Got some great feedback from a few animators and incorporated their notes into this revision. Worked on her dive onto the sled and on making her feet kick out better during run. Animation feedback still welcome! Animate, scrutinize, revise, rinse, repeat!
Here’s the previous version to compare:
Hi All! Got new character animation shots to show. Would love feedback on the character animation from any animators. I would likely incorporate any good notes and re-render. This is my character, Flojo, getting ready for a skeleton bobsled run. I did these shots as examples for a character animation class I taught recently and to advance my own character animation craft. The thumbnail sketches for many of the key poses are in this post.
Update: Did some revision’s. Here’s the new version.
These are pose studies for a shot that I’m animating. This hour of drawing from my collection of video references locked a whole bunch of rich details in memory for me. Just can’t beat visual note taking.
As a character animator and information visualization designer, I get great benefit from the abundance of information that’s mushrooming around us. In fact, I’ve based my career around this giant data bloom. Indeed, the transformative experiences of web 2.0, social networking, and lately the real-time web are echoed by almost every person I know across nearly every field of interest.
In the last few weeks, I’ve had some valuable experiences at the hands of the real-time social web. Twitter told me that Sony Online Entertainment animator Floyd Bishop was about to do a live broadcast on UStream in an hour. I was able to watch as a brilliant animator from another studio practiced his craft. He simply pointed the camera at his screen as he animated in Maya while he and a producer narrated for 3 hours giving the best animation demo I’ve seen in years. Through Twitter, I’ve also been just-in-time connected to live broadcasts from world class character artists, Bobby Chiu and Steven Silver as they draw on camera. And I’ve been pointed to numerous online animation resources of higher quality and relevance than I’ve found through years of searching.
But, on the flipside, it’s taking some serious fiddling to curate and filter the onslaught of information that comes from Vimeo and YouTube subscriptions, blogs, podcasts, and Twitter’ers . I am getting great value out of every one of these information streams. And there is an unprecedented amount of substantive, high value information available in my fields. But in the current state of the web, filtering and absorbing the stupendous overload of quality information, constitute’s a price for that benefit. And brace yourselves – something new, whether its Google Buzz, Wave, Seesmic Look or another from the swarm of new tech will, like Twitter or Facebook sweep us all up adding still more information streams.
The rapidly forthcoming real-time web clearly necessitates something new for it to be useful. Filters and lists in any given app aren’t good enough. There are too many apps and services that we use. In 2007 a small tech initiative, APML or Attention Profiling Markup Language appeared and unfortunately disappeared. But this is a concept we sorely need in our tools even more three years later: Take all the streams you have – emails, IM’s, Tweets, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, forums, Facebook, etc, etc. and funnel them through one digestible pipe. Apply priorities and filters to everything that comes through your pipe and tweak your pipe based on what you’re doing at any moment, working, studying, playing, etc. OPML has become a powerful tool letting me maintain, organize and import/export my long list of feeds. A markup language for attention priority could be very useful.
For now, a combination of Feedly and Tweetdeck is allowing me to gracefully follow, in just a few minutes a day (or every couple days frankly), a few hundred animators, visualization people, news sources, and podcasts. And sure, I can and do turn off my Feedly, Tweekdeck, phone, email & IM’s while I work. But if we’re expected to negotiate the currents and thrive in the real-time web, we need something better. Should some people band together and tell the web development community to pay attention to Attention Profiling Markup Language? Is there an alternative to APML? Do you have any meta-tools that top Feedly or Tweetdeck for filtering a lot of info? There has to be something clever and magical between being overloaded and simply ignoring all the great information available. I’d love to hear your thoughts or information strategies.
I added some new actions based off of feedback I got from the last playblast. I added a finger point during “and then” and “information visualization” now has two beats, ending with a more dramatic pose. The tweening for the two additions are not polished by any means but they’re somewhat close to my intentions.
Brainstormer Animation Playblast 003 from Aaron Hwang on Vimeo.
This blog explores the intersection between character animation & information visualization.
I’ve been exploring what it means to use the craft of animation, especially character animation, to inform & communicate. This means exploring how people collaborate, converse, present and inform. Its an amazingly rich process of studying, acting, drawing, and animating. I’ve been using both character animation and animated information visualization to graphically and interactively communicate.
Welcome!
I decided to focus on the first half of the animation due to time and quality output. I figured 12 seconds to be much more manageable than 23. In this version I noticeably tweaked the animation to end on “information visualization” so it looks complete rather than unfinished.
AIPA Animation Playblast 001 from Aaron Hwang on Vimeo.
Here’s the topics we’re covering in the first two sessions of our animation workshop. We’re focused on coming up with an idea for a dynamic action animation – throwing, kicking, clobbering, flipping, or some other kinetic action. We’re working on getting personality into the action at the planning stage as well.
If you are studying cg character animation and looking for some deep, sustained, focused learning for a good value, I’ve got a great class starting on January 26 at San Francisco State University. This class is open to anyone with a few animation fundamentals exercises under their belt and is ready to work hard. This is an entire semester dedicated to the basics of character locomotion and acting. So we will act, shoot reference, sketch thumbnails and dig into a process and critique focused approach to character animation. This class will be in the exciting area of study where we put many of the principles of animation together. We’ll cover dynamic actions, moving with personality, weight and force, and exploring moods and emotion.
This class will be at a truly fantastic location in downtown SF. Literally walk up the stairs from BART into one of the best animation labs in the Bay Area. This is going to be a small class with a lot of one-on-one instruction and a hybrid lecture-workshop format. We’ll have great Maya rigs to animate. I’ve been teaching animation & modeling for many years at several different schools during my professional day jobs. I’m passionate about the deep craft of character animation and am thoroughly excited about this class as an opportunity to dig deeper. If you’re prepared to immerse yourself in the assignments, this class can result in a portfolio worthy shot or three and serve as a solid stepping stone toward professional practice. I have a history of making strong commitments to continued coaching of any of my students who are ready to throw down and animate.
Here are some examples of animations I’ve coached and supervised and which were done by animators I’ve trained. Here is my latest character animation reel. And here’s the formal info and registration page.
Let’s animate together!
You can comment on this post if you have questions.
After a long hiatus I managed to block in and start the tweening process of the unfinished second half. I blocked in some facial expressions with minor tweening and did a first draft of lip syncing. Facial animation still needs some tweaks and fine tuning with some eye blinks. The lip syncing needs holds and tweening so it currently appears mushy.
Brainstormer Animation Playblast 01 from Aaron Hwang on Vimeo.
