week!  How time flies when you are having frustrations.  Ok, rant over now.

On a more positive note I have the next version of the edit, and have heard that the sizzle reel is ready too!  I've started going through the new edit and am trying to make this a priority to get done so everyone can get started working on this, but I still need to match up some of the data to the shots.  This is going to take a bit longer than it should due to me confusing myself on set (I was working off the format used in the storyboards (S1S1) and matching each shot to the appropriate storyboard, the clapper was working from order of shooting (S1SA, S1SB), and the camera assist who wrote down some of the camera data for me the first day wrote in order of shooting (S1S1, S1S2).  

I could have saved myself some hassle if I had known beforehand that not all shots were going to be shot as per storyboards, and could have applied an ID system instead of focusing on shots.  I also didn't really realise how much change was going to happen in the editing phase, so S1S1 of the storyboards was no longer S1S1 of the film.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing- I now have a better idea of how I would approach data collection on a shoot like this one, and about some discussions that should have been had beforehand.

Flight: Modelling Meerkat

I've started working on modelling the Meerkat character.  At the moment it is still at the low geometry stage, while I try to work out the topology of the model.

I was concerned about the legs at this point, as I didn't think they would deform properly.  I took out some edge loops so I could manipulate the shape easier.  Then I extracted the back leg and extruded the edges, before reattaching.  I'm hoping this will allow move movement and better deformation.

Flight: Storyboarding and Thumbnails

Over the past few weeks I have been working on getting my post production work done for Flight- notably thumb-nailing out my shots.

This has been a really good process for me, as somewhere along the line during this process the story began to shift in ways I hadn't intended.  I'm still working on putting the story onto it's final path and deciding exactly what elements to use.  Thumb-nailing has also highlighted some weaknesses in the story that need a bit more attention. 

Here are some pencil sketches exploring different poses and angles for my thumbnailing. 

Figure 1: Scanned Pencil Roughs

They are just rough, quick sketches, but useful for me- especially since this will be my first film with animals as the main characters.  Getting human expression while maintaining animals as animals will be one of the design challenges of this project.