Animation!

This year, my sub-specialism has been "Character Animation". I was able to do some animation for Stupid Kow at the start of the year (I animated the Farmer character). Towards the end of the year, however, with the way things have gone for myself and for a lot of the films I have worked on, my hands have been full with other things taking priority due to time constraints. Fortunately though, over the last few weeks I have been able to get back into animation, and work on a couple of new projects- mine and Rob's project "iR" and Dan's film "Wet Paint".

For Stupid Kow, I did the full animation of the Farmer, which consisted of a walk cycle, an arm gesture, and some lip-sync. I worked closely with director Jamie Buchanan to get what he wanted from the shots, and I am pretty happy with how it turned out. It was nice to be on the other side of my own rig as well! 

For Wet Paint, I was given the character shaking his can, spray-painting a little, then walking towards the camera and doing some expressions and arm gestures once he was there. I'm happy with my effort, except for the walk. It took me a while to get to grips with a 3d walk cycle, and being pressed for time it did end up a bit rushed. As I was trying to do a cautious walk, I was falling into the trap of making his upper body look too stiff. At this point, the walk is still pretty stiff, but I am going to continue to work on it in my own time, just for my own learning's sake really. Although I'm disappointed, I'm taking it as a learning curve- I know I can do better, and I will!

Some reason Blogger wont let me stick that video in here, so here's a link- WP

For iR, I animated the first 15 seconds. I really enjoyed animating such a simple character, and the style was one that I really love. Without giving too much away, here's a test or 2!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I did some "animation" for Fearg na Mara. After their animator had posed the kelpie, it was sent back to me with "weight paint problems", which I was happy to fix... turned out the problems were due to the rig being used incorrectly. After a talk with the director, we sat and re-posed the kelpie ourselves, sorting out the deformations and generally improving the original poses. Here are a few examples, I worked on 10 in total.revieved reference/pose-

my improvements-

 2.

2.

3.