The Final Showreel!

Here it be! The final showreel.

Walk Cycles

In a bid to tick a few executive boxes, I've created two new walk cycles, to demonstrate as concisely as possible my animation ability.

As well as a brand new attempt at a standard walk cycle, I decided to test myself and see if I could create a convincing 'fat waddle' walk cycle, to demonstrate my ability to consider the displacement of weight and volume on a walking character.

Basil: The Return

Hello!
Basil's coming along nicely - albeit slowly. I don't want him to dominate the project, so I might put his development on hold and work on some other things until I'm sure I can spare the time to work on him, as he's the most time-consuming project I've assigned myself for this showreel.

Fortunately, his face is animated, and his poses are keyed out. His clothes are even drawn out in a few frames. There's enough there for people to see the animation, if he ends up staying as he is.

Besides, I kinda like the idea of construction lines and test animations appearing in showreels. It shows the inner workings, demonstrating your craft a little more in-depth than a final product.

Here's Basil so far.

Music!

Continuing the slight retro vibe I wanted my showreel to have, the music will be jazzy. I have an idea for the music:

It's jazzy, it's lively, and because it's from a soundtrack to a movie, there are brief moments of quietness to allow other audio to be heard over the music. I can use these moments to play the corresponding sound clips to animations such as Basil Fawlty and Cave Johnson's 'lemons' speech.

The King

Okay! Muscle man's scrapped. There was something I just didn't like about his character. I may revisit him in a later project, but I'd rather this project kept chugging along, instead of stalling at anything needlessly complicated.

Good news, though! I finished animating a little piece of test animation for 'The Wall'. I wanted to see how the King would behave and how I could visualise my vision of his character - a large, but childlike, King, who means well but is a burden to his people.

Also, I've been figuring a few things out regarding Adobe Premiere. It turns out I can import raw SWF files straight into Premiere without having to export them as a video first. It cuts down on rendering time, and minimises loss of image quality due to compression. The downside of this is that you only get to see the King as an animated GIF for now.

Sorry!

A change of pace

Taking a break from all the Basil Fawlty work before I turn into the man and start shouting at people for disturbing me - "Can't you see I'm trying to inbetween an arc here! No! You're too busy poking your noses into other people's Flash documents, looking for something to complain about, aren't you?" - I've done a bit more work on another character I'm going to animate, a generic muscle man.

His design's developed over time. His face is much more geometric and exaggerated - weirdly resembling Vladimir Putin! - and his pectoral muscles have become more... breeze-block-ey. I like him.

I'm not sure how he'll animate. It might be an exercise in restraint. Very limited facial expressions, but powerful poses. A good exercise in anatomy, too. Should be fun.

So yes. All's good. Nothing... Fawlty... to report this time. OH MERCY

Basil Update

I've fleshed out some more of the movement, and gotten to grips with some of the facial animation. Looks pretty nice so far.

Here's a GIF of the best bit, as the video quality's a bit poor:

Keying out the movement

I've found the perfect audio clip from Fawlty Towers - the bit where Basil loses his temper in front of all the guests - and I've started keying out the movement.
Here.

More Basil

Here are a few more sketches of Basil Fawlty.
After hours and hours of drawing this man, I've reached the point I was so desperate to get to - the point where I can draw him without even thinking. Of course, the animated Basil will be much simpler, but it will be based on the same sets of instructions I now instinctively give myself when drawing him. Hopefully, when it comes to the animation, all I will have to think about is his performance.

An attempt at some sort o performance template.

The montage of actions at the top of this picture weren't meant to be a sequence, but they marry together so well I might use them as templates for keyframes in a separate bit of non-spoken character animation.

Basil's cracked! I really want the face on the left to make an appearance, in some form, in my final showreel.

The bottom two images here are among my favourites. They pretty much sum up my enthusiasm and how good I want this to look. Animating something with this much detail is unlikely, but it's nicer having to rein in your ideas than starting with something that needs improvement.

The darkest Basil here was a test to see if I could replicate the roundedness of vector imagery in biro. Trying it the other way around - sketchy expressiveness in Flash - is tricky, but I wanted to at least reach that middle point so I had something to work with, something to enhance my Flash drawing. This drawing helps provide that link.

By the time I'd filled this page, I more or less knew I'd reached the point where Basil was coming instinctively to me. I was in a pub when I did this.

Basil Turnarounds

With a character like Basil, there is going to be quite a lot of animation, so it's important for me to have a solid understanding of how his cartoon form is going to be, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of construction.

I always intended the character to be fairly simple, to make animation easy, but still be definitively Basil. As demonstrated in the previous post, I started by being quite faithful to John Cleese's features at first, creating fairly detailed studies. I then worked backwards, removing superfluous details until I had a character I could animate.

Starting to turn the character around, I simplified the design. However, there were still slightly too many unnecessary details, such as the creases in his clothing and the stripes in his tie...

...so I simplified it! I also improved his stance and silhouette. His arm is thicker in profile, which suggests flatness - might remedy this.

Concept Art

Some concept art for the characters of The Wall, and further development of Basil Fawlty.

The Wall:

Basil:

For The Wall, The King is more or less established, being such a simple character, so less aesthetic development is required (there are some other concept sketches, though - watch this space). Basil, on the other hand, has to be an authentic caricature of John Cleese but simplistic enough to animate successfully.

More of the same soon!

Basil

I've had another idea.

I'm going to take a sound clip from the sitcom Fawlty Towers and animate the character of Basil Fawlty to the dialogue. He's such a caricature of a man, it's amazing nobody's yet converted his manic character into the cartoon medium.

Here are some rough tests to get to grips with the character. I tried to replicate his face in detail first, in order to fully understand how his eyes look how his eyebrows sit and the relationship between his mouth and his moustache (nonetheless enhancing his distinguishing features), before simplifying it and going straight into a draft run of a piece of character animation.

I imagined a generic Basil scenario: he's in the middle of a stressful situation, and is furiously looking for something - or someone, probably Manuel - but then he notices a resident of the hotel, and has to immediately adopt a jovial facade. The video sweeps by in a couple of seconds, and I've only dwelt on the face, but it's a start.

I'm really looking forward to animating this man.

Working Title: 'The Wall'

I have an idea for a short film, the production of which I shall incorporate into my showreel. I'm not committing myself to completing it by the end of this year, but whatever I complete will be valuable material.
The idea itself belongs to Estelle Sharpe, but she comes up with original ideas for films with such alarming rapidity she doesn't mind me using it.

It's about a kingdom of people building a large wall, to protect themselves from an impending invasion. Work is coming along nicely, when the king arrives. Initially imposing and authoritative, he immediately reveals himself to be very childish and overly-enthusiastic about something of which he has very little knowledge or ability. He tries to assist in the wall-building process, but his large frame and inherent stupidity only serves to hinder their progress (with suitably slapstick results). His subjects revolt in frustration, and put him in stocks (complete with additional iron ball on a chain), where he is to stay until the wall is completed.

Progress on the wall improves and morale in the kingdom is at a high, until a worker drops a hammer while passing the king in his stocks. The king, still eager to help, breaks free from the stocks' foundations (still encased in the main section), retrieves the hammer, and in the process of turning round to find the worker, swings his iron ball in a massive sideways arc...

...straight into the wall.

Through the debris, a crowd of enemy soldiers can be seen on the horizon. The workers look despondent.

Showreel Research

Of course, if I'm going to make a showreel, it'd be wise to check out other people's, to observe standard practices parameters. So I did.

An interesting showreel I found was on the personal website of animator Mark Mason. Instead of compiling all his work into one video, Mark has used the playlist feature of YouTube to allow people to scroll through his work, split up into bite-size chunks.



Perhaps Mark has another, singular video for giving to prospective employers in person, encouraging them to visit his website for this more in-depth, albeit YouTube dependant, showreel. He clearly has a wealth of experience and work to show people, and so the playlist method, while unorthodox, works well in this context. However, my limited arsenal of past projects would make compiling a showreel like this pointless, and I prefer the idea of a single video that does everything a showreel should do.

Another showreel I liked is that of Guilherme Ferreirinha, who uses a retro aesthetic to make his showreel visually appealing. The action happens in time to the music, which helps general flow, and it's just generally nice to look at. The information (in this case, just his website) is displayed concisely at the very end. It's inspired me to make a showreel that flows nicely. I like things to look retro, so I'll definitely take something of Ferreirinha's away in regards to aesthetic.

Another project, another blog!

Hello.

This blog is where I will be documenting the production process of a demo reel I will be creating for the second term of my second year of university.

Here is my proposal!

Proposal 2nd Year by WillWivell