Moom Story Ideas

For this project we have to choose lyrics to animate to. Whether we keep the lyrics as a song or change the whole performance of it is up to us, as long as we keep our focus on the acting and performance of the character. I thought about maybe doing some different genres at first, but after hearing that we have to use our own voice that limited my options a lot - not only because of my lack of skills when it comes to voice acting, but also because of how uncomfortable hearing my own voice recorded makes me.

I chose to go for something a bit sillier because there is no way I could do something serious and make it convincing. I considered something that I could use some exaggerated fake crying in, because that would be fun to animate but it would also involve other emotional sounding speech which I can not make sound convincing even if it is over the top.

Eventually I settled on 'That's Amore' by Dean Martin - it would be fun to animate, and hopefully whatever comedy I could get into that would be enough to distract from the audio. I thought about trying to put on a thick Italian accent (with reference from m family) to make it even sillier, but it didn't work when I gave it a few tries. I decided to deal with the audio more later, and for now concentrate on making the animation fun enough to forget about the audio for a while.

I still wanted to go for the Italian sort of theme though, so I settled for a Venice inspired scene with a gondola and a love struck gondolier. I could use an oar as a prop, and that could work well for Moom to interact with.

I had a short think about lighting too - I wanted high contrast because of the line about the moon, but it is a bit too early to decide on colour. I'll think about that later, maybe around the crit, but wither way I can experiment in After Effects when the animation is done and I can see it properly.

Schedule

I am planning my schedule week by week rather than day by day because we have some modules this year that we haven't done before and since I don't know the volume of work we have, I can work around it much easier if I make the schedule for this module a little bit looser - although there a few days with such small/specific tasks that I thought it would be better to plan out, like for audio and specifically for blogging, just in case.

Mery Rig

Since we'll be using the Moom rig a lot for this project, I thought that it could be good for me to practice some animating on a different rig to stop me from getting bored of the same one and to see how other rigs work. The Mery rig is a free download that has recently been released and has a similar style to some of the most recent Disney Princesses, already giving the rig a much different feel to the Moom rig,

I found quite early on to be patient with the animation timeline; whenever the waiting/loading symbol came up instead of my mouse button (usaully after clicking/typing in a lot of commands in a short space of time) the limbs of the character would suddenly multiple, which was completely irreversable. I had to revert to an earlier save to get rid of them, but it didn't make some entertaining results.

I wanted to try out animating some fighting moves to see how hard it was. I chose Tai Chi from the way it was used in Avatar: The Last Airbender; he characters move so smoothly, and it does work perfectly for inserting powers of some kind or just as a normal martial arts.

I had a lot of fun animating, although I found out that the knees on this rig don't move that slowly, so leg posting was awkward. The arms were extremely easy though, so it was fun to move them. The biggest problem I encountered earlier on was when I made key frames quite far apart. I wanted to see how well the automatic inbetweens worked, and though they were alright for a fair few movements, when it came to the hands and arms when they were in slightly different positions, the keyframes would make large arcs or appear a bit wobbly as it animation played back. Deleting keyframes on their own also didn't seem to work, as the inbetweens made before them seemed to stay there and mess up the animation when I made a new keyframe.

It got easier to get used to animating a I got further along, although the lack of movement in the knees and awkwardness of the hips didn't help too much. Another thing I found was that as I moved the mode into more extreme positions, it would affect my earlier frames. For example, the twisting of her torso and head began to happen much earlier than I had key framed, so at the start of the animation where she should stay forwards, she is already turning. I think this is mostly my on fault, since I ended up keyframing every 12 frames, and instead of moving some frames gradually, they made quite large jumps in movement and rather than making this happen really fast in half a second, it just happened slowly over 10. I definitely need to experiment with this a bit more to make sure that this doesn't happen and that I have full control over the rig.

Overall this was fun, and though the rig doesn't move quite as smoothly as Moom, it will still be fun to use more often.

Introduction to Maya

Maya Controls

Q = Select Mode
W = Move/Translate
E = Rotate
R = Scale
T = Aim Lights/Camera
Z = Undo
Shift + Z = Redo

Our first try on Maya was fun, even though it was quite different from traditional 2D animation. I didn't find myself worrying about how nice each frame looked, or having to concentrate on keeping my anatomy consistent so much; the rig Moom made editing positions and movements of the character much easier, which gave me more patience to change things and animate for longer.

I didn't use reference as we were just intending to have a mess around on Maya to familiarise ourselves with it. I ended up trying to make Moon moonwalk but I did it backwards, so it came out very awkward. I also messed around with lights which was fun, and something I would like to look into further, to change the atmosphere of my animations and make then look even better.

I tried another animation with Moom at home which went a lot better since I had reference. I found some parts awkward to do, since my Maya didn't show me the boxes that allow you to put in values for the ball/heel etc of the rig, so I wouldn't move Moon quite how I wanted to. The animation still came out a lot better, and it was a lot of fun to make him move and see it work properly. So far I am finding that I have a lot more patience when it comes to animating 3D characters than 2D, and I am hoping that this continues as I tackle harder problems.

Character and Narrative

Our first brief this year is Character and Narrative, a module that gives us the opportunity to learn 3D applications and explore deeper into performance and telling a story using the characters' expressions and body language.

I am very excited to use Maya and try out 3D tools, although since we are concentrating on animating, the brief will not provide us with as big an opportunity to learn modeling and rigging skills as I would like. I aim to still learn these skills alongside the brief so that in the future I can create this sort of performance with my own characters.

The brief requires us to chooses some lyrics to use as a basis for our narrative and then animate around that, recording our own voices to lip sync with the character. This will be fun to learn, but I am not looking forwards to having to use my own voice for the project. I will have to think carefully about the lyrics and see what I can make a story out of, and just deal with the recording after that decision is made.

Expressions, body language and lip syncing will be very important for this performance, but the characters also needs a proper to interact with/alongside. I hope that I can also make a decent environment for the character to help set the scene a little bit more.

All in all, I am excited for this project as an opportunity to learn more 3D skills so that I can explore the further with other aspects of animation that I want to concentrate on later in the year.