Motion capture

Quite some time ago I thought I had posted about the motion capture equipment. Today I logged on to blogger to find I forget to publish it and I lost the post I intended to make last week. This is what I tried to post last week.

Today we started our motion capture assessment 1 which is being incorporated into our production. Steve and I got to wear the suit to test out the sensors, software and hardware. It is great fun. So far the way we have been working has been recommended by Jon the motion capture teacher at JMC. Jon recommends a shot break down sheet where we list all required shots for the production. This provides good organisation and I find make’s sure that an individual or group don’t forget any shots or props required. Steve did a great job with this basic one. We had to do this outside of regular JMC class time but that’s life.

A number of our shots involved the boy Liam with a toy gun.

So we added tracking markers with electric tape to a toy gun of our own.

In the software we set up these points so that they would be recognized as a separate object. So far no issues have been found and the markers were tracked with no issues.

At this point in time I don’t feel I can give a full self-analysis of the motion capture until I get a rigged and skinned character moving in a scene. However I do feel that there is one thing that I would like to say. If I could do anything different it is that I would not use a small room. Having a small room gives the motion capture actor a limited amount of room to move. This limits the potential of the quality of animation. For e.g. if you have to have a scene where a character has to walk 7 meters and you only have 5 meters of acting space to do so it’s actually quite impossible to achieve quality. I believe jmc are aware of this and are considering moving the equipment to the auditorium. I want to help push this decision to move the equipment so that the quality of our motion capture is to its best. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfGqTVf5nkk

2D Animation Scene

2d Animation

One of the first takes for the production is the scene or shot of the main character Liam (the boy) watching his favourite action hero on television. This hero is your typical macho alpha male, the kind of guy who was the captain of the football team. A jock type character who grew up to be a successful space captain.

Liam idolises this hero and the production requires a short animation of this hero in his prime and glory. The group decided to go with a 2d animation to create a contrast between the 3d world art style and the 2d art style. Also, the intent is to give it an old 80s or 90s cartoon look. Using flash symbol based animation, the 2d animation has reached the completed stage. If I feel that I have enough time, I may refine the animation more before the rendering stage but moving on with the project at this point is a more pressing matter.

The reason for choosing a symbol based animation is because of the time constraints and the design of the character. When it comes to 2d animation, this character is quite complex for one individual and would be far more time consuming if done frame by frame, which I actually love. However, time is a major cost in this production, especially a 4 min production, so symbol based animation may not have as much appeal as hand drawing animation. Besides, it does give time for other more pressing matters like the vast amount of modelling and 3d animation required in the production.

When it comes to self-analysis, I would say there are some positions which make him look off balance and quite like a chicken pose. I was a student of Ian Lacy, former animator of The Lion King and other Disney films, and it really pains me to say the character has shots where he is off balance. This is one of the flaws that Ian would be determined to remove from a student’s. However, the horizon line of the background which is dropped is something I am hoping people take into consideration. The fact that the horizon line is dropped off camera gives the audience the sense that we are looking up at him and that the crouching awkward pose is actually the up angel shot of the mountain he is climbing.

Also the animation is on 2’s ( 2’s is when animation is done on every  2^nd frame )

Animation on 2’s can make an animation not looks as clean with its interpolation (inbetweening). However, it is one of those things that was popular in the 80s and 90s cartoons to save time back then so hoping it creates an old low budget aesthetic.

I also wish I had the time to get up to production quality knowledge with Toonboom. Flash is regarded as an application which is on its way out and a number of 2d feature films and television shows are now produced using the Toonboom application. During the creation of the scene I am reminded of Flash’s limitations and difficult vector calculating for brushes. 2d animation will always be a passion, love and practice of mine but I think it’s time I migrated from Flash to Toonboom.

Also, big thanks to Edd for creating the ground for me as his skills in illustration are amazing which gave the environment a more readable understanding. To keep the style consistent, I had to vectorise the ground because Flash works with vectors not pixels and more Flash’s options are available with vectors.

Link to 2d shot.

https://vimeo.com/77277298

Week 2

Week 2 A major improvement in productivity this week. Edd has created an impressive looking Zall and Zeet Character and josh has made a excellent environment house model. Steve is putting together the shot break down and has begun modelling the boy and I have completed the 2d flash scene and beginning creation of the mother character. The concerns I had in week 1 have gone and we may not have completed a finalized animatic but I can see its getting done and feel more confident it will be done soon.

Week 1 The Begining

This is a post of the progress of week one. So far things are not good in my opinion. I remember during pre production I said time and time again that I am concerned with project scopes and how people don’t realise that less is more. I even asked my lecturers about their thoughts on the fact that I have concern. One lecturer stated in week one of pre-production “don’t think about the scope in your project at this point because it can effect creative out comes”. I totally understand, yes don’t let concerns of scope let a quality film suffer. However now that we are in week one of production and we have those same lectures now telling us the project has too much to achieve the same lecturer said “I don’t understand why this happens every year students always make animatics which are too big for themselves” If it happens every year why don’t you improve preproduction to avoid it from happening year after year. I don’t currently feel confident in my lectures ability’s to manage a project. They are talented in their own fields modelling animation and whatever but they show very limited knowledge of management. I am taking a big risk in saying this in a blog which is to be assessed by them but I have to express my opinion.

This brings me to another point. They are also the cause of major procrastination in the project in my opinion. We had an animatic to finish which was due last semester but for some reason we spent one and a half hours talking about motion capture equipment which has not even been tested and talking about the technicalities of it when we still needed to finish the next draft animatic. We ended up having to do the animatic over the week end when we could have done it in a group during our class with communication not having to be digital over face book which takes more time.

Here is a great piece of advice I got from the former project manager of a hospital in Brisbane who was my teacher during cert 4 information technology during a project management class. He said ‘Murphy’s law’ if it can go wrong it will go wrong. So if motion captures doesn’t work have a back-up plan. It goes without saying motion capture is just a tool if it doesn’t work use 3d traditional animation instead. That should have been the end of the motion capture conversation. And we should have then got back to work and had a finished animatic by now. Instead there was major procrastination, and the group is no closer to their goal. Especially if the motion capture equipment had not been tested yet and we had more pressing matters like the need for the animatic.

There is also the issue of incentive. What I mean is if the film project fails the people who are affected are the student’s not the teachers. The teachers still get paid and still come back next semester. While if the film fails the students have to pay another 7000 thousand dollars and fail the course. If you’re thinking “but in the industry” well guess what this game proves my point ET on the Atari. If you watch this documentary you will understand that it is considered the worst game ever made because the staff had no incentive to do a good job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZxXEidtxHk

The programmer for the game was paid a massive sum of money now matter how good the game was. Sorry to say the teachers are going to get paid no matter how good the film will be. This is why incentive is required in order to manage a project. What incentive do the teachers have to do a good film none and I don’t blame them there responsibility’s lie elsewhere. They are not here to do the job for us. But my point is they should not manage the project or even what is done in class time for example could have avoided wasting time about motion capture. It should be us who manages the daily roster so we don’t have procrastination.

Other than that I am now in the stage of creating the 2d animation scene I am up to the long hours of clean-up and in betweening and will post a breakdown of the scene.