This week we were given a couple of exercises, for homework and a class activity, in which we were to get used to animating in Maya. I feel like I probably keep saying the same thing about the activities we’ve been given in both of this semester’s classes, but with Maya animation I feel like I am once again struggling against the unknown! I am incredibly slow to learn this stuff, it took me a full day to complete the class activity we were given. However, I did eventually get both animations to a place where I am happy with them:
It took me a stupid amount of time to get this part right, I’m still not even sure if I’ve achieved it, but I knew I wanted it to act like a bowling ball in it’s density and I felt totally out of control of the way that the bounces looked. However, I’m happy with the end result, I think it looks like a heavy ball – I can almost hear it hitting the floor.
Next, we were given a ball with a RIG and we were to look at working out squash and stretch:
Again, it took me a long time to get this to a place where I was happy, but I am really pleased with it. Instead of the ball simply falling, I wanted to make it look as if it was bouncing along by itself and I think I achieved that by squashing the bottom half of the ball up towards the top when it was at the peak of its jump, almost to give the illusion of ‘legs’. I also wanted to add a little humour to the end by having the wall – that is seemingly stable – fall straight over after it’s wobble on top of the ball.
After lunch we were split up between our groups to discuss our final assignment. My group took the time to agree on a plot:
Ciara suggested ‘The Graveyard Shift’ which we all thought was just so clever, which it was, so we are working with that as our title.
We arranged to speak again the next morning with our own versions of what we thought the story board would look like, as well as some more experiments with character design for the ghosts. This was my story board:
I realised pretty swiftly afterwards that it’s a bit long, and would probably over run the amount of time we have for the animation! The other members of my team had much more succinct storyboards that much better represented the process of our trainee character training! In the end, we each looked at each others story boards, thought about what we liked about each one, and we merged them all together. Whilst we all had the same story, it was amazing to see how diverse the story boards turned out. I volunteered to draw up the final story board so that Ciara could start off her responsibility of getting the animatic done: the rough sketches:
So pleased with all of our ideas, and how they’ve all come together – I really do think that we each brought our own parts to the story board and that our ideas and senses of humour click together so well, which allowed us to very easily blend our visions together. I am really looking forward to getting the animatic done, and getting a feeling for what it’s actually going to look like!
I also roughed out some more silhouettes and ideas for the ghost characters:
I could have pushed this much further, however last night I was up until about 3AM trying to get everything together and organised for my blog update/homework that I really didn’t have the time. I’m super happy with the model on the bottom right, but I really love the long dangling arms of the top left. These were my final ideas, which were proposals for both of the main characters, or, the one on the right would be my chosen design for one of the background character ghosts:
Overall, I am nervous, worried, frustrated but also excited for this semester’s assignment; I feel like it has been extremely intense this semester, in comparison the the previous one. I’m working hard so that things hopefully start to come a little easier.
We made up an animatic for our story, which we presented in class:
We were given pointers on a couple of things that needed changed, namely having the other ghost gardeners in the beginning shot be gardening to establish the ghost’s jobs, and some changes to timing etc.