Jamie Gone Dun a Weblog

“Fair enough”, I thought.

Here’s two for the price of one (nothing).

After Effects does not automatically keyframe adjustments, so to save yourself some heartache, just remember to hit the stopwatch icon before you start adjusting things. I don’t have a clever way to help you remember to do it, I’m just hoping that by mentioning it I’ll save someone some pain.

This second one is so important, that I’ll probably end up posting it again later. Save your work. All the time. Whatever you are doing, whatever software, just press ‘Save’ (apple+s on the Mac). Do it now. Do it all the time. This was drummed into me by the lovely and talented Joe Bennett at City of Bath College/Bath Spa University many years ago, when he would come into the room we were working and switch off the power to the whole room. We learnt the lesson. Save. Thank you.

If you’re going to be doing more than a couple of hours of rotoscoping in your lifetime, buy a graphics tablet. You won’t want to use it exclusively (sometimes a mouse is more precise), but it will be worth it. Get whatever size you can afford. You can always buy a bigger one when you’re a success… I’m sure it’s much harder to be a success with RSI, and a life without that misery is worth at least a couple of hundred quid. Swap between your mouse and pen whenever you begin to feel uncomfortable, and make sure to take a break!

Hey, shameless plug! I’ve started multimedia production company called Super Mega Action Plus. We make cool stuff like videos, websites and other fancy things to make whatever it is you do look as great as it possibly can. Even if you don’t want something made, go have a look at our creations… oh, go on. Thanks!

If you can at all possibly help it, DO NOT rotoscope people you like. You will not like them any longer and it’s not their fault.

Thank you.

Last one!

My First Lip Sync. We were given a dope sheet with a phrase mapped out for us to draw our keys with our own character design. We didn’t get to hear the sound until we’d line tested the drawings! Mine is a little bit off in places, as I haven’t adjusted it to the sound clip since watching it back.

There is also a bit too much eyebrow going on, cos you basically do a drawing for each vowel and consonant shape, then repeat the same drawings when the sound happens again. This meant when sounds happened closer together, the additional ‘acting’ gets a bit intense! It’s all learning tho, innit.

Since finishing the course, I’ve done no animation what so ever, which is rubbish. I’ve had loads of ideas, just not sat down and done it! I gotta sort that out and do something, else I’ll never get any better…

Just realised I hadn’t finished posting all these, so I’ll get on with it…

Starting to do a bit of acting with characters. Brief (as far I can remember, it was a couple of weeks ago and I was tired from working on a computer animated project all week!) was to have a character lose (drop) something and then have to bend down to get it back. That could be just my interpretation however, cos thats what I seem to have done…

Bit more facial acting this time. You have to imagine the guy is whistling away to himself, then there is a massive crash stage left…

Combining the ‘bouncing solids’ with character animation, I present… a diving man.

Whats more difficult than a human (2 legged) walk cycle? You’re right, it’s a 4 legged walk cycle. The legs are drawn differently to show near and far legs. The whole idea with these line tests is to get the animation right without spending long on making the drawing beautiful, then you clean it up later once everything is moving as it should.

Interesting fact – I’ve done a natural animal walk cycle here, but for comedy effect you can also use two human walk cycles, like a pantomime horse. Pluto is drawn like that (apparently, I haven’t checked).

Week 3, we start walk cycles. Pretty much THE fundamental idea to master in animation. Aside from my amazing ball rolling and bouncing in the previous two weeks, I’d only ever done motion graphics with video clips, text, bits of 3D and abstract stuff, so this is my first attempt at character animation. It’s pretty much straight copied from the examples we were given, still, gotta start somewhere, and it’s good practice for drawing ‘on model’.

Picking something up off the floor! It’s… like… all about acting… and weight… and balance. As with most of these line tests, these are just the key frames, I didn’t have time in the sessions to ‘tween them. Maybe one day I will. Probably just do something new instead.

I been doing a course in Drawn Animation at Central Saint Martins, so I thought I’d kick off my Vimeo account by posting my line tests of the stuff we’ve been learning. Tho I’ve done plenty of software animation before, I’d never done any using just drawings, so bear with me, things get better!

This one was just to teach us the principles of keys, breakdowns and tweens, plus give us a bit of practice in ‘flipping, flicking and rolling’…

The next week, we did ‘Animating Solids’. Not those sort of solids, thanks Simon. This is quite obviously a ball rolling off of a building/wall and doing a bit of ’squash and stretch’ as it bounces along

Hey guys, I found these sites which might be of interest… Feel free to post any more that you wanna share!

Animation

John K (the Ren and Stimpy guy) – Tho John rants a quite a lot about stuff he doesn’t like, and posts new stuff all the time, his blog is full of awesome bits of practical information and interesting ways of looking at animation. There’s loads of good stuff at the start of May (I haven’t looked any earlier), so make sure to check out the archives.

Animation World Magazine – Massive site full of articles and tutorials.

ASIFA – Hollywood Animation Archive – What they say about it: “The International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood has embarked on an ambitious project to create an animation archive, museum, and library for the benefit of the animation community, students and general public. We are in the process of building an ANIMATION DATABASE which contains biographies of artists, filmographic info and media files- movies, artwork and audio.”

The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course (Part 1) – I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks promising. It’s partly why I bought the Preston Blair book I brought in the other day. See the links down the side for the other parts of the course (scroll down a bit).

Drawing/Painting

Vilppu Drawing Online: Gesture – Haven’t had chance to read this one yet either, but it claims to be ‘essential’! Who am I to disagree?

Drawspace – really cool site dedicated to teaching people how to draw!

Linda Bergkvist – Linda Bergkvist is my hero! Not only does her site have all her amazing work on it, but she’s put tutorials up on how she does it! I love it. Check out ‘Glimpse of Summer’ in the ‘Jade’ Gallery. Awesome.

Manga Revolution Drawing Tutorials – Loads of user submitted tutorials for drawing and painting in Manga styles.