Major Project Part 3: Biped Musical Walk
For my third walk cycle I decided to time something to music like how Tabasi how done in his loops:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CcP4tR6lpf2/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CcP4tR6lpf2/?hl=en
This was my last walk and was due in two weeks so I didn’t plan this one quite as much as the others since I needed to hit the ground running with this. I came up with the idea of a groovy robot with big rubbery arms and sketched it out in my notebook. I decided to go with the taller bottom design as it would allow me incorporate more hip movements.
The next problem was finding a beat I could animate too. I wasn’t too sure where to begin since looking at the stuff Tabasi had done, he seemed to have gotten a friend to create specific music to use since he sells them as NFTs. I decided to start searching through royalty free jingles on YouTube until I found this:
It was funky and had a clear beat I thought I could animate to. I took the audio into Premiere Pro and cut it down further to around a 8 sec clip.
From there I took it into Harmony and tried to match the contact poses of the walk to the beat. I decided to use just 2 seconds of the clip I made.
Since I wanted to explore displacing the weight via the hips and shoulders, I had a look back through William’s Surivival Kit and found this section:
This gave me a really good guide for how handle the weight during the walk.
I had to time the walk out on threes in order to match the beat of the music which gave it something of a rather clunky movement. I don’t really like walks being done on threes, personally I feel it’s too slow and unatural but it allowed me more space to work with the arms. The walk at this stage I felt was very dull. I decided not to do the speaker on the chest, since it wouldn’t really add much and chose to spin the whole up body not just the hat.
Before I started a did a quick sketch of the torso spin in my notebook to help me figure the movement out. Working on threes actually helped me here since I had more timing to play around with for the torso. I started planning how many poses it would take to spin the torso and how many frames I had before the robot returned to his next down pose.
Rather than start spinning the whole body at once I broke it down into sections and started with the torso first, since it would set the speed for the head and arms. This gave me the idea to then break the body apart as he walks, letting the torso hang in the air as it spins.
I liked the spin, I felt it helped give the walk that extra flair it was missing. I also used some of the foreshortening techniques I had learned from my first biped walk to help polish the end of the arm spin. I choose to exaggerated the up and down pose to help set the spin up more and give it that extra punch on the down.
You’ll struggle to see this in the gif but my first pass on seperating the head and body out involved having the head and torso seperate twice before I decided it didn’t look as good and actual subtracted from the second seperation, so stuck with just one.
Below is my final version of the walk repeated in video for ease.
In reflection there were elements of this walk I was happy with. I liked the spin, I thought it was timed nicely to the beat of the music and liked the weight displacement in the shoulders and hips, although I probably could have pushed it a little further in some parts. There was also a certain something in the way the character was drawn that looked increasingly off to me. I wasn’t sure if it was the repeating internal lines on the arms and legs that was causing strange tangents or busy-ness when they overlapped on the passing poses, or if it was the thickness of my lines.
Looking at it now I think it’s the arms become lost in the staging of the passing pose, so I’m left with an unclear silhouette. Adding some colour to help differentiate between arms and legs might have worked. If I was to do it again I think I would stage the character a bit better to allow me to seperate the body further and go higher on the up poses and clean up the silhouette.
Major Project Part 2: First Biped Walk and Quadraped Cycles
With my plan of making a 2D rig shelved I began to plough head first into my walk cycles.
I had found an animator on Instagram a while back called Hadi Tabasi, whose work I absolutely loved. He had created a series of looping animations set to music. This inspired me to create something similar, focusing on creating somehting that was hypnotic and mesmerising to watch on repeat.
I also took inspiration from Jack Foley, a previous students walk cycle and a few looping run cycles I had found online.
My intention was never to produce something as finished, instead I wanted to focus on creating something that had really nice arcs, smooth animation and was a pleasing loop. I wanted to create three walks, each exploring a different aspect of walks, a biped walk which focused on loops, a quadraped walk and a walk timed to music.
Biped Walk 1
I first started out by trying to animate my own little wolf man character based on my discord profile pic.
I got through three poses of the walk cycle before deciding it looked awful.
Absolutely hideous.
I quickly scrapped the character and started a new.
With my new character I kept the designs simple and based around shapes I could easily animate. As I was designing him I also worked out how his body would rotate from side to side with each step.
I went back again to Richard William’s and had a look in his section about improving upon base walks.
I used this approach to inform myself of how to handle and displace the weight of the character as he was walking. I started by using a basic walk cycle with some added tilt. Since I knew arcs were what allowed an animation to produce that hypnotic effect I paid close attention to the arcs of his head tilt.
Then I pushed the tilt more extreme in my up and down poses, speed up the timing and added some squash.
The tweaks gave the walk a nice sense of vitality and weight. Once I was comfortable with the timing and arcs in the walk I started on the arms. With the arms, again I wanted those nice arcs but also more 3D depth.
My inital attempt involved his arms swing back and forward but also out towards the camera. Needless to say it did not work, and looked bloody awful. I then attempt another approach where his arm bent around his body and swing out back towards the camera.
I wasn’t quite happy with the back swing, then I remembered reading a similar section in William’s Survival Kit and found some inspiration for a better way to handle the arms. I also had a look at the William’s advice for adding more flexibilty by breaking the elbows. I decided against this since it didn’t really fit my walk took not of the application for the characters wrists.
I added a slight bit of foreshortening in his arms and started incorporating a greater flexibility in his wrists.
I then decided to mimic the foreshortening effect I had with the front swing on the back swing as well.
Once I had the left arm done it was pretty straight forward to replicate the same effect for the right arm.
I was really happy with the final outcome of this walk. I felt it had all the elements I wanted, nice arcs, smooth animations and a hypnotic effect to the movements. The only thing I think I would change would be to have animated the tie more.
Quadraped Walk
For my next walk Sarah suggested I try a quadraped walk since I hadn’t tried one before. I also wanted to do something trippy too, so one night before bed I sketched out this weird little dude.
The plan was everytime he took a step the heads on his feet would scream and his actual head would spin in a 360 while the tail made little fists.
Before I started I looked again at William’s guide for doing quadraped walks and decided to do a test before starting the real thing.
Using the guide for a dog I produced this:
Truthfully, I thought it was an okay for a first attempt. I didn’t bother with the head since I was focusing on the posing, weight and the timing. After having the finished the walk test I realised the dog anatomy wouldn’t quite work with the monster I designed. Specifically the placement of the head feet.
I took a look at a few skeletons of horses and deer to give me a better understanding of how the body would move and the joints would bend.
Scientific illustration: horse skeleton – Isolated on sky blue
I then had a look at a few examples of a horse walking.
I then discovered that Williams had actually gone through a horses walk cycle in the extended edition of his survival kit.
This was a lot of help since it was easier to work out the ups and downs for both the back and front legs. I started by working on his the back legs first. I had spoke to my co-worker Daryl earlier about my plans and he pointed out it would actually make more sense to have the feet screaming when they’re in the air and having the mouths closes while they’re in the contact and down pose.
I thought it turned out okay. I decided to turn the left head away from the camera since it would make the walk too busy and probably hard to make out what was going on.
I then move onto the front legs. To save time, I reused the feet head from the back legs and simply flipped them.
I then combined the back and front legs together and started planning out the head.
I drew out a rough guide to help myself plan the turning of the eyes on the head. 
I had a bit of trouble trying to work how the original mouth would work in it’s rotation. It was round about here I realised the timing in my head spin was off and wouldn’t actually complete an entire 360 turn but was instead only doing a 180. I decided so simple replicate the same mouth design on both sides since it would then form a complete loop, it also took up less space than the original mouth.gh
With the head sorted I moved onto the tail. I was a little unsure on how to manage the hand design while it was making a fist so I had a look online and found a hand guide for Looney Tunes that I liked the look of.
The hand would move in lieu of a regular tail, after I finished I wasn’t too sure if it looked too small and appeared like it was moving under it’s own initiative rather than reacting to the motion of the back legs. Part of this I think was due to the placement of the tail being higher up than it would be naturally.
I sent this on to Sarah after I finished it and she pointed out the timing on each body part was too even. I wasn’t sure how I’d done that since I was following William’s guide but it must be caused by the head spin, which probably needs to be faster. I seem to have a recuring problem of making my timing too even with my animations. Sadly I didn’t have enough time to implement these changes since I still had another walk cycle left to do, but if I did it again I’d speed the head spin up until it was able to do a full 360.
In conclusion I think the walk turned out okay. I liked how the feet turned out, especially the expressions and squash of heads but the tail is a little lackluster, although I like the fist clench. But the head has a bit too much negative space in it for my liking now the larger mouth was replaced. But overall it was a decent attempt for my second quadraped walk cycle, espeically since i had added such absurd elements.
Major Project Part 1: Rigging
For my Major Project I started off upskilling myself with rigging in Toon Boom. I’d done rigging in the past with After Effects so I had a general grasp of rigging in 2D. Sarah recommended, to speed up the process, I take a previously designed character and rig them. Since I’d just finished my pitch bible I decided to use my main character Jill and rig her.
I’d started a new role at the Univeristy, which was going to eat up a lot my attention. So to save myself more time and since I was only concerned with learning the process behind rigging in Harmony, rather than producing a world class rig, I aimed to create a 90 degree rig for Jill, not a whole 360.
I started by looking at Harmony’s own resources for rigging:
Adding Constraints to a Rig | Toon Boom Learn
Rigging 1 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn
Rigging 2 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn
Rigging 3 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn
How to Rig a Cut-out Character
Although the websites were a bit of mess and were missing some vital video tutorials, so I had to cromb through their youtube to find them.
Using the Harmony tutorials the first step was creating the layers for a blank rig.
I didn’t find this terribly useful, since it was more ground work than actually getting stuck into the nitty gritty and I already understood rig heriarchy from After effects. Eventually I moved onto creating the assets for the rig, which you do from scratch in Harmony itself rather than importing the drawings from another software. Again, the original tutorials from Harmony here were not the best. They explained the process but half way through I discovered they were showing me a method that was more time consuming rather than productive. Leading me through one side of the process, then returning to do the other half instead of doing them simultaneously. Eventually I pivoted to using a combination of the Harmony tutorials and live streams from other riggers showing me their process, Kyu-Bum Lee was especially helpful in this regard.
Along the way I gathered a variety of shorcuts, advice and off-hand reminders for myself which I could reference back to for future use.
I began working on building my rig in Harmony, which was a realtively straightforward process of tracing my designs.
The next step was going through my node libary and cleaning it up. taking it from this:
To this:
It wasn’t stricly nessecary to do this, this early but I found it easier to make sense of the mess of nodes this way. One of the biggest issues I encountered was the hair in my character. It was a nightmare. I was struggling with the design and how to deal with all the interlocking strands and getting them to intercut into eachother. I found this tutorial online which I felt was really helpful.
But once I had solved this issue I realised I had an even greater problem with how I was going to manage the hair when she was turning. Elements that were in the back were going to need to be the front and vice versa. It was also around this time that my new Univeristy post started eating up more of my time and I decided to make a decision.
Knowing I’d need to crunch my MA over the Christmas holiday I chose to pivot my major project from Toon Boom rigging to a series of walk cycles.
My reasoning behind this was four fold:
I was faster animating than rigging, I enjoyed animating more and since I was going to need to crunch I had a higher chance of finishing it if I enjoyed it, I had a solid enough foundation now for Harmony rigging and lastly, I knew I could produce stronger animations than rigs. So I choose to leave my rigging and move onto walk cycles.
Industry Facing Materials
For the second part of our part of our major project we were directed to create a CV and showreel. For students this a requirement to step into the industry, thankfully I didn’t have that same issue but it was a nice chance for me to punch up my old CV and showreel.
CV
My old CV was very basic, having previously overdesigned a CV while I was in my undergraduate I had sought to keep my working CV basic and easy to update with new work experience.
It’s not really an attractive CV by any regards. It’s a very basic design and kinda ugly, so I was keen to have another go at it but one thing that I wanted to maintain was that employer’s had found the layout easy to read and navigate.
When it came to gather reference for redesigning I was lucky enough to have a slew of examples from our previous students to start with. I had a clear idea in my head what kind of style I wanted, something that looked professtional, wasn’t overly cutesy or cartoony and had a general mininalist approach.
I liked these examples by previous students but was aware that they getting a little incestuous with their design motifs so I wanted to explore further and avoid making mine too similar.
The main take away I got from these examples was petite type size, bold headers with clear sections. a white background with black type and a splash of colour for personality.
I really liked the yellow colour off the examples I had found and was keen to move on from the bland cyan I had been using before. Yellow is apparently the first colour the human eye sees and I felt it had a lively energy to it, which matched my personality.
I sketched out a rough layout in Photoshop before I starting.I made sure to leave an even spacing around the border and broke up each section into it’s own respectable area. 
From here it was just a straight forward but time consuming process of finding a typeface I could work with. Thankfully Henry reconmended I check out the fonts from Adobe’s own database, which made things a look more faster. I decided to settle on Rig Sans by Jamie Clarke since it had that professtional vibe I sought but also had a large selection of different font styles I could work with, which was useful for breaking up sections.
With my font chosen and my layout down I started work on my first pass.
I was really happy with how quickly it came together and pretty pleased with the inital result. I was unsure about including a photo my myself, there’s always so much differenting opinion on whether or not you should include a photo but I felt it humanises the CV more to me. I showed it to Henry and Sarah and got this feedback:
- Make the background an off white/grey rather than a straight white.
- Align the text to centre.
- Remove the yellow lines behind the about me section.
- Rearrange my refence section to they were spaced more vertical.
With that done, this was my final version:
I’m really pleased with how this turned out in the end. It looked a lot better than my previous CV and had all the design motifs I was going for, minimalist, professtional, easy to read/navigate and with just the right splash of personality to avoid it being boring.
SHOWREEL
My next assignment was to create a showreel. At the time I didn’t realise I could have done an optional portfolio, but since I already have an online portfolio, (here) I figured an showreel would allow me stretch my video editing skills and give me something different to work with, plus I haven’t updated my personal showreel in over 10 years.
I’ve done several showreels for student year groups throughout my time at Ulster so it wasn’t really too difficult to repeat the process myself but I decided to have a look at a few showreels from studios I liked and some random artists I found.
A lot of the showreels I looked at had very chill music tracks to them, but with very noticable beats to them. This matched the advice we would give our students and which I’d been given myself, pick a track with a beat and edit your cuts to it.
I wanted a track which could build to a crescendo and had a reasonably fast beat since it would allow me enough oppitunity to fit enough cuts in.
After many, many, many hours of searching through royalty free tracks on YouTube I finally found one I liked.
I also wanted to make sure I book ended my showreel with my name and contact info and tied the style of the title cards back into my CV, to make it a more cohesive branding. I had originally wanted to put an animated paper texture behind my title card but Henry talked me out of it since it wouldn’t have matched my CV. My showreel was a combination of backgrounds, prop design and animation I’d done between my MA and my time in the industry. When I showed my original version to Sarah, she simply reconmended that I add text to explain which parts of my showreel I had actually worked on since it was so eclectic.
I was pretty happy with my final version of my showreel. I think having more shots of my backgrounds in the actual animations makes it more interesting to watch, at least from a showreel perspective. I think the energy of the showreel works well and I feel I’ve edited the footage nicely to the beats of the music, especially matching the frantic footage with more intense beats. Overall, I’m pleased with both results, I think my new CV is a vast improvement over the old and my new showreel is well edited and enaging to watch.
Animation production. Team project: Part 2
We had a meeting with Niall after Matt and Eoin completed the storyboards and this was his feedback. Notes in white are Anni’s, notes in grey are mine.
After Niall’s feedback we decided to work on an animatic while the backgrounds were being done. However the process was taking too long so we were forced to jump straight into animation. Which I knew wasn’t a great idea but we were beginning to fall too behind. I worked up a Shot list of the animation shots similar to what I’d done with the backgrounds and everyone was able to choose whatever shots they were keen on. No one else in the group seemed keen on doing the voices and I knew we couldn’t get anything done without it so I also recorded some lines in audacity and then pitched higher or lower for Lyra and Darkstar respectively.
I got stuck into Shot 02, since I had the background for the pan. I made the mistake of doing too much work on Zack’s hair before realising my mistake and blocking the rest of the scene. I had a look at a load of skating reference from YouTube.
The gif of my first pass is too big to be posted to the blog so there’s a link here.
My second half focused on Zack’s walk, which was moving way too fast.
Thankfully Niall offered me some feedback on my walk cycle and was extremely helpful with the lip syncing since it was an area I was particularly weak in.
He also offered me some great video examples to help with the lip syncing:
head_turn_example_graduateslayers
The basic take away was to do pose to pose animation and fake the movement with secondaries. Holy shit was this a god send, it spend up my work phenomenally.
I returned to Niall for more feedback and recommended adding another pose to the skate and tweaking the skid.
I worked on Zack’s torso first, making sure I got the walk down right. Then I did his lip sync on a separate layer and once I was happy with it I combined the two together and synced the head movements to the walk.
I was really happy with how this shot turned out. I had previously really struggled with the lip syncing and was surprised when I managed to get it to work. I got some advice from my co-workers who recommended I shorten Riley’s skid. I had always intended to add dust to it so when I got the chance I found some reference off and then went back later and added it.
However it’s only after posting this to the blog that I realise I must have messed up Riley’s eyes when I started playing with the timeline. Sadly, I’ve already submitted the video so I’ll just need to keep an eye out for those mistakes next time.
My next scene was shot 16 which featured our three main characters running at each other before a smash cut to title. I had a look at Richard William’s guide for running animations.
It was very similar to a walk but at some point during the cycle both legs were off the ground. I started with Darkstar since she would have the most basic run, the main issue with Darkstar was her cape, which I knew was going to be a nightmare to animate. I used Darkstar’s run to help guide me with Zack’s run.
I simply traced over the drawings then went back later changed the timing on the runs so it wasn’t identical. Riley’s run/skate was tricky, I wasn’t quite sure how to do it and since she was skating fast she technically wouldn’t be making much movement. I found reference online for hockey players on how to skate forward fast.
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxTfcGBRxKGucfsKGGS4dTBnzusrmZREts
Darkstar’s run turned out okay but Riley’s skate was far too mechanical and needed to be completely redone. Zack’s was fine in terms of timing but his arm just did not look good. I decided to continued with Zack’s secondary actions, adding movement to his hair and coat. I found this video online for cloth that was super helpful with Zack’s coat as well as a cape guide.
The coat looked good but his hair was bouncing too much and his arm just looked dreadful. I spoke to some of my co-workers and filmed some reference. I had broken my own cardinal sin and tried to base the run purely off Richard William’s guide.
After studying the reference I finally realised that his arm should be moving in a 3D plane not 2D. It needed to swing forward as he ran, not simply bounce up and down. I toned down his hair flick too and finally got a result I was happy with.
Next was adding secondary movement to Darkstar. The cape was tricky, especially finding good reference. I tried some gifs I found online but just couldn’t work it the movement from the angles and the right timing.
Thankfully remembered the running segment from the Thor Love and Thunder trailer. Which cracked the issue since he was running from a side view.
Anni pointed out I may have changed the mass a bit too much with the flick so I turned it down in my next pass. I went back to the drawing board with Riley’s skate a completely redid it. I found some better reference of an old man skating about England and a guy playing street hockey, which better fitted both the movement and the character. The old man clip I used to give me an idea of how Riley’s weight should move as she pushed herself on skates and the street hockey clip was super useful for her arms and to give myself a better cycle reference.
The first pass wasn’t quite right, her legs were doing this weird warping effect. So i scrapped if and started again. Focusing this time on legs first to make sure I had a good base.
This new pass was a huuuuuuuge improvement although it still had a little bit of an mechanical edge to it I was happy enough with it to continue since time was getting of the essence.
The next stage was to create a birth card background from my characters charge at each other over. I found a tutorial online for After Effects that I followed.
I’d be lying if I said I thought the end result was perfect but it was good enough to get the idea across. I made a copy that I could share with the rest of the time for their scenes, although I don’t think anyone had the time to ever use it. Probably not a bad thing either since without the characters being coloured it’s kinda hard to see what’s going on.
Next I made a super quick title card to cut to so my animation didn’t just end in black. I was actually pleased with how the title card turned out, it wasn’t anything amazing but it was simple and got the job done.
For clarity I’ve included a version without the birthing card.
All in all the animations in this scene aren’t that bad. I was happy with Zack’s run and I thought Darkstar’s run turned out pretty good, the cape cycle was also pretty good for a first try. I wasn’t too keen on Riley’s skate though, it still felt too still and a little awkward but since it was only on screen for a few seconds I wasn’t going to worry. Scene however by itself is not great. The staging is painfully dull and really could have done with either an improvement at the animatic stage or I should have redone it myself before I started animating, although I was concerned by how playing around with the staging this late into the game without testing how it’d look next to the other shots would have worked. Zack’s run could be a nice portfolio piece though and I think some kind of soundtrack building to a conclusion would have helped the scene.
Eoin was kind enough to put together a final edit of all the shots.
We had a few scenes missing and some were unfinished. Truthfully we didn’t really stick the landing with this one which I kinda figured would be the case. I think an animatic would have really helped us spot some of the issues before we started animating and looking at it now in it now in it’s entirety I should have sped up Riley’s skate sequence. All in all the final product was mostly just okay.
Animation Production: Team Project Part 1
So for this project the main objective was to teach us how to work creatively as a team by simulating working on a production for a client. I was part of the 2D team and our client was Niall. The brief we were given was to create our own show for Cartoon Network following the theme of either “Stay safe online” or “Don’t Judge a book by it’s cover” and animate a short 30-40 scene that showcased the main theme and points of the show.
I’ve a load of experience of this process and the pipeline from my undergraduate and working in the industry so it wasn’t too hard to know what path to take. We started by coming together as a group and throwing up as many ideas as possible up on a whiteboard. We briefly dabbled with ideas about “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” like a man biting a dog or a rabbit eating a fox but we quickly started to congregate around the “Stay safe online” theme.
Photo by Anni.
We took the idea to Niall how seemed pretty happy with what we had done so far. He had some really good pointers to pay attention to and had questions to help us refine the idea further. 
With Nialls feedback we returned to the whiteboard and refined the idea further while focusing on tone, world and hook.
We came round to the idea of kids fighting computer viruses inside a computer and from there we started to build an action comedy about a trio of kids getting trapped in the digital world and adventuring across a digital landscape fighting a rogue AI and an evil kid. Our three kids (aged 6 to 12) filled the tropes of the leader, the muscle and brains.
With the general idea under our belt we split up to concept some designs and write up the script.
Early in the brainstorm we had discussed becoming their avatars when they entered the digital world and gaining super powers. Gabe drew a sketch of a kid in a horse costume on a post-it and we all agreed the idea was adorable so I decided to work it up further, I quickly realised it was gonna have design limitations and started exploring other options. I had a look at some shows that were already on Cartoon Network and tried to replicate their styles in my own designs. One thing I knew Cartoon Network did was design their characters with simple shapes so that kids could draw them. I had a look at Adventure Time, Craig of the Creek, Steven Universe and OK KO!.
When we took the idea to Niall he seemed pleased with what we were doing and didn’t have too many changes beyond getting us to figure out the exact tone of the show. This lead to another brainstorm where we refined our ideas further and explored more of the world’s mechanics and characters. For the animation we felt it would be best to have a short scene almost like a teaser that showcased the main characters, scenario and theme of the show. This consisted of our two older main characters, gamer boy and sporty girl entering a new digital hub looking for gamer boys little sister and finding her in a confrontation with the bad kid and a fight between the three ensues. Simple and punchy. We continued concepting the characters. I envisioned each main character designed around the basic design shape principles. Such as triangle for the gamer boy, representing speed. Square for the sporty girl to represent strength and circle for the little sister to represent youth and innocence.
I was struggling a good bit with the earlier character designs so started focusing on the sporty girl more since I had a clearer idea of where I wanted to take her design. I started looking at female roller derby, Steven Universe and Scott Pilgrim for inspiration. I know I wanted her to be thickly set and look like she could shoulder a door open. Nothing peeves me more than when I see a female action hero that’s a stick. We need more buff female heroes.
Matt had also done some really sweet designs and we all agreed to try and steer the style a little into his.
Above designs by Matt.
I steered into a lot of the shape designs from Steven Universe, thick set women with long flowing hair. They all a slight 80’s action hero vibe to them so I started steering closer to the sporty girl vibe. I really liked 6 but continued with another few designs before moving onto the villain since I felt more comfortable with that design. (I’m awful at designing females).
Villains were easier for me, sharper shapes and harsher proportions. At this stage I was quite sure if the villain would look more like someone in a suit or be a completely in-humanly shaped avatar. My references came from a collection of Teen Titans, Samurai Jack, Shaolin Showdown, and Digimon.
With the initial concepts done we decided to start specialising roles. Anni wrote up a role list based on what people were interested in and what we’d previously been doing. I think with more experience I was somehow chosen as the creative director but in terms of practically I worked on character designs, backgrounds and animation. We decided after seeing a combo of Matt, Toms and my own designs that Matt should design Zack (gamer boy) and Riley (sporty girl), while Tom designed the little sister (Lyra) and I took the villain Darkstar. We all agreed 1 was the strongest design so I continued to work that design further.
I was already sure of the body shape but didn’t quite have an idea yet of how to do her helmet. Eventually we settled on 8. From there I made an “expression sheet” and worked out a turnaround.
With our character designs done the next stage for me was backgrounds, I’d worked in the industry as a background artist so I knew what I was doing here, and external jungle shots are the easiest backgrounds. Matt and Eoin had worked on storyboards so we took the scenes they did and used them as the bases for the layouts of our backgrounds. The backgrounds were split between myself and Shane. I made a google sheet for us to keep track of the BGs, who was assigned what, timestamps/reference shots, if they were reused and if they had animation in them. I also created a colour code to tell us which backgrounds need to be started, in progress, pending review, layout approved and final lines. I based the structure on a background tracker I’d used while at Studio Meala. Link to sheet.
Shane and me had a discord call and we discussed what background style we wanted to go with. We had found a show called Craig of the Creek that had lots of forest shots that we liked. I also looked at Bgs from the Jungle Book and the Hey Arnold! movie of all places, plus real life ref to give me an idea of what type of foliage we’d need.
With the shots split up between us I got stuck in. I gave Shane a film guard I’d used from an Adult Swim show I worked on so we made sure to keep everything with the correct frame. I also took the more technical shots like the background pan, since I’d had more experience. I suggested early into the production that we wouldn’t do colour for anything unless we felt we had additional time at the end, since colour was so time consuming and wasn’t marked.
Worms eye view BG was pretty difficult to work out, especially since I need the top of the canopy to match up the tree trunks. Trees only grow where there’s light so no tree could be under the shade of the other. I worked out the canopy by taking a suggestion from Kirstie, start with the shadows and work backwards. It was a huge help and I was really happy with how it turned out, although we ultimately ended up cutting that shot after feedback from Niall concerning the staging. I was pleased with the backgrounds I made and felt I was able to put my own spin on the designs with the details. We had a few BGs that were animated but I was going to handle that at the animating stage.
Animation Production: Pitch Bible
I’ve been looking to this module for a while, but by the time it came around to do it I was so bloody peddle to the metal that I never got a chance to stop and smell the roses while I was working on this. So it was less a fun creative experience and more an example of one minded productivity, which was fun in of itself.
Anyway, the brief for this was to create a pitch bible for a four part animated Netflix show. We needed:
- Character bios and designs
- Show and episode synopsis
- Background concepts, external and internal
- Production Plan
I’d known about this project long in advance so had a decent idea of what i wanted to work on. I had the pitch for a kid’s TV show aimed at 6-12 yr old’s about a young girl, Jill trying to prove to her Dad she can be a great lumberjack dispite the fact it’s traditionally seen as a man’s job. This was born from my own love of the romantised myth of the North American lumberjack (In reality it was a pretty rough and shitty life) and a desire to take that sense of grit and machoness and instil it in a modern story with a female character so it wasn’t just a lesson for boys, but for everyone. The show was wacky and fast paced in nature and featured monsters from lumberjack lore called Fearsome Critters.
So before I started I scoured the internet for Pitch Bible advice. A few sites I looked at like Cartoon Brew had this advice:
Pretty straight forward and easy to follow, I wasn’t gonna have much time so keeping everything punchy and brief suited me well.
Since I was looking at Gravity Falls for a lot of my inspiration I found this Alex Hirsh interview which he provided a few tips to newbies about making their own pitch which was basically, focus on your characters.
I also had a look at Pen ward’s pitches for Adventure Time and Bravest warriors. These were great, and clearly detailed the arc of each character and where the show was headed. They also a a looooad of art, almost to the pint of being a comic book. I loved the idea of it but there was no way I’d have the time to do something similar.
I found this video pitch of a series of different artists pitching their ideas to Gennedy Tartakovsky and Mike Lazzo for Adult Swim. Which was interesting but didn’t give me too much advice, but I did get a bunch of great examples of a lot of different pitches.
I found another video about pitching to Disney. Although it had an extra dimension since it’s a video pitch it really sold to me the importance of a good idea and selling us with the shows personality, having info told to us from a characters POV I thought was a nice touch.
A really good video I found from Olan Rogers talked about the importance of selling the pitch of your show by focusing on the story and the relationships of your character. Everything is similar to something else so focus on what makes your show unique. This is pretty similar to what Hirsch mentioned in his interview, characters you love and are unique. Thankfully for me there isn’t that many cartoon shows about Lumberjacks and featuring Fearsome Critters so I think I’ve got the unique angle there and having a Father, daughter story gives me a strong basis to work off there.
Next I moved on characters, I started off designing Jill’s Dad since I find it easier to design men rather than girls, and knew I could always work backwards from the Dad’s design to create the daughter. I made a PureRef and filled it with many manly lumberjacks.
Once I had quenched my thirst for beards and checkered shirts I began my designs. I started with a few sketches in a book then moved to digital.
I settled on the last design since it had the best “fatherly leader” vibe. Once I had the Dad sorted I was able to work backwards towards Jill. This design I really struggled with, I’m not use to design women let allow teenage girls. I had a look at previous characters from shows that I felt fit the theme of “Lumber-Jill”. Like Gravity Falls, Hilda and some designs by Bobby Pontillas.
The general takeaway was long hair, hat, and big boots. I also had a look at some reference from the Character Design Reference pinterest for Teen girls. I also made sure t give Jill a similar shaped nose to her Dad rather than the typical “button” nose.
I eventually settled on number four since it had the most amount of energy in the design and I got a good sense of a go-getter off her. I made special attention to avoid making my colours too similar to Wendy from Gravity Falls. I liked the design I had but felt it was just a little too close. I gave her and her Dad more natural colours since I felt it fit the vibe of the show.
The next stage was designing my Fearsome Critters. My main source of info about the appearance and personalities of these creatures came from a book by William T. Cox, “Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts“. The designs for these creatures were bonkers and didn’t make much anatomical sense. I chose the Gumberoo, Snoligoster and the Axe-handle hound to feature in my book since they can the best options for storytelling.
I looked at a combination of sketches from the original book and other artists interpretations I found online.
The Axe-handle hound was the hardest to design, trying to get a version that looked cute but still read as an axe wasn’t the easiest and if I’m being honest I’m still not that sure I nailed it, but I didn’t have time to keep playing around with it. I was happy with the Snoligoster though (It’s the weird Crocodile thing.)
Next I had to worry about the actual design of the bible itself. Since the story was based on campfire stories I decided to introduce the pitch bible with a kooky old man welcoming us to the camp and then popping up throughout the bible to add extra jokes and hints of character. The background of the pitch bible I decided to base on old advertisements for North American national parks.
I took random photos of pine forests and the Canadian mountains I found online, posterised them, added a faded colour and border. For the Fearsome Critters section I gave it the look of a old faded journal to match the feel of the original Fearsome Critters book.
The last section was my backgrounds. I’ve worked in animation backgrounds for a few years so I wasn’t too worried about this part, what I did want to focus on was my own weakness for internal backgrounds. I was pretty happy with my external backgrounds, I felt it had a really good example of depth. I did my perspective in Krita since it has a really good perspective tool built-in, then took the file over to Photoshop for more details 
I didn’t have an awful lot of time to add colour so I just kept my backgrounds as tone and sketches but was really happy with how it turned out. My internal backgrounds were a little harder and I did two passes before finally settling on a design. The first design was just completely off with it’s perspective and just ugly and boring.
I redid it, raised my horizon line and added more bunks to give more of a bunkhouse feel.
I was pretty happy happy with my final pitch bible. I was a little worried the different background styles might give the bible a jumbled feel but all in all I thought it actually turned out pretty well. If I’d had more time I would have added a lot more finished elements, rather than just sketches and I probably would have added more content like a better cover, (simple text covers are truly just so blurgh) and I would have added additional expression sheets for Jill and more actions shots of Jill and Axel interacting but for a final hand in I’m content enough. Also sorry for writing so much again, Sarah.
Acting for Animation: Lip Sync
My next assignment within Acting for Animation was to produce a lip sync to a 5 second audio clip. We were given free reign to choose from a variety of sound bites. I eventually settled on one of a monstrous voice saying “I Smell Human”.
I went back and forward over this audio clip and a few others for a little while. I toyed with the idea of doing a cowboy audio clip and a hedonistic wine drinker. I even started sketching out potential character designs. The old woman was maybe based a bit too much of Ursula from Little Mermaid.
After I had a closer look into what lip syncing entailed I decided the wine tasting audio clip would be a lot of work for my first time and I already had a clear idea what I wanted to do with the “I Smell Human” audio, plus time wasn’t on my side. I had a week before hand-in and didn’t want to faff about too much longer. I decided to stick with I smell Human and get stuck into the character design.
The image I had in my head was of a demon in a chefs outfit opening a silver platter with a cooked human head on it. I looked at a few sources for inspiration from Earthworm Jim, The Simpsons, Leo and Satan and Smiling Friends.
I wasn’t trying to replicate the graphic primal shape designs I’d used in my previous animation. In fact I was drawing in a style more closely related to my own comic style.
However I hated a lot of these designs and felt they were very uninspired and boring. I eventually found myself steering back to simpler primal shape designs I’d used before. It works better for animating and since the focus of the animation was on getting the lip sync right I didn’t want to over complicate it.
This was the design I eventually settled on. It wasn’t anything special but it didn’t immediately make my eyes bleed when I looked at it so it was good enough to continue with.
Once I had my design I started looking at mouth charts online. I was a little unsure about this process as I couldn’t find a concrete guide for how mouth shapes were meant to look, obviously part of this is due to variations in character designs but I was surprised how open ended it felt.
With a rough guide I started on making my own mouth chart for my demon.
William’s Animator’s Survival Guide had an extremely helpful section on lip syncing and mentioned the importance of popping into your vowels, basically using the vowels as your timeline for the “beats” of speaking. So I broke my audio clip down into it’s vowels.
I also wanted a bit of character animation before and after the lip sync so filmed some reference in the living room of myself smelling the platter and removing the lid. I knew I wanted big flamboyant arcs with the arm movements.
I created a rough animatic which turned out looking like this:
I wasn’t too keen on how it looked. The lip sync seemed really janky and stiff to me so I sent it to Sarah for some feedback and this is what she said:
Sarah’s main advice was to tweak the timing and soften the mouth shapes. William’s recommends softening the mouth shapes after you hit the vowels. This helped a lot and allowed me to fill the space between my mouth shapes so they didn’t just ‘hang’ there.
Once I had the mouth shapes sorted I worked moved onto the rest of the character animation. I knew a wanted a big sweeping arc as the demon lifted the lid off the platter so I blocked out the movement with some skeleton joints first before actually animating it. One thing I remember specifically from my earlier animations was how William’s quoted Milt Kahl on adding flexibility into the arm movements by breaking the elbow and having it lead in the arc. So I wanted to include it this time around.
With the arc nailed down I just had to add the arm, the platter contents and a little bit of polish.
In conclusion this one is a bit of a mixed bag. The strongest part is the character animation, the lip sync looks fine in of the sense it matches the timing of the audio but it lacks a bit of character in my eyes. If I had another week I would have probably added a bit more polish to the animation, eye blinks, steam from the head and bit more elasticity into the demon’s face when he speaks. His body just seems to pause while he’s speaking, maybe a bit of sway in the hands and some head movement would have helped to breathe a bit more life into him.
Acting for Animation: Bus Stop
The brief for this module required us to animating two characters of different ages, personalities and professions interacting together at a bus stop. One thing Sarah mentioned during the lecture was the characters didn’t have to be human. This of course led me to devise a scenario where a man and his dog are waiting at the bus stop next to an alien disguised under a heavy coat. The dog begins sniffing the alien who pushes him away with his foot, the dog responds by pulling the disguise off the alien causing the dog to jump with shock into the man’s arms ALA Scooby-Doo.
Sarah provided the template for the background so I just had to design the characters. I wanted to steer further into the bold flat design I had with my rat in my animation JAM. While the rat design was very 00’s Nickelodeon for my new designs I wanted to keep the strong shape language but with thinner lines. I pulled a lot of inspiration from Barry Reynold’s designs on Book of Kell’s (2009).
Reynold’s designs are iconic and have so much appeal even before they start moving. I really liked how Reynold does larger character’s with rounded shoulders broken up by the head shape and wanted to incorporate them in my own character. I worked out some sketches in my bed late one night. The man’s came together fairly quickly and so did the dog. I really steered into basic shape design with these characters and since I knew we’d be seeing them standing together in an almost line-up I made sure to keep their designs complementally of each other. Each character had a circle, square or triangle shape at the core of their design. The alien was the hardest design to crack. I knew I wanted a long and spindly design with large hat and coat concealing his face. I looked at A Monster in Paris (2011) for inspiration.
After a few sketches I just couldn’t get a design that was as strong as I had with the man and dog. Eventually the image of a rocket lolly popped into my head and gave me the inspiration to boil the shape language down to it’s simplest form, which gave me this:
I was a lot happier with this design and I felt it worked well next to the man and dog.
I took the designs and brought them into Photoshop where I worked them up and added some colour. I knew I wasn’t going to be using colour in the final animation but there was always the possibility of adding colour after the hand-in, plus it’s just too much fun not to colour them!
With my designs out of the way, the next stage was onto animating. I made an animatic to give me an idea of the staging and timing. I knew the man wasn’t going to do much movement outside playing on his phone and catching the dog when he jumps. I got a little caught up in getting his fingers to move right while he was on his phone and ended up filming some reference before I started my animatic. I didn’t really need to get the finger animations to the level that I did at this stage but it didn’t effect my pipeline and in fact it just meant I got them out of the way earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XxuyIwKxJwI
For the animatic I only included a few frames of the finger animation but for the whole short I intended to have them on an alternating loop.
The timing for some actions was seriously off but the staging was good and it gave me enough of a foundation to begin working. My first hurdle was getting the dog to turn around and walk. Quadrupeds are tricky to animate so I looked at a few photos and videos of dogs turning around to give me a reference.
small golden retriever dog walking one way and looking the other way, exploring the zone on white studio background
To make it simpler for myself I broke the dogs body down into it’s most basic form and thought about his torso like a sausage twisting around on itself. For the walk animation I looked at a walk cycle for quadrupeds and the standard walk cycle.
I understood the basics for the walk was alternating leg poses and I was surprised by how straight forward I found the process. The walk I created for my square dog ended up being something between a human’s walk and a dogs. I didn’t want square dog to have backwards joints so gave him human legs, I was a little concerned with how it’d appear and whether it might come across as creepy but it worked out in the end.
The rest of the animation was pretty much straight forward until I got to the part where the alien has to push the dog away with his leg. In my original plan the alien pushes the dog away with an arcing sweep.
But after looking at it I realised the logistics of the movement didn’t make sense, the sweep felt like he’d be pushing the dog behind him rather than away. Since I was working on a 2D plane I needed a kick that fit within those dimensions. I asked Sarah to film reference of me in the office kicking away a chair so I could have some idea of how it’d look.
With my new reference as a guide this is what I was able to change the push into.
I liked the leg movement and the animation on the scarf but I really didn’t the squash on the dog so I decided to push it further and really squish him when he gets pushed.
The next section I worked on was the dog bite. While I was working on it I showed my progress to my co-workers and they suggested these changes.
So the dogs sniff became this:
And the bite became this:
Next stage was the tug on the alien’s coat.
Unfortunately the only clip I have from this stage is 1 second long but you can see the main issue if you watch the clip frame by frame. The clothes fly off too fast, there isn’t much reaction from the scarf being pulled and the alien looks very stiff as it coming out of the spin. So in my next pass I added a lot more spring to the alien to give him life coming out of the spin and I slowed down the clothes.
I showed what I’d done so far to Sarah and my co-workers and got this feedback.
This made me realise I’ve been having an issue with the timing in a lot of my animation, I tend to make ever movement very even and with the same amount of frames. This was especially noticeable in the dogs jump. But by deleting a few frames and holding the pose for longer at the top of the jump I was able to get a better result. I also implemented the feedback about the scarf, the leg and the dog tugging. Due to time reasons I didn’t add more reactions to the alien but I feel the end result still works. Below is the final version of my animation.
I realised when I finished the animation in true Aodhan fashion I gave myself a good bit more work than I probably needed to do, the brief said the sequence only needed to be 10 seconds and mine comes in at 30. But all in all I’m mostly happy with this piece. The character designs are strong, the staging is good. Some of the timing is a little lifeless in some parts and I’m not entirely convinced by some of the movements in the tug of war between the alien and dog. I think the scarf tension in the end looked a lot better but the way the man and dog move during the tugging, their back and forth just seems a little off too me.
I do really life how much life the animation has towards the end with the alien’s bounce and the man catching the dog. Although it has made me realise the rest of the animation is a kind of stiff and lifeless by comparison. I noticed it with my animation JAM too, the nicer more fluid animations are always towards the end. I think it might have something to do with the fact both of those animations featured a walk animation in the middle which I tend to only redraw the legs on so the rest appears as the a singular drawing moving across the screen. Either that or it takes me a hell of a long time to warm up with my animation. Whatever the reason I’m marking this animation down as a win, it’s a clear progression from my previous work, if still a little stiff/unappealing. Perhaps more exaggeration is needed.