What I hope to do with the animation

I hope that I will have rigs that are capable of animating well. I am thinking of doing a few short animation tests, a walk cycle for each character and a short scene showing the characters interacting with each other (no dialogue obviously).

I was thinking for this scene that I could have Pocahontas mimicking Cornelius. Cornelius would be a bit perplexed about this and Pocahontas would be enjoying herself.

I have been thinking about the benchmarks that my work could be marked against. Any good animation and character design could form a good benchmark.

For the Character Design, I was thinking that Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch). If my character designs could evoke a child-like wonderment like his did in Lilo and Stitch I would be happy.

(These are taken from the Art of Chris Sanders website)

I also think the character designs of Stephen Silver (Kim Possible, Danny Phantom) are good too. He really uses life drawing well. (Taken from his blog)

Other people I admire are Craig McCracken, Bruce Timm, Chuck Jones and of course Fred Moore, the definative Mickey animator.

I was also thinking about Gromit and any of the character designs in that Tom Bancroft book I already mentioned. I have been using that to help me character design so his work in that should form a good benchmark.

For the animation, any good animation would do as a benchmark. If I could animate as good as Glen Keane does right here, I would be ecstatically happy.




This is an example of top quality animation done in a very short amount of time. Amazing.

Here is another example of just how great Glen Keane is.

Here are some more pencil tests. John Lounsbery, animation of King Louie and a dancing Bugs Bunny by Ken Harris.

Here is Andreas Deja, a great Disney animator, talking about the legend of Disney animation, Frank Thomas.

However, these seam rather lofty goals to reach. I, myself, would be ecstatically happy with a standard similar to the animation coming out of Les Gobelins.

These are the short of benchmarks I am setting for myself. I am not sure I will ever be able to achieve them but I will sure try.

Introduction

For this project I have a selection of questions to answer:

Do I work as an individual or as part of a team?
Personally I feel that I would rather work as an individual this term as there are a lot of things going on this term, with this Contextual Studies Presentations and Post Production. However, I am not a good modeller and rigger, so I could probably use the help of someone who is better in that area, to model my characters.


Which of the four possible areas do I concentrate on?
A) 2D Conceptualisation
B) Character Animation
C) Visualisation (and modelling)
D) Visualisation (texturing and Rendering)
Since we are required only to submit two of the exercises, I will choose 2D Conceptualisation and Animation. I don’t have much interest in modelling and texturing. I like drawing and animation and I want to be the best I can be. This is why I want to focus on those areas; I want to be a better animator. I want to work in that field. I want to be good like Glen Keane (a very lofty goal to obtain)


Do I follow on of the briefs set by industry or follow my own?
I really don’t want to have the hassle of creating a brief 100% from scratch. It’s a lot of hard work and anyway, if you take one of the industry briefs, it’s obviously more like what you get in the real world. Brief C: The Character Design brief I thought was interesting. It has a nice style to mimic “Claymation” and the characters are reasonably well described. Unfortunately, the entire brief seems a bit unreasonable for just one person, i.e. me. The brief calls for five separate characters to be designed, modelled, textured, rigged and animated. I will not be able to design and animate all those characters in an eight-week period, also considering all the other subjects I have to do. Also I have to consider the fact that I do not want to specialise in modelling, rigging and texturing. I think it is most reasonable possible for me to design, animate and possible model and rig two characters. Anyway, the way I see it the two most important characters in the brief are the little girl and the gorilla. They are the most interesting as they have a connection. I have recently been to London Zoo and saw their new gorilla exhibit and you can get really up close.
Hence in my brief it is mostly exactly the same as the Character Design brief, except I am focusing only on the girl Pocahontas Billiams and the Gorilla Cornelius. I hope to design them and at least have some 2D animation tests completed by the end of term. If push comes to show, I hope to model them in a rough form, not finalised mind you, for some Maya tests.

I have included a copy of the original brief below.
I also have sorted out my production schedule for this project.
I believe that the brief I came up with reflects industrial working practices, as

a) it is based on an industrial brief
b) In most pitching sessions I believe that final character models will probably not be ready and rigged yet and
c) Animators in CG productions never deal with fully realised models anyway.

In the end I hope to have some entertaining character designs that meet the brief, and some interesting 2D and 3D animation tests to show how they will move and react.