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.

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!

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.

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.