Responsive 11 second club December

Unlike the previous month i was able to actually,  successfully enter this competition in time. With this months i focused on actually creating the animation rather than the designs of the characters in order to get it in on time, so i chose to work with a pre-existing rig, moom.  I had recently completed a project in Maya and wanted to continue practicing with it. I came to realise how daunting moving a much larger and complex rig can be with mooms being much different to the ones i had created.

With this in mind i didn't think about the character designs and focused on the storyboarding and the acting, to see what i could do with the rig and the sound clip.

The words i had to work with were;

Guy1: You can always talk to me.

Guy2: Yeah, Thank you. And you were right, i still have, a lot, to learn.

Guy1: Theres one more thing...

There was background music of a club to also use, but i didn't want to just go with two people talking as that is fairly predictable. So i made it a man talking with his conscience. This was my only piece of character design and to a minimum at that, I wanted to keep the character fluid and flexible to have fun with the animation of its character. So i made it a simple rag ghost, but this actually resulted in it being unclear what the other character was talking to because most consciences are depicted as angels or devils, however because i was too focused on getting the animation done i failed to think about further character design.

When animating with Moom i found that his arms wouldn't stay on the table so using a tutorial i figured out that i had to change the rig to an IK rig, I'm not entirely certain what the difference is but it meant that i could lock the hand controllers to the table. With the acting i wanted to try and keep it feeling natural and like he is responding naturally, i.e. i didn't want an action to happen one after another but move smoothly alongside itself, things like the head scratches and the holding of himself are all traits one would associate with uncertainty which is the feeling i get from the clip.

Once the 3D maya was exported i put it into Photoshop and animated the conscience into the scene. I wanted to work with Hybrid animation because it is how i believe the industry is heading towards so i wanted to work in what ever way i can to practice with the aesthetic, it also meant i didn't have to model a unique character and i didn't know or have the time to figure out how to make it in Maya with the month i had to work on this brief.

The lip syncing in photoshop was the hardest part as the sound file didn't seem to play, i came to learn that that was because i hadn't put the sound file in the sound layer and left it in the image layer so my lips syncing for the 2D character was not only off but the maya lip syncing, once moved into photo shop also shifted from where it needed to be so my lip syncing was out of time in the end.

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/december16/entry/cQKHar

After I had submitted i got the results back on the 5th. I came 55th out of 119 entries which while not the top 50 is the top 50% so i am very proud of this feat. I also received information on how i can improve certain areas and aspects of the animation.

Its clear i still have a lot to learn as well especially with lip syncing and maya but i enjoyed making this animation none the less.