Animatic teaser

So as mentioned in a previous post, the whole animatic will never go up here to avoid spoiling the phenomenally hilarious and spiritually moving plot......er...... but since it's almost finished we thought we'd post a small section as a bit of a teaser for the film.  Normally on a production the first animatic is done in pencil (or the digital equivalent) from the storyboards, but because this is a personal project and I find it easier to tweak timings and shot composition in 3D, we went straight into Maya.  This also gives you a kind of basic previz too where you can see if the camera moves etc work. 

You will notice that there is no sound on this, and we did the same with Remote, with the thought being, that if it predominantly worked and everything made sense as a film in silent pantomime, then it's pretty solid. The characters and props in this are basic proxy placeholders, but hopefully it's enough to wet your whistle for when the actual film is finished in May.  As in May-be next year, May-be the year after...or May-be the one after that!

New rig animation test

It's been a while since I posted anything on here and that is all down to me being too busy doing the day job. Throughout the Covid-19 lock-down I've been animating flat out but have managed to spend some time in the evenings and weekends animating this test for one of the main characters in the film. As is always the case this only needed to be a short exercise, but ended up being a 33 second beast, and I spent longer than I care to admit on choosing the song he tries to sing to. The plan is to get this shot into Unreal as soon as the engine friendly rig is finished, which hopefully wont be too long, and I will then post those renders here too! 

 I have a few versions of the shot to show from blocking to final just to show the process, but it has to be said that you wouldn't always work like this on a live production where you change parts of the shot significantly in the latter stages.  You'd normally try to nail this down in the blocking stage, but it is fun to tweak things as many times as it needs when it's a personal project to make sure it is as strong as possible. It also highlights how getting feedback is vital to make sure everything reads as intended because the animation process is such a slow one where you spend weeks looking at the same shot, you often can't see the wood for the trees, and need an extra pair of eyes is essential to point out glaring problems which you simply can't see anymore. These issues could be to do with timing, shot clarity or something that you thought is funny...just isn't. My go to man here is Andy Lavery, a colleague who I've done several projects with in the past, and has a very polite way of telling me if stuff is looking crap. 

So here is a block version of the shot which contains all the main key poses that need to be there as well as any breakdown poses that help sell the action. The test had to put the rig through its paces and I tried to push the mouth rig as far as it needed to go. So So with the first pass block the first 13 or so seconds was fine (apart from needing to shift the Karaoke machine slightly to the left to create some negative space between it and the character) but we felt he got happy a bit too quickly as if he already knows what the machine is. It made more sense for him to have a bit of an incling but be slightly unsure until he turns it on. Adding a little tap of the mic confirms what he hoped it would be, and then he gets really excited! This thought process felt a lot more believable than what was there in the first pass. He then tosses the mic from hand to hand before going into the song because he's got his confidence up and nothing it going to spoil his day now. So here's the second pass block... It It all hopefully works better with a more clear thought process from the character. The only part that felt a bit weak was the ending. It was a shame to do all this work and not finish with a punchline so I polished up the shot and added the gun misfire and reaction. Next problem was that the gun firing was lost in his movement and his reaction at the end felt really weak. So after some more tweaking we got this... With there being a bit more of a delay before the gun goes off, it now reads much better and to add to his sense of panic, because lets face it if your head ballooned up to that size you'd be slightly concerned too, he now frantically tries in vain to close the visor which can't get past his huge melon. His reaction at the end though feels a bit weak and makes no sense considering he was panicking a few seconds ago. So it was revised again to get this... This ending felt much stronger, and more in keeping with the character too. So happy days. The sound also needs to be added which we'll get to at a later date but the good news is it reads without it. 

Obviously it all needs rendering, so the next step, once the Unreal Engine compatible rig is finished, is to render the sucker in real-time and see how it all comes together. What could possible go wrong.

Early animation tests

As mentioned in the previous post, the design of the characters has gone through several iterations throughout the production. Below are some of the tests I animated with the character designs that got as far as some sort of rigging. Some had a face rig and some didn't, but we just wanted to see what we could do and play around with a certain style. We also decided to do the animation on 2's, which means that each pose is held for 2 frames, so you have to deal with 12 frames in a second instead of 24. Fast moves still need to be animated on 1's though so that the animation still reads. There are two reasons for this decision, firstly, Remote was animated on singles, and it requires a lot of polishing time to get the animation to look as nice as possible which is very time consuming and the character needs to be kept alive at all times otherwise it feels dead. However when animating on 2's, it is a lot more forgiving and it's completely fine to hold the character still without it looking dead. Secondly, I like animating on 2's! Having worked at Aardman for over 11 years, I've had to animate in all kinds of styles, and nowadays I prefer the look and feel of animation on 2's. It is also quicker than animating on 1's so there's a good chance we can get this film finished before I retire! So here are a few animation tests of the main characters that were done early on to play with the character rigs...







And this was a short test with the re-designed, simpler character. The staging is quite wide on this and there is no explanation in the shot as to why he looks up, gets scared and runs back into his spaceship. We actually made a short AR experience with this where he landed on a tabletop (or wherever you wanted actually) looked up and saw the viewer, then scarpered. The character was only about 150mm tall and it worked really well to be honest and Andrew Lavery did a great job of building the whole thing in Unreal. We might even get back to finishing it one day.



We are currently in the process of rigging the final versions of the main characters, so once that's done I will post the animation tests for those too!

We will leave you with one final animation test done with a secondary character that was rigger brilliantly by Duncan Rudd. The only way we could figure out how to get the extreme mouth shape was to have 2 separate rigs, and swap them out on over the transition, another advantage in animating on 2's is that it's easier to hide the join.

Monster_animTest_01 from Mathew Rees on Vimeo.

3. Main Character Designs

The designs of the characters has gone back and forth quite a bit over the production. The initial idea was to keep the two main characters very simple, with clear graphic shapes and simple colours to distinguish between them easily, as seen below.




We got as far as modelling the characters and rigging them so that we could start making the 3D animatc. That all went out the window when we ended up in the pub with Rich Webber, one of Aardman's best directors and character designers, who offered to design some of the characters in the film. I say offered, the reality was I begged him and threw a few more pints of Doombar into the deal, and below are the brilliant variety of designs that Rich sent me.




These were great! Appealing, and funny to look at, and we knew that the performances would be much funnier than with the original designs, without the story having to change much at all. Next we started refining the designs in Maya using very simple shapes. Personally I find this easier as I'm not a particularly strong character designer, but I know when it feels right. So after many iterations, we ended up with these two fools...



Then from there I sketched various poses to get an idea of the kind of poses the rig might have to hit, especially facially.



So we cracked on down the old Real-time road for a while with these characters but had major problems getting the rigs, especially the faces, to work in Unreal. It all worked fine in Maya and we did a few animation tests that will be shown in a later post, but we couldn't crack the game engine. This was exclusively down to me trying to rig them myself with very limited experience of game engines, and it got to the point where we were completely stuck and looking at abandoning the whole thing. So one night while chatting in the pub (there's a theme emerging here) it was suggested that we simplify the designs again to how they were originally intended. So we ended up with these...



Where two of out favourites were refined into these (rendered in Unreal)...



Now if you think that was the end of it, you are very much mistaken. Even though we rigged them, did loads of animation testing (which will be shown in a later post) and got the whole lot working in the Unreal Engine, deep down we still preferred the previous designs, so after another break doing the day job, we managed to get our department rigger, Nathan Guttridge, to help us out. So this is where we currently are. Two steps forward and one step back, then three steps forward (or something like that)!

2. No Space!

As is the case with most personal projects, they take a very, very, very long time to complete. Sometimes this is because of the ambition of the project, but for me personally, its because we're normally trying to make these while working full-time and spending time with the family, so you end up grabbing a few hours here and a few there to keep the project moving forward. Sometimes if there is downtime in work we jump on it but those are few and far between. For example the last film we made, called "Remote", took just over 5 years from start to finish and it was only 2 minutes long! If anyone is interested you can watch it here...

Remote from The Garden Shed Films on Vimeo.

No Space! came about because the company had an open brief for anyone to come up with some new ideas for an internal project, and even though this idea wasn't really suitable for what they wanted, I liked it enough to develop it further. It's a pretty simple story about a couple of ultra competitive space explorers who keep getting in each others way, so we fleshed out a thumbnail storyboard of the whole film pretty quickly.

The story felt pretty solid but the following week I was burgled and my bag containing the storyboards was pinched in the process. Luckily it was all still pretty fresh and it didn't take long to re-board it. I made several copies, digitized them and saved copies everywhere just in case that thieving bugger came back.

The next step in the process was to make an animatic. Normally you make them in 2D using the storyboards but because there was quite a lot of action and camera movement, and my drawing skills aren't the best it made more sense to make this in 3D where we ended up with a kind of animatic/previs of the film.

The animatic and storyboards will not be put on this blog because we don't want to reveal anything about the story , but we plan to show everything else, from character and prop designs, to animation tests and all the Unreal Engine gubbins.

Finally, I should mention that we've actually been working on this film for quite a while to date, albeit moving at a snails pace, but it does feel like its gathering momentum now which is why we've set up this blog, which will allow us to update it more often than we otherwise would.

1. Here we go!

Welcome to our new Production Blog where we plan on showing the process, mistakes and all, of making an animated short film using Epic Games' Unreal Engine. The 3 minute personal project is called "No Space!" and the plan is to model, build, rig and animate the whole thing in Maya and then export the lot into Unreal so that hopefully we can light it, add all the effects and render it in real-time.

Why bother doing this? I hear you ask. Well, more precisely my wife, and some bloke I chatted to whilst making a coffee. It is because a few of us have worked on personal short films in the past and the biggest bottle neck was always rendering, especially on personal projects where we don't have the resources to send it off to a render farm. It is also exciting for me to be able to see the animation playing with proper lighting in real-time so that I can get immediate feedback, instead of the grey background with zero lighting we normally get in the animation stage.

So, along with the advancement in real-time technology and our ability to have characters squash and stretch a lot more easily in the engine than it used to be, I figure we might as well give it a go. So keep an eye out for updates and lets hope this works...