Some people do essays, I do this.

Once we had the audio recorded it was time for some broadway skills, it took a few takes to get comfortable with it and to learn the dialogue off by heart but I couldn't upload the early takes because the files we're too big. Heres the best bits that we stitched together.

Will and I went through all the footage we had and chose the clips that looked the most natural but were also entertaining, next we went through the final video and sketched out the most important beats which are pretty much when the character is at it's most expressive. These can later be translated into key-frames. Here are the drawings i took of the footage.

This guy gets paid for this...

Gunna have to do some acting reference so i thought i'd have a look at how the pros go about it, it looks like this guy is really annoying but the over acting totally works for this purpose. You can see how similar his animation is to what he acted, this is definitely the best way to get natural results.

So awesome, i think for the best results I'll have to try my hardest to not be shy in any way because it's the loose, relaxed approach that clearly gets the most natural movements.

Lipstick Tests

Before you ask I haven't turned transexual, and even if I have this isnt the appropriate blog for suczh things. Lipstick camera is when you record the audio with a video as well so you can catch all the beats of the person's face while they say them, it helps with lip syncing and with acting later on. Heres my first attempt at recording.

Well the sound came out okay but my face was a little flat, was concentrating too much me thinks. Tried again a few times and heres a snippet from the final one. It's not too important to get the acting right as we'll record that separately later but needed to get the audio perfect and make sure there is some emotion for reference.

The voice of an Angel

After that horrible piece of research I had to do I came up with a few ideas for the voice of this guy. Used the dialogue Will had already written for it and Sorry guys, it's just audio so no handsome face for ya, used a screenshot of the character he's using.

So I sent these off to Will so he could see which are his favorites, Once I've heard from him we can go over refining the right voice then do some recorded dialogue with it.

Some Tasty Scriptin'

One of the things Will said he was struggling with was thinking of a short gag to fit in his film at the end of the credits. We like totally so kept in contact over facebook so we could bounce ideas around and he could update me with what else he needed.

Obviously I had floods of hilarious ideas pretty much immediately, it was almost annoying.

Of course that was a lie, i was racking my brains for ages, Will said he needed something simple that wouldn't destroy his sizable mind so i went for something that could re-use all the assets he already had and not require another character. I wrote a brief script for hi

m with a gag about a dart board, frankly its genius.

I was pretty pleased with this, im sure you can't read it but take my word for it, it's awesome. However this message was to follow.

Will rightly pointed out that if we made something that long it would take another few months to animate, he liked it though so we basically just cut it down to him defending himself on phone.

What a pair of F**king C*nts

HA, right so i need to do a politian voice for Will's short animation at the end of the credits, this is gunna be fun. Basically i just need to sound like as much of a dick as possible, an easy feat i believe. Done some research so here's Mr Milliband and Mr Cameron both making absolute nobs of themselves.

God i never thought these two would appear on this blog, luckily it's mostly to be ridiculed. So i chose them speaking in quite uncomfortable positions because in the scene were doing the character is on the phone in his office so referencing a speech wouldn't really make sense as it would have incorrect pacing. Maybe I'll post the voices up soon if you're good and before you say it, NO, mimicking is not the sincerest form of flattery.

What's this module called again??

So we've gotta help the third years in need, except they aren't in need at all, i presume they just wanna get on with their final projects without having to babysit us guys. Never the less we had to do a presentation to show ourselves off, demonstrating our strengths and explaining our weaknesses, naturally this involved a whole lotta lying from the majority of the class. After what seemed like two weeks of mono-toned talks with the year above slowly being drained of life force most people paired off. These are a couple of the slides from my show.

I stressed that i'd much rather get into drawn work like character design rather than 3D work that i probably could do, unfortunately that's pretty much what everyone else said. Once the monumental clusterf**k that was us trying to pair up kicked off i immediately felt like i had to get out of there, luckily i saw someone else that clearly felt the same way, i recognized a Mr Will Marsh from having spoken at various points over the last two years and knew he was specializing in CG. I ungracefully chased him down the corridor and pretty much forced him to work with me. Also whilst we were talking another 3rd year who i knew to be hugely talented because he had given us a lecture (you heard) a few weeks earlier came up to me, a Mr James Isaac approached and asked if i could also design an alien for him to model in CG. Erm, hells yeah.

Light it up

So i've was thinking about how to light this fool since we had a very interesting mini lecture at uni about texturing and lighting, mainly the three point set up and Kelvin showed us some new render techniques which looked totally bas ass.

I'm looking for something quite stylized so the lighting doesn't have to be hyper real, i would prefer if it just showed of the style of the models. I quite like the clinical look for the school aswell, i think this would reflect how boring everyone finds it and bring the action to the characters. i have found an example of lighting and rendering I really like, this is a snapshot from the children's TV show Pocoyo.

What i like about this is how real the models look, obviously not anatomically but it looks like you could pick up and play with the models, i would very much like this look for my animation but with background scenes aswel.

This was my first attempt at lighting using two lights.

So yeah, this is pretty bleached, i forgot to play with the intensity and brightness of the lights, heres my first go at 3 point lighting.

Well it's not bleached any more and i quite like the light that's hitting the lockers, looks like it's coming in from a crack in some blinds or summat, heres a go using two directional lights with a slight coloured filter on them.

I really like the shadows on her face on this one but the light on the back wall is waaay to harsh, it's still looking to CGI'd aswel. Just like the rest of this project i could mess around with the lights for weeks so i tried a daylight simulator in the MentalRay render plug-in that i briefly tried before i'd coloured the models, heres how it came out.

Sweet jesus that looks awesome, obviously the floor is bleached out a little but the rest of the colours look so grounded, the model looks really solid and the reflection in her eyes is amazing. This is exactly what i was looking for.

Weight Painting

This subject pissed me off so very much that is does not even deserve a humorous title, painting weights is where you tell the skeleton which joints will affect which parts of the model when i move them. You gotta do this by manually painting in white which areas are affected, this went wrong around 7 million times, mainly because it took me days to figure out that you can't paint negative weights. I'm sure if you're reading this you have no clue what the fook i'm on about, hopefully this'll help.

So the white area is what will bend when i move the related joint, it's definitely as boring as it sounds. The better it's done though the more natural the animation will look.

Riggin' Hell

Oh my f**king god, rigging is the worst thing i've ever done in my life, even as i'm talking to you now things are going wrong with the rigging for this character, this is definitely the most i've learnt in such a small space of time though, also i can see the enormous potential in this skill. This was my first shot at making this lady a skeleton.

You can see here that i already had a problem with shoulder joints that are waaay too big, i know how to fix this though i just don't have a middle mouse button. I did however manage to figure out how to make controllers, you can just about see the rectangle around her left foot, this means that i can control her whole leg just by moving her foot and it bends at the knee like a leg would. If i had all the time in the world i could rig controllers for all the limbs but because she only has a few joints i can just control her by manipulating these.

once i imported the character to the scene though i had a problem scaling her down and then all hell broke loose and i started to cry. Since then i have had to re-rig her several times but that meant i was able to make a few improvements.

I have now gotten the hang of creating a skeleton for a character, like i said i wish i had more time to rig it as well as possible but all these unforeseeable mistakes (apparently we learn from them) made it impossible. I did add a joint in the hands though so now she can bend her fingers and hopefully grab things