MANIMATE 24hr Film - Trickery

MANIMATE 2012 - Trickery - Volleyball! from Amber Derk on Vimeo.

This was a 24 hr film made for MANIMATE @ ashlyna.com/manimate/
The theme word was "trickery".
It's Olympics themed! Mostly I was inspired by a really bad definition for trickery on urbandictionary.

DEMO REEL

DEMO REEL Amber Gail Holowaychuk from Amber Holowaychuk on Vimeo.

01) Kozak Mating Dance - 0:03, 0:08, 0:12, 0:20, 0:22, 0:24, 0:28, 0:41
 • All Character and Environment Design
 • Animation (paperless in Digicel Flipbook 6 for Mac)
 • Layout and Paint (Photoshop)
 • Colour (Digicel Flipbook 6 for PC)
 • Compositing (After Effects)
02) Higher Education - 0:05, 0:06, 0:17, 0:19
 • Environment Design
 • Involved in Character Design
 • Animation and Layout on paper
 • Background Paint - Photoshop
 • Colour - Photoshop
 • Compositing - After Effects
03) Higher Education - 0:13
 • Environment Design
 • Involved in Character Design
 • Animation and Layout on paper
 • Character Colour in Photoshop
 • Beard Interaction in Photoshop
 • Compositing in After Effects
04) Exercise Action Analysis - 0:33
 • All Character and Environment Design
 • Animation and Layout on Paper
 • Animation and Colour in Photoshop
 • Compositing in After Effects
05) Voice - Patrick Stewart from "Jeffrey" - 0:37
 • Animation in Maya
 • Vocal Breakdown in Magpie Pro
 • Compositing in After Effects
Demo reel assembled in Premiere Pro

The music in the demo reel is Korobushko by Bond, used without permission.

Sheridan Flipbook 2010

This is the page I put together for the industry book this year. The arrows behind the characters were intended to show the direction of the movement as well as the direction you should "read" the images. Marusya across the top goes from left to right, while Bohdan across the bottom is read from right to left. Dance dance dance! Gogogo!

Production on my film is now essentially complete! Most of what I am choosing to do for it now is all gravy, icing on the cake, window dressing. An exciting time to be me!!... after I get some sleep =_=

Thesis Film Movement Analysis

These three composite images were put together to go in a display case in the college this week. Overall I'm happy with them. They're a bit interesting because, if you look carefully at them, you can see that I've cheated each of those three movements in different ways.
The top one was a challenge for me because I first approached it as though I was hitting key poses. I looked at many reference videos to discover that although it is a very simple, straight forward dance step I was needing to cover a lot of ground very quickly. The footwork was so fast that I found the best way to tackle that movement was to approximate the foot positions (which is the area that was giving me the most trouble) in the live action video references and to sell the rest of it with the center of balance of the characters in each frame.
The second composite image was a step I don't feel worked too well as an animation, and I can't quite decide what I would have changed to get it to work more efficiently in motion. Rather than using a lot of squash and stretch in my animation for this film I made a conscious decision to hit poses very crisply and to use lots of secondary action on the hair and clothing to follow through along the arcs. Kaj Pindal gave me the advice to hit the poses immediately as he said that "that's what dancers are really trying to do". That's all well and good when it's not a long, continuous movement like this one. The constant changes in the body posing doesn't give the eye much opportunity to rest. I did my best to compensate for that problem here by using the arms to follow the hips just slightly in their rotation.
The third image was the first piece of physical dance animation I had done for my thesis film. There is a huge perspective change for that character in the scene, and the angle he is moving in along the z-axis is a pretty piss poor one for showcasing the center of balance of the character that is allowing him to make such a broad movement in the first place. The character design helps out here. His jacket keeps moving while he himself is not, as always. The sudden whip of his arm does read as being a large transfer of weight and sudden torque in the body. The relative speed with which he takes off is not realistic but, I felt, necessary for such a hefty character to supposedly become airborne. The last pose in that set, where he opens his body, is probably my favourite in the whole film... a silly little aside for anyone who bothered to read this far! Haha. Not as a drawing in itself, but for the way it feels in motion.

It may be worth throwing in a mention here that the bottom row on each image was the rough animation for the sequence shown above. I've been working entirely digitally, in Digicel Flipbook, if anyone was curious about that.

Thesis Film Coloured Animation

Click here to view the clip if the embedded video will not play for you. This is the scene I have been showing work from on this blog. That's all on this front for now! The film will be done in another couple of weeks. For now, try to imagine it with music and a background and... you know... the rest of a film surrounding it!

Animation Equivalent of the Cutting Room Floor

I had been developing some scenes which got the axe fairly recently. Here's a comp of some rough work from one of those.

Thesis Film Clean Up Frame

Not doing much these days other than working on my film! So you get some more of that.

Animating Dance

Animating dance has been a truly challenging, engaging, and rewarding experience for me. Never before have I felt this level of appreciation, consideration of, and care for what I am animating. I wish I had better words for communicating what this is like. Now, if only I wasn't on the 200 drawing a day diet (which is meatier than it sounds) I could really get in to breaking down the movement and caricaturing it for animation!

Thesis Film Test Scene

Click here to watch this clip if the embedded video does not work for you. Our most recent milestone deadline asked for by the school was to work an entire scene through our pipeline. I definitely have some opinions about what I still would like to change in this scene! Still, I do feel it was important to see what sort of quality I can churn out under the time restrictions I've set for myself for this project.

Film Frames

Last weekend I'm working on the group film for school! It's very exciting stuff.

Action Analysis

A few detail images of the texture and shading I did for the layout of my animation assignment this semester.

The animation was an action analysis, a side step. Some of the earlier conceptual development, along with the original story reel the animation belongs to, can be seen here. The animation was done as lineless pixel art, and so most of the detail has been lost from the high res file.
The completed animation, yay!