COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 9

Posted on by Thor

I animated 2 Minotaurs yesterday and duplicated several animations to fill out the crowd.I just have to paint one Minotaur’s legs and I will probably duplicate that animation as well. I should definitely be able to finish this scene today. What remains is adding breath, COVID Spatter and perhaps dust rising off of the dirt road. I think I should also expand the background on the right so that I do not need to crop the scene tight top and bottom at the end.

The plan right now is to zoom out as the Minotaurs run towards the camera and possible pan right as they turn the corner. This should add more motion to an already frenetic scene. I had tried moving a still painting of a crowd of Minotaurs behind all the animated Minotaurs but that stood out like a sore thumb. I am hoping that the dust will fill in the negative shapes in the same way and look more natural. There are some painted levels that I will also add in After Effects. A yellow wash with overlay transparency will give a nice sun light glow and darker washes around the edges will add menace.

The background will be given a depth map and that may effect my choice of camera move in the final composite.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 8

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I animated the largest Minotaur. Callipeg updated the program in the morning and the changes to the program made animating so much easier. The turn o the Minotaur is the best that I have done and that is in part due to a new feature of Callipeg called off the pegs. This feature males it possible to place the drawings on each side of an inbetween on top of one another. Before I was accomplishing this by creating two layers and copying those two drawings into the layers and turning down the opacity. This new feature makes that process so much easier.

In the prior version of the program I had difficulty using the 3 finger flipping technique. That is now fixed. Another new feature is that entire levels of animation can be duplicated and transformed. I plan to duplicate some of the smaller Minotaurs and moving them into the negative spaces to fill out the crowd. In the illustration those negative spaces were simply filled with darkness and brush strokes to imply the crowd. Now I have the option to add motion to those areas.

I also have one more Minotaur to animate today and he stops to the left of the left most character. He will be charging straight ahead as if he has no intention of turning the corner.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 7

Posted on by Thor

I finished animating a third Minotaur but didn’t finished painting him yet. I woke up and decided I want to change the timing of his left fist as well. Today I think I will start tackling the largest Minotaur who passes right in front of the camera.

Painting yesterdays animation will take quite some time since over 28 frames need to be fully painted. I also have to darken the highlights on the bodies of the character. The brighter painting worked on the still illustration but I want all the Minotaurs to be similar in the final animated scene.

There is one more Minotaur carrying a skull that needs animating and then I suspect I will fill out the background crowd by duplicating several runs so that they fill in the existing negative spaces between the 5 Minotaur animations.

So far I have spent 7 days on just short of 2 seconds of animation. What a crazy business. This scene is wearing me down but I learn from every mistake and victory.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 6

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I finished animating a second Minotaur and started a third.I made a horrible mistake in that i merged a planning layer that had arcs drawn on it into one of the Minotaurs. I didn’t have enough undos to correct the situation. So I erased each of the arcs one each individual cell. However the lines still appear inside the character. I will have to go through and touch up each cell with paint as well. I thought I had positioned the arc layer below the painted layer but I guess I moved it back up in the stack for some reason. That is a mistake I will never make again.

I will resume touch up work after I finish animating and painting the third Minotaur. I have to keep moving forward. I have two more Minotaurs to animate including the larges one. Actually the largest one might block some of these mistakes so I will wait until he is in the scene before I clean up the nitty gritty mistakes.

The first two Minotaurs I had turn over the course of one stride in their run. The animation I am doing today lengthens that turn over two strides. This should soften the turn and break up any monotonous timing similarities between characters.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 5

Posted on by Thor

I finished one Minotaur and started a second while reusing some of the keys. I have three more Minotaurs who are large in the foreground to animate. The plan then is to reuse some Minotaurs to fill out the herd charging down the street. My plan shows the tracks they travel on down the street.

Pam and I took the dogs for a walk this weekend and I spent the entire walk watching the dogs back legs to see how they worked. I am trying to replicate that movement in the runs of these mythical creatures. Since the legs are different than human legs I am having some challenges figuring out the poses. The entire lower leg is like the human foot and only the upper leg is like a human thigh and calf. The entire run then is like a human running on tip toe.

I should get the Muybridge book on animal motion. My animation might not be perfectly accurate but hopefully it is believable. I would guess that I might have three more days working on this scene in Callipeg. Oh that reminds me, last night after working on the scene all day the program froze and all the drawings in the timeline disappeared. I stepped away from the computer to calm my nerves for a bit and then came back and tried to do a hard reboot of the iPad. I had to do this over and over. I was following the directions but it turns out the timing of the button pressing is a critical issue. After the 5th or 10th try I got the timing right and the tablet rebooted. Thankfully all the drawings were there when the program was reopened. Callipeg seems to have issues with freezing when the eraser is selected. Best not to erase then, but I erase all the time while animating. I do wish Apple was smart enough to use the opposite end of the pencil as the eraser rather than having the artist select an icon to erase. Oh well tech is slow to develop.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 4

Posted on by Thor

On Day four of animation on this scene I finished up several human runners and got one Minotaur running towards the camera. There was a hint of another human runner in the illustration, but I decided it was overkill for the animation.

I picked a minotaur that is in the distance and in the end is mostly behind a huge foreground minotaur.I figured if I was going to make any mistakes it would be best to experiment in the background. I finished the difficult take of animating the minotaur rounding the corner. I haven’t animated his arms yet. I will be doing that today. I might get to animating a second minotaur today and I want to be sure he isn’t in lockstep with this one. I can probably re-use the turn but I will likely re-animate the legs at a different timing.

These guys might are wielding Thor’s hammers in the original illustration. I will see how I feel about leaving those in the animation. Once the largest Minotaur fills the scene, I will see if I need to add more to fill in the negative spaces.

COVID: Minotaurs Day 3 Animation

Posted on by Thor

I finished up animating a background runner and started another. Each runner involved creating about 28 drawings. Each runner also has multiple layers for paint and separate layers for arm swings. In this shot you can see a light blue outline of one of the runners. I use the identical poses to figure out how the runner gets smaller in the distance. I then have to redraw the keys to orient the pose to the perspective.

I will be teaching a virtual animation course this week and my students will likely get to see this scene develop in real time. I have specific animation assignments that teach each of the 12 animation principles, but once I have finished demonstrating the assignment I will likely head over to this scene and work on it while the students work on their animations.

There is a rare possibility that I will finally start animating one of the Minotaurs today. I suspect I will add a camera move as well which is zoomed in down the street to start and pulls back as the crowd rushed towards the camera. A whole lot of work remains to be done.

COVID: Minotaurs Day 2 Animation

Posted on by Thor

Day two of animation and I finished two more runners. The runners get smaller at the start of the scene since they are further down the street. They also line up behind one another so mostly the foreground runner is predominant and the others are half hidden behind his right shoulder. I fully animated them all regardless. I might reuse a few if I want to fill out the crowd more.

After finished the animations, I realized they were in lock step at the end. I decided to hold some of the earlier drawings on 3s and 4s since they were hardly noticeable anyway. That change of timing at the start changed the timing of when each runners foot hit the ground at the end. I will have to keep this in mind as I animate the Minotaurs. I want plenty of chaos in when hoofs hit the ground.

Today I have to animate one runner getting small in the distance, paint that partially hidden runner and add his arms swinging. Then I want to try and finish animating one of the Minotaurs. If I animate the largest Minotaur, I can see how much he blocks views of the human runners. The runs will be animated along a wide sweeping arc that gets smaller in the distance. I suspect much of this will involve full animation and a cleanup pass.

Time to get back to chipping away at this scene.

COVID: Minotaurs

Posted on by Thor

This might be the most complicated scene to animate in the film. I separated out all the characters in the painting and will animate each in turn. The background had to be touched up so that the buildings which were covered by characters in the foreground are now visible. The challenge in this scene is that the minotaurs and people run up the street and then turn the corner passing in front of the viewer.

Since everyone turns this will involve plenty of full animation. I decided to start with the smallest characters which are the people running on the sidelines to avoid the minotaurs like the running of the bulls in Spain. The first person I animated is barely visible in the illustration as he runs off screen.

The second person I animated was simpler but I am flailing his arms. I had to change the arm animation when I look at it with the other runner in the scene as well. I had to avoid the arm from appearing in front of the other runners face or belly. That became distracting.

There are about four other people in this sideline crowd and then I move on to the more challenging minotaurs. There is a good chance that the much larger minotaurs will cover some of this early animation. That leaves me the freedom to play and experiment.

I am teaching virtual classes for eight hours today, so there will be less progress made on the scene.

COVID: Freedom From Fear

Posted on by Thor

After compositing all the layers of the flaming football players, I decided to animate a simpler scene in the afternoon.I figured animating this army nurse offering a vaccine jab would be a simple task. I tried animating the scene at first in Callipeg by cutting the arm into a forearm and upper arm. The plan was to animate those two sections like cutout paper animation. The problem was that Callipeg reduced the resolution of the segments when they were moved into a new position. I suspect that rotating the segments caused the loss in resolution. This is a major drawback for the program and I stopped using it for this scene.

I instead cut out the arm as a single segment and imported it into After Effects. I set up depth maps for the scene minus the arm. The arm layer was then composited on top of the scene which had the parallax effect. I downplayed the parallax effect on the girl and nurse’s head and shoulders.

The yellow dots scene in the shot above are pins which I placed at the joints. The red dots are called starch pins which solidify the bony arm segments. I moved the wrist pin and the elbow pin a tiny bit to key frame the animation. Unfortunately After Effects can not play back the animation in real time because of memory issues. It only plays a few frames in quick succession. I have to render the scene and look at the render to check the animation. I tend to accept some sub par animation because of this technical glitch. I plan to go back into some of the previous scenes to adjust animation timing. I might go back into this scene as well after I figure out how to adjust the memory settings for optimal use in After Effects. Technical shit like this can cause a solid day of digging into memory settings, so I prefer to just keep moving forward.

At first I animated the jab over the course of the whole scene which is just short of two seconds. That was too slow and monotonous. I then cut the animation down by half and held the jab in for the remaining time. That left a somewhat uncomfortable pause but I liked it since I am always uncomfortable when I get a jab.