It’s been a while since my last post due to an immense amount of work that has fallen into my lap these past few months, including an epic battle between me and the dark corners of the internet. After finishing up the the Gallipoli project for Peter Jackson, ANZ, and the New Zealand Government (http://www.wellingtonnz.com/discover/things-to-do/events/the-great-war-exhibition/) I went back to work for Weta Digital on Steven Spielberg’s feature film: The Big Friendly Giant (The BFG by Roald Dahl). I’ve worked on many great projects in my career, but The BFG was the absolute most fun film I’ve ever done. I had a lot of artistic freedom on this show, and much of my work on body animation was left untouched and sent straight to Final Motion. You’ll find much of my work were close ups on BFG’s hands – a fully animated shot of BFG placing labels inside a chest – animated, not simmed – by me 😉 and perhaps a tight shot of BFG closing/locking a dream in a jar. Hands are tough, but seemed to be my speciality on this show. There are few films the come along every generation that define a persons childhood – I think The BFG […]
Been ages since I’ve done any keyframe animation. Brushing out the cob webs – using a scene from Tangled as reference for some animation practice. Start to finish this was about a 1 1/2 weeks of full time work broken up over 2 months while I was at my day job. Used the Mike free rig on CreativeCrash and the free Maya World Zombination Character Rig by Proletariat Inc.. Looking at reference is something animators have been doing since the 9 Old Men days – Disney’s Snow White is a perfect example. What I do in the performance capture world is no different. We look at reference footage of what the actor did, and make our timing and pose adjustments accordingly. Keeping close eye on arcs, pops, etc – no different than adjusting your base layer animation. For this keyframe example, I took the Tangled reference and got my key poses down first. Adjusted keys in the graph editor for timing, then did all the in between fixes so I got cleaner arcs. This isn’t perfect, but for not doing any pure keyframe in several years it’s not too bad.
