SAFARI

Here is the finalised version of catbabe. During the process of this animation I have accomplished the set task - A human acting like an Animal. I have enjoyed the observational work that this assignment entailed I have also learned to solved the problems of animorphism. I am reasonably happy with my final piece and the quality of the work that has gone into it. I would have liked to include the hair and tail and also to have created a more detailed piece. If I was to do this project again I would have studied animal behaviour intensely. Overall I believe my process to be more personally gaining than the outcome.

SPIDER and FLY

This is my finalised coloured version of Spider and Fly. I have sent this to Aniboom, BBC Talent and Trouble TV's Homegrown. I am very happy with the outcome of this animation. It has been a big learning experience using colour and lighting effects on every frame. If I were to do this again, I would have added more body to my characters as they are effectively talking heads. I still believe that you could consider this animation to be a successful version of an animal acting like a human but i am glad to have had the experience that the catbabe project has brought to be.

http://www.aniboom.com/Player.aspx?v=5009

Portfolio of work

Here is a portfolio of all my development and observational animation of catbabe. These are very interesting as you can see just by looking at them the flow of the animation. if you double click on one you can view them in more detail.

catbabe animation test

I have combined all of my original animations into one finalised piece for it to fit into my assignment criteria. I have also added a comedic twist as catbabe is chasing down a man. I am now going to start creating the sound file with assistance of a sound technician student (Adam Newland).

Spider to a fly colour 1

Here I jumped back to assignment 3, 10 second club as my tutors and I, decided that this animation would need to be coloured to enter a competition. I found this completely acceptable because I have wanted to experiment in colour and shading within an animation.

Here I have completed the initial colouring stage. I am now going to start on the shading and lighting stage.

Test animation of cat jumping

Luckily the video clip I found exactly matched the motion I was looking for so I almost rotoscoped the cat in this animation.

cat jump

http://www.thoughtequity.com/video/clip/3456235_015.do

catbabe test walk

Here is the catbabe walk cycle. This was extremely hard as the leg and arm extensions had to be changed according to the joint positions to look accurate. I think that this animation makes you believe that she is human. Another problem that arose was the position of the woman's breasts as they were in the way of the cats arm movement paths. This was simply rectified by the elasticity of the breasts.

Test animation of cat walking

Here are my cat walking studies. I used the same process as with the run cycle. Because this animation took longer to complete a walk cycle, there were more frames.

I think that this animation has been very successful.

How does a cat walk?

Now I plan to develop a walk cycle of a cat. Here I have found videos of cats walking.

Woman running like a cat test.

After developing my cat run cycle it was time to adapt the woman to run like a cat. I used my original cat run cycle as a guideline for the human figure. I then had to change the body structure as the cat has more of an elongated body. The cat's back legs also have a sort of elongated foot which caused problems. When viewing this animation it became visibly clear that it would be nearly impossible for a human to run like a cat. This is partly because of the weight displacement within the body and the tail counterbalance.

woman running like cat



final colour test

Cat running animation

Here is my final animation of a cat running. I believe this to be extremely accurate as I have studied the body and muscle movements of cats extensively. I also observed a friends cat over a few days to get the personality and movement pattern. This helped me immensely as visual understanding is far better than video content.

Cat animation test - running

Here is a final test of how I think cats run.
The technical process for this was to first find a video depicting a cats movement, then break it down frame-by-frame, Immitate the body form and structure capturing the motion - almost rotoscoping. I also have included the timescale and the frames per second to help me understand the motion within normal time.



More tests on body weight



Skinning the cat; test

A cat runs a lot like a dog

It was quite hard to find a video of a small cat runing as they run so fast, and not many people film their cat running but I found that dogs run just like a cat. So here are some visual references of some quadruped's running.

How does a cat run?

I wanted to find some video clips of cat movements. and run cycles. This was extremely hard and time consuming as cats are fast creatures. I was able to find some on YouTube. Here are two clips of cats running.

Catbabe Concept Character

I will be working from this body structure and colour test to create my Human acting like and Animal animation. I will remove the hair, ears and tail whilst creating the rough animations.

Catbabe 3D Maya

I created this catbabe character using 'Maya' but I want to explore the 2D process further so I think I will just use 2D with this project. I will be using flash for the remainder of this assignment.

Catbabe -- a woman acting like a cat

Here are some concept pictures of my character Catbabe

Here is my psp concept "catbabe", I designed this for a Wrapstar competition in which I came Runner up.

I decided to create a cat-woman character in a Manga-like style for this competition. I think that making a woman act like a cat would work well for this assignment.

The 2D flash version of my charcter Catbabe will look simple until I have the animation looking good then I can work on the look of her, so I will animate the hair, and tail last.

Teachers critical analysis

I emailed my teacher for more infomation and critical analysis on my project

-----
Teacher said
Ass 2 = Portfolio of character studies and up to 30 secs of character animation
Ass 3 = Published artefact (ie 10 sec club)

There is no problem with you using the same characters... The published artefact can use your characters to emote to the 10 second club dialogue. I will mark that separately to the character study. It is probably unwise to get the two characters to emote to dialogue only, though... I am after animamorphism or anthropomorphism here. I like the coloured version BTW.
end
-----

I feel my spider and fly characters are to weak to do anything other than emote dialogue! So i have decided to develop my pet project "Catbabe" into my single project as i think she has the ability to create more animamorphism than my other characters.

Spider and fly animation 2?

I might make another Spider and Fly animation short but next time I will animate in stages like this:

10 Second club

I will be sending this black and white animation to the 10 sec club when it is back up and running. The 10 second club website has been hit by hackers so they have temporarily shut the site down. I am now sending this animation to other competitions to fulfill the criteria of this assignment.

Colour tests

Now that I have produced the finalised versions of the characters ,I have decided that if I have enough time, I will add colour to the animation. This is a long process so the finalised colour animation may have less detail than these drafts.

Half way test

Here is my half way test converting my sketch animation into my final neat animation. The production process of this was to create a rough sketch animation of the expressions and facial features and lip-sinking. I then used a layer over this animation and drew a more detailed characters so that the animation would look more clean and would flow more smoothly.

GOOoooo

Right! Ive got the all clear from Jane and Carol so its GO GO GO ! XD

Fly character developments

Here are my developments for my character Fly:


I wanted to keep similar characteristics to my Spider like enlarged lips and teeth to keep the animation looking balanced. these are just a few facial expressions that I could experiment within the 10 second animation.

Spider's character developments

After creating my rough animation I wanted to finalise my character designs so that I can create a finished piece. Here are the Spider designs I came up with:



After choosing the look of my spider I started developing facial expressions an characteristics like enlarged lips and teeth:

Research: Richard Williams

Thoughout this project I will be constantly referring to the Richard Williams book 'The Animators Survival Kit' as it has all the animation know how I need for this project.
I want to read the hole of this book by the end of this semester. This will truly help my understanding of weight in 2D and 3D animation.

Richard Williams
'The Animators Survival Kit' 2001
pg 001-342

12 weeks left
84 days left
342 pages in 'The Animators Survival Kit'

If my calculations are right I will need to read 4 pages a day minimum. Which is ok I guess. I think it will drastically improve my animation skills!

Research: Richard Goleszowski

I also did some research into Richard Goleszowski.

Richard Goleszowski joined Bristol-based Aardman Animation in 1983, and began working on the likes of Morph and Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' video. He has also brought us the award-winning frolics of 'Robbie the Reindeer in Hooves of Fire'. He's also directed Aardman's hugely-successful 'Creature Comforts' series.

I have chosen Richard Goleszowski to research, as I like the way the lips move on his characters and animals. 'Creature Comforts' and 'rex the runt' are both made in stop motion claymation. I am going to study his works on facial movements in his animation to further my understanding about lipsinking and emotion.

The thing about rex the run is that it is surreal but believable and that’s what I am trying to achieve for my animations.

Follow the lik below to view some of his work.

'rex the runt'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTOivRZqMxw&mode=related&search=

Research: Don Hertzfeldt

I researched into an animator called Don Hertzfeldt,

Don Hertzfeldt (born August 1, 1976) is the creator of many short animated films. These films typically feature hand-drawn stick figures acting out combinations of slapstick and black humor along with heavier existential themes.
Hertzfeldt creates his films with traditional pen and paper animation, without the aid of computers. Instead he works mainly with 16mm or 35mm film cameras and occasionally employs relatively out-dated special effect techniques.
In 2001 the animator's fifth major film, Rejected, was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film and in 2002, Hertzfeldt was named by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the "Top 25 Filmmakers to Watch".Don Hertzfeldt is one of the funniest and sickest modern animators working today. I plan to combine his style with my style then create some animations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Hertzfeldt

Don Hertzfeldt likes to use 16mm or 35mm film cameras as he can't see himself making a film in front of a computer. I am going to animate using flash as I have made some animations with it before and liked them. I will take this into consideration when animating although I think this type of animation will suit flash perfectly.

here is some of his work's
"rejected"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaXlR-EMijk

Concept idea; 10 second animation

I started by thinking if animals talked to each other what would they say and how would people react to them acting differently?

Character ideas:
Spider to a fly (lovers)
Ladybug to an aphid (wife talk)
Wolf to a sheep (no jobs so there bums)

I sketched all of the above animals and liked the look of the spider, so I started to sketch the spider and a fly talking with the 10 second club sound track.

After sketching the characters together I decided to create a rough animation to make sure that the characters would work well together.

Problem 1

I was going to play one of "Jamiroquai's" songs when the frog dances but i now need his permission to play his song. I am quite disappointed with this so until the song problem is rectified the Dancing Frog concept is on hold!

Because of this setback and a shortage of time, I will start from scratch on assignment 3. I will be animating to the ten second club 's talking sketch. The ten second club is designed for animators to show what they can do to an online community. The ten second club produce a different 10 second sound file every month that is available to the animators to use for their own unique animations. The animators then send the 10 second club their finished animation to be shown on the website.

I am going to use this months sound file called "Honey"

I now plan to create animals talking using this sound file.

Test animation

I began animating in 2D to see if my character concepts of the dancing frog would work. Here are some test animations showing the movement and personality of Mervin the frog. I am extremely pleased with these.

Frog dancing


Frog dancing and singing

Initial concept idea

This is my initial concept idea. I wanted to create a short story with a small dance scene.

Mervin the Virgin

3 frogs walking down the street stop outside a club.

Frog 1: "Hey Mervin, let’s get you a lady!"
Mervin: "But I ….. No!......Wait! "

The two frogs push Mervin through the door of a club.
Mervin lands face first into Fat Toads breasts.

Fat Toad: "Oi you’re a feisty one! "
Mervin: "Gulp! "

Fat Toad picks Mervin up by his head and squeezes it.
Fat Toad: "If you want a piece of this totty you gotta be able to dance!!"

Fat Toad throws Mervin onto the stage, Mervin skids to a halt and a spot light appears on him and the music starts.
Mervin freezes as the crowd shout.

Crowd: "DANCE! DANCE! DANCE!"

Mervin knows that the only way to get out of this situation is to dance his way out!
Mervin dances funny but everyone likes it.

Fat Toad: "That’s My Man Up There!!!!"

Mervin moonwalks out of the fire exit and runs for his life.
He is then followed by Fat Toad running behind him!

The End

Deadline

Assignment 1 (15%):
Presentation of character project proposal (Also submitted as a written pitch)
Hand-in: Hard copy 500 words, illustrated.
Hand-in to Tutor after presentation
Week 4

Assignment 2 (45%):
Portfolio of character studies and up to 30 secs of character animation
Hand-in: Portfolio and DVD of film.
(students must have given demo in weeks 10 or 11)
TC308.
Week 12

Assignment 3 (40%):
Finished published artefact and documentation of production process and submission procedure for venue, with proof of submission
Hand-in: 500 words, hard copy. 10-30 secs animation with sound.
TC308.
Week 14 (at latest – could be evidenced earlier)