Showreel

The little Helper Rough Hand in

Website (work in progress)

As rigging has been putting animating on hold for now i decided to have a go at designing my website. It is still a work in progress but here is the link for what i have got so far.

http://www.lucywheeleranimation.moonfruit.com/

Frankie reference

Before me and jenny animate frankie we needed to get some reference footage of how he would move so we recorded ourselves acting out the movements that we needed (badly on my part! see jenny's blog for better acting skills haha!) I found it incredibly hard trying to think how an old man would move and exaggerate it without making the movements too old as we imagine Frankie still being quite energetic in his age. Here are my attempts at acting out frankie's movements we started off with walking.

Then went on to filming how he would get down to put the toys in the box.

Then how he would slump on his chair after searching through his desk for his key.

And finally i wanted to record basic movement of how he would open the door as well as holding the box.

As well as recording ourselves acting out his movement we tried to think of old men characters in animation and thought of grandpa from the Rugrats and grandpa from the Simpsons. However after looking at some clips of these two I noticed that there isn't that much of a difference in movement.

Another obvious elderly character would be Carl from up here is a scene of Carl

Another Pixar animation that we thought of was Geri's Game

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7dcbIKvlw

Jenny also found a live action version.

I then went on to think about other old people in television and thought of:

Bruce Forsyth

Victor Meldrew character in one foot in the grave

And the characters in the last of the summer wine

As well as these I also thought of Prince Phillip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o60W286cm-E

From looking at this footage what i noticed is that they all seem to be very stiff in the shoulders and tend to hunch Over. There seems to be not a lot of movement from the shoulders up which can also be seen in the shot of Carl. As well as this they are quite stiff in the way they walk and put more weight on each foot. Or they don't take as big steps or pick up their feet as much.

For the style of Frankie's movements I feel the style of movement in the short Geri's Game will work well for Frankie being exaggerated and comical in movements to fit in with sally. Also the movements of Carl from UP will be a good reference but is a bit more exaggerated than Geri and feel he is more suited in style.

shots so far and adjusted shots

So the shots that just contain sally are now animated and its exciting seeing it gradually coming together. As me and jenny have been animating we have been asking for each others feedback and its really useful as sometimes you do not notice things and need a second opinion. Hopefully as well i've been doing a good job so far as animation director trying to keep both of are animations similar in style so sallys personality will come across in the final animation.

I did find animating shot 14 difficult as i found it hard to think of how sally would react to the key falling and make it interesting and funny. My first attempt was too dull and you didn't see enough of sally's reaction or expression. So with the second attempt I changed the camera to be closer to sally to show her expression more clearly. the second attempt at her movements in this shot i think work a lot better as well as her movements are clearer.

We then went on to adjusting shots

For this shot the bounce of the wooden circle needed to be adjusted as the last bounce didn't work as it looked like the second bounce was more powerful when it should be less.

after getting feedback from Andy and Derek i adjusted these 2 sally shots the first needed to be snappier as they felt it was to slow and feel this shot works better in comparison. The second needed sally's pose when she puts her leg in the air to be clearer so help this pose for longer.

Sally Animation Shots

Shot 1

Shot 14 1st attempt

Shot 14 

Shot 18

Shot 19

Shot 20

shot 24

shot 26

shot 30

shot 41

shot 43

shot 50

sally animation tests

We got the sally rig yay =D and as i have been assigned animation director before me and jen started animating the shots that contained only sally in i needed to make some test animations. This is so that when we started animating both of us had an idea of how sally would move. Then with the actual shots in the film the animation would flow and the viewer hopefully won't be able to tell a difference between who has been animating what.  

With Sally's personality we need to show her cute and playful side so with the walk i tried to make it bouncy. One of the problems with spiders is that people are freaked out by the way they move so i tried to make her not scary in her movements which i think works with this test walk. sally's walk was a challenge as the swaying i gave her made her look like she was strutting or a gangster which wasn't what i wanted but think it worked out alright in the end.

I then went on to making test animations of sally pushing and pulling something. The push test i kept simple and she reminded me of a puppy while animating it as i gave her a bit of a bum wiggle before she went to push. I think this shows she has a playful personality.

I really enjoyed animating the pull test as i played around a bit more and i like the part where sally pulls the key and the first look at the key shows her interest. However i wasn't happy with bits of the animation like the second look at the key at the beginning didn't really work for me but didn't really know what to add either which was annoying. Also after showing the tests at the production meeting they commented on how sally rubbing her hands in preparation to pull the key doesn't really come across and that her personality doesn't really show very clearly in this animation. Which i completely agree with and if i had more time i would of liked to alter it but it is still a good reference for how sally would pull something and the comments are really helpful for when we work on the actual animation. I really enjoyed animating these tests specially as have been excited to play with the rig and has been quite a while since i have been animating. I was impressed with the sally rig as well as dan is learning as he has been rigging the character and she was very easy to use and there wasn't that many problems with her that needed fixing which was great =D.

Spider clips

As me and jenny will be animating sally soon YAY!!!!! we decided to look up clips of spiders movements to help us. Georg had given us a video of the spider animation and heres a clip 

i remembered watching this episode when i was little and still remembered the tune haha =D the spider in this animation uses exaggerated comic movements which show his character very well. I think this style of movements would work really well for sally. I then tried to think of other animations that used spiders to get different ideas of styles of movement and thought James and the Giant Peach!!! which i haven't seen for ages and really want to watch now!! and heres a clip i found of some test animations of Miss Spider

Completely different style of movement compared with the previous animation as well as being stop motion the movements are less comical and she walks more lady like...... in a spider way =D I then tried to think of a 3D animation with a spider and could only think of Charlotte's web and heres the trailer and skip to 1:10 to see the spider

Her movements are more realistic. I think that sally would work well with more comic movements seen in the first animation but perhaps a little bit more realistic in movement.

and finally here is some footage of a real life spider

cuckcoo clock animated

textured environment

The environment is now pretty much textured well done to harriet =)

unfortunately we have had a few issues as one the render time was taking a very long time and one of the reasons Pete found out was that our textures were very big in file size!! so me and jenny had to resize all of the textures.....but now the render time has been decreased because of this so its all goood =D

another problem we've found is that when me and jenny check the textures on our own computers for one of us there might not be a texture but for the other there is.....which makes no sense sometimes but ah wells!! worked around it as i have now checked and changed issues with the environment and hopefully it will be okay now (fingers crossed) and here are some renders. It does have lighting added by pete in the renders but this isn't the final lighting but gives an idea.

web bow, hook string modelled

jenny modelled the hook to add for the last wind up web shot and i modeled the web bow and string to hang from the hook which will have toys hanging from it.

UV unwrap change, Environment problems and textured environment part 1

For the moment no more animating has been done as the characters are still being rigged but we have come across some problems to keep us busy. We found out that there was a problem with the UVs in our environment as they were not right for when we give them to harriet to texture. So me and jenny adjusted the UVs for the objects that needed to be detailed in the animation so that they are now right to be textured. We then updated the objects in the environment however for some reason which we can not make sense of everything decided to move around and disappear and do all sorts of weird things. So jenny ended up moving everything back while i applied the textures that harriet had finished for the ferris wheel shot that jenny animated. Then i tried to open the environment when the textures were applied and it froze my computer =/ so we will have to see if there is something that we are doing wrong when we next see georg. I will put up an image of the environment with the textures applied so far soon.

animating shots so far

so far i have animated

• the ball flying through the air after being shot from the catapult,
• the end web wind up scene (without web at the moment)  
• POV jack in a box scene. 

The POV jack in a box scene i enjoyed animating the most as it was fun to make that come to life. The problems i had with this scene was getting the movements to be more exaggerated without pushing the rig to far. I feel the timing is working well with this scene. Another problem was getting the camera angle right for this shot as he needs to jump out at the audience but think this angle works well. It will be interesting to see what this shot looks like when it is textured and lit.

The end we wind up scene needs to be added to as we need to add the web that winds around the pencil display. We have had a talk with georg about it and he said he was going to think of ways to achieve this. In the meantime though we have decided that we want to make this scene more interesting for example we were going to have the web tied up in bows and hanging through washers to keep it up. Also we are going to add some hooks around the pencil display on the shelves so that the web can wrap arond these and hang some toys from them. So far though the scene is working well the main problem i had with this shot was getting the camera to run smoothly as for some reason there was a hiccup when it was rotating around. I tried looking at the motion trail (which i have never used) to see what was happening and i sorted it out by looking at the movements on the graph (which i also couldn't remember how to use as haven't touched since first looking at it opps) and worked out how to make the movements smoother. It was a lot easier adjusting it on the graph so this scene ended up being a learning curve. 

The flying ball scene is also not finished yet as we need to add Frankie who also needs to be added in the web wind up scene.

Im looking forward to getting to be able to animate sally and frankie.

animating jack scene

animating

Sally facial expressions

To help with rigging sally and as we didn't know how dan was going to do facial rigging i drew out some facial expressions to show what we need her to do. I did find this challenging at times as sally can look very scary and evil instead of looking cute and friendly which is a slight problem as the animation is for kids. The ticked facial expressions are the ones that i found worked well. However in the end dan has managed to make it so that we can move each part of the face individually so this will be a lot easier when animating sally as we can then exaggerate expressions a lot easier. 

jack in a box test

I also animated a short test of the jack in a box rigged by Dan to see if everything was working alright and to show at our first production meeting. It helped to see what adjustments we needed to tell Dan to make.

2nd week, 4th blockthro, Setting up the Scene

This is the final blockthro!! yay! for this me and jenny got together and thought about everyones comments and put together what we thought would work. There are still adjustments that will be made with the final animation compared to this as we still need to work on the pacing but for now we are happy to continue on to start animating =D

To be able to start animating we also had to set up the scene and make sure all the props were referenced in. I set up the workshop and here are some images.

3rd blockthro

This is our 3rd attempt which we showed at our first production meeting of the term. Derek suggested to us that we added some camera moves however we didn't completely understand what Derek was trying to suggest so ended up going a bit overboard with the camera moves and this was noticeable to other people. So we would have to adjust this also there are times where the shots do not flow into the next. Such as frankie is standing up and then suddenly magically sitting down so we would have to show him moving to this. However it was nice to see that they understood the story from the blockthro which is great. We then had a meeting with Rosa to make sure that everything was on track and that we were organised and so far so good =D

2nd blockthro

This is the second blockthro which we then showed to Derek who pointed out that we crossed the line in numerous places. Some of the shots were not working and some things didn't make sense in the blockthro. We also needed to make the pace of the animation quicker. So we again adjusted the blockthro.

Christmas, 1st blockthro, Dissertation

Over christmas me and jenny worked on putting together the blockthro so that we could get ready to animate when we got back. This is the first attempt of the blockthro. We realised that we needed to cut it down a lot as it was just under 7 minutes but we could see that a lot of the shots could be a lot quicker so wasn't too worried. We first had georg have a look at it and he cut out a lot of the shots so after talking with him we then adjusted the blockthro.

I have to say i really enjoyed animating the scene where sally is under the floorboards playing with the spindle of thread as in this scene i focused on her movements more. I really enjoyed animating her movements as it is very different to what i have animated before and am looking forward to animating the real sally =D

Dissertation

Over christmas i have also been focusing on my Dissertation and got around 9,500 words down however i haven't properly read it all through yet as i was panicking on getting it done. So now i will have to go through each section and make adjustments where i need to.

Blockthro