London gathering.

Woohoo! Tomorrow I am going to London! I will meet a lot of students from Animation Mentor and other friends :). And the cool thing is that I am going to see the Framestore, Double Negative, MPC and Uli Meyer studios! WOW!!!! Those are the greatest of the great UK studios. Too bad Aardman is located in Bristol. The trip haven't started yet but there are some issues already. The plane from Bydgoszcz to Warsaw was canceled, so I have to take a cab at 3am and go to Warsaw to catch my plane to London. Going east to go west. Anyway, I can't wait to meet all those crazy people hehehe, I know I will have a blast! Just like in San Diego. WOOHOO!!!

Video reference.

hey guys. So as I said I have been collecting video reference for my short film. Hahaha, I must say that few ideas were really bad. First of all, I thought I would be able to record myself for few shots with the baby, actually I did for the very last shots when baby is going to behave a little bit like adult person. For all other shots my performance simply sucks. There is no way to pretend a baby once I am almost two meters height, there is just NO WAY. So I decided to cruise the youTube a little bit. Thank you God for youTube! I found few clips that I am going to use and I realised that baby can't do few things. For example, it can't just spit like a normal person. But I found a clip that it does something different that will be perfect for my shot nr16. Like a completely different performance that I wouldn't even think of if I wouldn't see it. So one big advice for all the people who are going to start class5. If you will have the rought idea for your short film, cruise the youTube, find something familiar to the subject, you never know what you will find. Great source of inspiration! I should do that much much earlier. Anyway, I have vid ref for most of my shots. Overall, it is around 1:20 of vid ref motion data. This is bad, much more than the 60 seconds limit, but I always end up with shorter blocking than actual video reference so I hope in the end I will have something shorter. I am still not sure how I am going to animate baby in the shots where we can see both characters and audience's attention is focused on dad. Held pose is not really going to work I guess, baby tend to move here and there all the time. Will have to solve that somehow. I have three days before I will go to London for few days, so I will use all that time for analyzing reference. I am going to see Framestore, MPC, Double Negative, Uli Meyer's studio and the best thing is that I will meet many fantastic people.
I am starting to feel the pressure related to the production of the short, every single time I look at the schedule it makes me think how I am going to all that in the short amount of time. I can already see that without video reference and really solid planning, knowing what exactly you have to do in maya, there really is no way o finish this kind of project. Respect to everybody who did finish any kind of shortfilm!

Maciek

What's next.

Wow, this was a great time on working on my story. Now it's time for the BIG TIME. Next class is going to be damn hard. Real production schedule. I have 22 shots, short is going to be around 70 seconds long with the potential of being even longer. I just prepared entire schedule for class 6. I have 3 months - 12 weeks to complete my short. I was thinking about taking class6 twice, but Robert Barros gave me advice to push myself as much as I can, set tight deadlines. So from my calculations it seems that I will have around 4 days for each shot, for some shots maybe day less, for some shots maybe day longer. I have never been working that fast, but if I will make it, learn to work that fast, I shouldn't have problems to work in a professional studio. I am pretty sure I will have to work 10-12 hours a day, and I mean 12 real production hours without any slacking, talking on skype etc. It is kinda overwhelming when I think about it now. But I should be prepared. I do my planning, analyze video ref, do some research of the baby movements etc. I truly believe in my story. Big note to myself is to public my work on a daily basis, so if you are interested in seeing the progress of my short you will have a chance to see every single step I will make on my blog. I saw few of the shorts that people did in class6. It is amazing how much progress people did. And it is amazing how hard people really work in AM. My computer science studies were piece of cake in comparison to AM. I hope that once I will drink the beer on the graduation party I will be proud that I did something solid, something that is truly mine, and hopefully, something that will be really entertaining to other people as well. I have big request to all the people who visits my blog. Please give me feedback on my shots once I will post them here, on my blog. Animation is not a single person effort even if we do short film all alone. The more pairs of eyes, the better. You never see everything, unless you are one of the nine old men hehehe :). Wish me luck next term, I will need it a little. But on the other hand, it's all about how much of the heart you can put in your work.

I believe I can put a lot.

CLASS 5 - THE END

Sorry for being quiet for last couple days. I am realy into the planning for my short film. Basically I am trying to collect video ref, do some research, some planning, and prepare every single shot for animation which is soooo time consuming. But it has to be done, otherwise I will struggle in class 6, so I prefer to use the time I have as well as I can. And frankly I have no time for anything else at the moment :(. I will tell you very soon about cool software I am beta testing at the moment. It helps me to do my planning, allows me to make notes on the video reference, re-time it completely etc. Very very cool tool. I also signed up for the e-mail demonstration series by Glenn Vilppu. Very very cool stuff! I wish I had more time, especially since I am going to London soon.
Anyway, few words about class 5. I had really nice class. It was quite calm I should say and quiet :). My mentor was really great. Several times he gave me critiques during q&a sessions which was awesome. Overall I am happy with my story and layout. I think it is solid and has potential to be funny and have a lot of appeal. I am glad I decided to change my story ideas in the middle of the term, because the previous one really sucks from today's perspective :))))). I think I have learn a lot. Funny is that many people actually don't want to do short films, they just want to animate. I realized that I am much more story teller. My story is super simple, because of the time constraints, but I am sure I will do my other much more serious ideas in the future. And that production experience I am going to learn during production of my short will be priceless! Animation is cool, but without storytelling it's just moving body parts around I guess. What is cool about doing shortfilm is that you have to learn to look at shots from the much wider perspective and that is something I had no real idea about before class 5. I am looking forward to class 6, I am a little bit scared but I hope that with good planning and enough "sit on that damn chair" hours I will make it and will be proud of it.

Glen Keane in action....

Super interesting. It's not only great to watch how Glen Keane draw each pose, but i t actually is even more interesting to listen to his thought process. When I watch something like this it becomes obvious why traditional animators were so much faster than cg animators are.

Sketch

I was just listening to Bobby Chiu podcast. They are awesome!

Layout

Here is the new version of layout.

Ohhh myyyy GOD! This is the masterpiece.

Well, in short....this shows how much you can push cg medium. I think we just scratch the surface of what can be done in CG and this is the best example of that thesis. Just watch it!

Short film planning board.

I just made planning board. Actually it was cool and fun to do it :). Finally I can see entire short film from a little bit wider perspective......it is gonna be a lot of work in the following months :)))). I think it will help me to keep track of the production, that's the main purpose of it. And it is cool to see your ideas on the wall near your desk too :). Ok, I need to tweak two shots today and I guess my class5 job will be done....well, not exactly....I still have to record and analyze video reference for EVERY SINGLE shot, before class6 will start. I will have about 10 days to do it so I should be ok.

Layout almost there.

Hi guys. Here is the layout for my shortfilm. It took long trip actually. Many shots were cut, many ideas changed :). Anyway, here are the things I am going to implement tomorrow:
shot15 - in this shot dad will show the baby how to chew (right now there is just one crappy pose...)
shot 16 - in this shot baby will have different performance, will be more cute and will really try to eat the food, but because it is so ugly baby will spit it out, not intentionally like it is right now.

Any feedback always super welcome!

Words of wisdom.

I found this great article about student shortfilm production. I think it is really interesting. If you are going to make your own shortfilm, start with this article :).

Meet the engineer!!!

Another cinematic from TF2.....it ROCKS! Every single one is great, but this one is pure gold.

Cg, or not cg?.....MUST SEE IT!

I just saw that commercial done by MPC (great studio located in London). It is absolutely fantastic, camera is great, and the gorilla is....real but not real in a good sense. I think in most of the shots it is not CG, rather a costume, but frankly I am not sure. Animation is great, it's very very subtle, but at the same time totally appealing! This is that kind of motion that really inspires me, top notch work! Take a look at it:

My new super toy :)

I just get my cintiq today....well I am going to pay for it for the next 12 months, but it is standing on my table right now :). And I tell you this, it is freaking awesome tool! The experience is absolutely fantastic. Anyway, back to work, my layout has to be finished asap.

Super inspiring animation

Hey guys. My friend Olivier was telling me about tvpaint lately. It is really great software and actually students can buy it really cheap if they buy it in a 5 license pack. Anyway, I was just cruising the tvpaint website and I found this:



This short is absolutely fantastic. Everything is so cool Animation and poses is sweet and very, I MEAN VERY, appealing. Story is very unique, backgrounds are so nice. I really love this short because it is different. It tells about life in such a unique way. And yeah.....it is French......no wonder ;).

Edit: Well actually it is a video clip for a music, but works brilliant as a shortfilm.
Edit2: Just changed the link, so the animation has got better frame rate, not that crappy youTube quality.

Animatic and part of the layout

Ok, I have to apologize for lack of posts lately. There is a lot of things I have to post about. But first things first. Here is the animatic and part of the layout for my shortfilm. Still very rough, but I have to post something :).

layout
animatic