SWOT- What do I want to focus on?

Strengths-

•  Stop-motion animation
• puppet making
• 3D animation

Things to improve on- 

• 2D animation
• Drawing
• Character designs
• Set designs

BAF: Watchdogs.

Next Generation Game.

Collin Graham. Ubisoft Montreal.

"Are we ready for next generation software/ consoles?"

PS2 allowed games to render more detail - more power.

What does it mean to be next gen? More memory.

Why memory matters. Games consoles dont have much memory, so the amount of data of games must be compressed to fit. 

Less memory = more compressions = reduced quality. (Characters can't interact with the scene... eg a character in prison can't touch the bars, just has to wander back and forth inside the cell.)

More memory = More space for variety of animation. Less compression - better animation quality.

This means more animation needed, but on the same budget.

10-20 animators more, not including scriptwriters etc.

Budgets will go up.. will need to spend $200 million on one game. If one company does it, everyone else will need to follow suit to stay competitive. 

WATCHDOGS.

4000+ animations on Aiden Pearce alone - Half for cover system.

4000+ animations on enemy AI.

5000+ on living city.

Ubisoft Montreal = 3000+ employees.

>>Assains Creed, Far Cry, Watchdogs etc. 

>>Motion capture studio in Montreal.

Watchdogs/ Project Nexus. Watchdogs is a new IP.

Initial core team comes from Far Cry 2 and Naruto.

Initial gameplay focused on driving, running and shooting... Breakthrough idea was to include hacking.

E3 2012 demo.

This helped finalise the look for Aiden Pearce.

>>Hacking gameplay.

>>Clothing.

>>Movement.

>>Weapons and tactics.

>>Living city of Chicago.

Sebastien Rouleau - Stunt man - Provided reference for Aiden.

>>Natural and Athletic.

>>Parkour/ Police man in real life.

>>Inexperienced at Motion Capture.

>>Member of 'Fast Motion'.

Two refence guys were used.. one who had the experience with working in motion capture and one who had the right look for the character.

Actor defined posing - must be natural for the actor to have a great performance. Consider how the actor moves in and out of poses. 

Iconic style for the main character. Hands in pockets - Hard to do, fingers cut off inside pockets so that they don't poke through the material.

T-Bone (secondary character)

Little cheats to stop things going through walls etc. Backpack moves over when in crouching position by the wall to stop the backpack going into or through the wall. 

Crowbar scaled down when it's on his back.

Living City

>> Gameplay, hacking and criminal scenarios.

>>Realistic characters in the background. They interact with the scene and behave realistically. - Drunk, throwing things away, sneezing etc.

Aiden Pearce can read texts and emails withing the city/ game to find out secrets and to help victims. - VIGILANTE.

Each individual crime has a backstory and the criminals have moments of realisation before running away. 

Each living city animation is treated like it's own story. 

How to fill extra memory and save team size.

>>Focus on time waste and inefficiency.

>>More powerful tools.

>>Better source data.

>>'Lean' approach to animation.

Many of the animators have a background in key frame animation but the animators at ubisoft are now more focused on a realistic style. 100% motion capture animation. 

Good quality motion capture data set to animators, not bad quality for animators to clean up. Costsmore but better quality animations. MOTION BUILDER SOFTWARE.

Optical Tracking.

>markers.                Actor Tool.

                                >represents actors      Characterisation.

                                  height and body         >Characters            Retargeting.

                                  shape                           skeleton.             >Fitting the skeleton

                                                                                                    to the characters shape.

Pivot points - very important. If they are off, characters will end up with chicken necks and short bones. 

Outsourcing things to India or China to get it exactly how the motion capture depicts.

Animators direct actors. 

>>Many of their animators/ motion editors are great key fram animators.

>>Collaborative approach to directions.

>>Gameplay animators are responsible for whole systems.

>>The direction comes together on the shoot floor.

>>Animators have ownership ownership and contribute actively to the directions for movement.

The industry is starting to produce Animation Assembly tools aimed at animator. This would mean more control and more decisions.

Animators design gameplay. Gameplay animators need to understand game design. 

>>All the speed and responsiveness of animation is determined by the animators, not game designers. 

>>Game designers can't change speed and responsiveness of animations.

New Gen.

>>Animation memory won't be such a limiting issue.

>>More efficient pipelines are necessary.

>>Animators will have new opportunities to be creative.

Where do you need to be in 5 years? Keep looking forward.

Reference/ Research books.

The art of innovation - Tom Kelley

Game Feel - Steve Swink. (12 principles of game)

Blink - Malcom Gladwell.

Impro - Keith Johnstone.

BAF: The Boxtrolls- Behind the Scenes.

Mark Shapiro- Laika Studios.

Boxtrolls is the 3rd feature film by American animation studio Laika; after Coraline in 2009 and Paranorman in 2012.

Boxtrolls is filmed at 24 fps and is all filmed on 1s to give a more realistic look for the stop motion animation.

CGI and VFX are also used, but mostly just to remove green rods and rigs and add in backgrounds like the sky which is hand painted but added in in post production. 
Each character has around 30 puppets for multiple filming, costume changes or in case the puppet breaks during filming. Each puppet has to be identical so that the movie is consistent.
Eggs had 15 puppets of baby/ child Eggs and 15 of his older child character.

Laika studios has about 2 acres of studio space in a huge warehouse made up of about 50 units, each with different sets in them. Most days would see 10 or 11 units going at once, filming different scenes of the movie.

The trolls all have lights in their eyes to make them glow and electricians are on set working the eyes.
Some of the background people and trolls in large crowd scenes are composited after filming. 

Everything in Cheesebridge is assymetrical, there are no straight lines and even the town of Cheesebridge curves to the side.

Boxtrolls was 10 years in the making, based on the book 'Here Be Monsters' by Alan Snow. The planning and initial ideas and designs were started when Laika recieved the book in 2004. 
The film uses real lighting and everything you see in the film is made by hand, including every prop, even the smallest detail. 

Laika uses 3D printers to print each individual facial expression for each character. There are over 55,000 faces printed and each face takes around an hour to print. Some characters have mechanical faces if they don't have many facial expressions or don't talk very much or at all. 
There are three types of facial animation in stop motion: Replacement (as used for most characters that talk or have extreme facial expressions, and involves taking off the face of the character each frame that it needs to move and replacing it with the next face. Each face is magnetised for ease of changing), Mechanical (as used for characters with limited facial expresion, and moved by small screws and cogs inside the face) and claymation, which is not used by Laika.
Some of the hair of the characters is printed on, but others, like Winnie and Eggs, have hair that can be animated and are held in place by wire. Norman from Paranorman's hair is goat hair.

The lines on the faces from the changing faces, and the rigging that helps the characters stay balanced or jump, are removed in after effects. Dragonframe is the software actually used for the stop motion. It makes the animation process a lot easier as it can be controlled with just a click of a button. 300, 000 photos were taken for the movie at 24 fps.







The Mechadrill is 5ft tall and is worked by electricians. To create the fire inside the mechadrill, the team at Laika created an app that created fire that could be filmed frame by frame. This was then placed on an iPad mini that fit perfectly into the grate on the mechadrill.

The temperatures in the studios must be kept at a steady temperature so that the sets do not expand or contract in different temperatures, as this would have a huge effect on the filming.

The voices are recorded first and then the characters are animated to fit.

Previously, Laika puppets were made by McKinnon and Saunders, but for Boxtrolls, Laika started to make their own puppets, although they took a lot of knowledge from McKinnon and Saunders and even have some McKinnon and Saunders alums working for Laika now. 

Everyone at Laika studios is an artist of some form, even the runners who are there hoping to move up the ranks into a more permanent role. 


Q and A
How do they make the animators animate in a consistent style?
They work together a lot but they have different animators for each character so that characters move consistently.

How much did it cost to make Boxtrolls?
$8.5 million budget.

How are the puppets made? 
Breakdown of puppet building:
Armature.
Draw Character based on armature size.
Silicon/ Rubber mould casting.
Magnets.
Painting.
Hair.
Clothing.

Steel armatures- made with ball and socket joints.



NEED TO MOVE TO LAIKA STUDIOS IN PORTLAND, OREGON. 
INTERNSHIPS. 

BAF: Strange Hill High - The Puppets.

Tim Jones - Lead Puppeteer.

The Puppets are created by McKinnon and Saunders.

At least two people operate each puppet at any time.. this means that when 3 puppets are walking down a corridor together, there will be 6 people walking underneath the set. 
TV screens under the set to show the puppeteers what they're doing. They do everything backwards so that they can see things the same way everyone else does.

Puppets bodies are made of wood usually. Clothes are machine sown and have lots of detail.
Tracking dots under the mouths so that when the characters need to talk they remove the mouth and animators later put the mouths on in software later and lipsync it to the words using the tracking dot information to keep them in the right place.

They shoot the scenes very carefully to the story board. 

Strange Hill High is classed as an animation even though it's not technically animated. 

BAF: Strange Hill High- Screenwriting.

Mark Oswin- Screenwriter. Mainly works on CBBC. Currently working on Danger Mouse.

Strange Hill High is a CBBC program made with puppets. Mysteries in a British High School in a city.

Screenwriting Development.
>>One Line Pitches - can be a paragraph but basic.
>>Writers Room - Democratic. No one gets laughed at.
>>1 Page Outline - Structure seperate acts.
>>SXS - Scene by scene - Writing what's going to happen in each scene.
>>1st Draft Script - Sometimes several drafts.
>>Redrafts.
>> Polish.

The idea was to create 20 minute movies, so each episode had a full plot and was concluded at the end of the 20 minutes.

3 Act Structure.

Act 1.
>Set Up.
>Inciting Incident.

Act 2 (Part 1).
>Playing with Fire.
>Midpoint.

Act 2 (Part 2).
>Down Hill.
>Lowest Point.

Act 3.
>Fight Back (and fail).
>Pull it out the bag.

Writing it.
>Write what makes you laugh. (even in kids writing)
>Plot/ Comedy/ Character balance - Make sure it fits without being overwhelming in 20 minutes.
>Big Visual Comedy. 
>No text based jokes.
>Big Movie Moments - Jokes and movie references.

BAF Peter Lord- Aardman animation

Aardman studios. 

Aardman- what does it mean? Not much! It was the name of their first superhero  character but no one but the two of them knew this. A mix of an aardvark and superman

They started out animating for fun and they got put in front of the BBC by daves dad and asked to pitch ideas for a deaf program. 

They started out working in the same ways that Disney and Hanna Barbera.. Cell animation. 

Started working in plasticine or modelling clay after seeing an animation on TV. They don't like the new plasticine so they make their own. 

They started building aardman when they were at uni studying geography and English but practicing their animation in the holidays. 

Created morph in 1976 and it's still going today. 

Knew someone who had recorded their kids playing and animated it, tried that but didn't get very interesting stories so started interviewing people and animated their lives: creature comforts. 

THE STUDIOS: 

Feature films

TV commercials

TV series 

Digital and online group- games, apps etc 

Lots going on all the time. 

Labour intensive films- cost a lot to get them done compared to cheaper, faster methods of animation. 

Peter lord "Pixar is famously wacky because their work is fundamentally dull" 

The studios at Aardman are a really fun environment 

BAF Films for children

Mr toti

Didn't like the mismatch of styles 

3. Cute story, creepy music 

Children of the holocaust.

Moving, dull colours, real insight into auschwitz 

Laika

'Back in May, Portland animation studio LAIKA announced it was spinning off its advertising division LAIKA/House to focus on feature films. The new independent entity, branded House Special and lead by president Lourri Hammack, CD Kirk Kelley and MD of strategic operations Al Cubillas, are off to a promising start completing the end credits of LAIKA’s Boxtrolls and this acerbic in-house CG short called “A Tale of Momentum & Inertia.” '

Laika is one of my absolute favourite stop motion studios. I love the way their puppets look and how smoothly they move, it's hard to tell they're even stop motion but the aesthetic of stop motion animation is still there. 
I am really interested in how they create these characters to move so smoothly and realistically and how they animate it.

Almost finished Robot Dance!

Just a bit more to colour and some detail to add.

I've had to cut it considerably shorter than it was originally meant to be as I've almost run out of time, but I'm hoping to revist this and finish it in the summer.

Finished robot dance

Here's my finished animation.. It's not quite how I want it to be.. I need to tweak parts and colour in a few bits that I missed but it will do..
It's a lot shorter than I'd intended too but I've run out of time..

Animated Self Robot Storyboard

Here's the storyboard  for my Animated Self Dancing Robot.

Due to the fact that I have 4 days to animate it, however, I may have to make this a lot shorter and cut it down to 15 seconds.

Animated Self ideas

I really struggled to think of an idea for this project, but after talking to Mike, I ended up with too many ideas and then I couldn't decide which one to do!
The ideas I've had are:

Re-work one of my animations from earlier in the year (The music box from the first module).
Stop-Motion of my robot character from the ceramics workshop.
A 2D animation of my robot dancing.
Rotoscoping something.
Doing a colaboration with someone who designs the characters and I make up a story to animate around them.

After some thought, I've decided the one that appeals to me the most is the 2D dancing robot, and I'm going to rotoscope the dance moves (as I'm not the best choreographer) 

Mike said to make a short narrative withing the robot dance, so the robot is going to slowly fall apart while dancing.

Phineas and Ferb

Phineas and Ferb is a Disney Cartoon about two young boys and their teenage sister Candice. The show follows their crazy adventures while Candice tries to tell on them to their mother. They even have a loveable pet platypus who doubles as a secret agent.

I really like the simple colour palette of the show, and I like how the three main characters are mostly created from one shape each, Phineas is a triangle, Ferb is a rectangle and Candice is circle based. I think this adds to the child-like nature of the show. 

I think this television series works well because every episode includes the loveable pet, some crazy adventures and there's even a token bad guy (who isn't good at being a villain)- Dr Doofenshmirtz.

Late Night Work Club

The late night work club is a ' loose, rotating collective of indie animators.' Otherwise known as animators who do independent, non-commercial work. I really like some of the work on this website, as there is a variety of styles, and I like how they all work together to bring the artists to the public's attention. They even have a member's page so visitors to the website can see who the animators are so they can explore their work further.

It's called the Late Night Work Club as the animations are made late at night when other people have gone to sleep, or at the weekends by all sorts of people; students, freelancers, people with other day jobs. It creates an interesting world of animation which I think is really exciting and it would be awesome to be a part of this one day.

The late night work club has made a 'short film anthropology' which explores each animators camp fire stories-  'Ghost stories'. 

PPP presentation ideas.

Travel up from Surrey - Leeds little car moving

Me having an awesome time doing EVERYTHING on this course

Fighting an essay monster beast


Things I have enjoyed this year:
Almost Everything.
Being away from home.
Learning how to animate.
Seeing my work get better.
Getting Alex drunk.
Elliots terrible jokes.

Things I haven't enjoyed as much:
The essay. 
Sitting on a coach for 5 hours to go home again.
Missing my friends back home.
My Cyprus flat mates that don't understand the idea of being quiet at night.

What I'm excited for next year:
Living in a house with 7 awesome people.
Being 21.
Learning how to animate in 3D.
Getting better at animating.

What I've learnt this year:
Sleep is the best.
Sleep is unnecessary when deadlines approach.
I'm terrible at time management, even when I think I've managed it, I still fall behind.
Days go way too quickly.

Laika Studios

Laika Studios are responsible for the wonderful, and creepy animated movies; 'Paranorman' and 'Coraline'. 

These two animations are done primarily as stop motions, and the characters have interchangeable faces to make it easier to do multiple expressions and to make the lip synching more accurate. 

The models used are created by a computer so that there are loads of identical models available for consistency.





I really like the way these movies work with the chosen media, they both move so smoothly and realistically.

Paranorman also incorporates some CGI into it which shows that Laika studios can work with many types of animation. They use theatre knowledge and innovative camera angles which help tell the story in a more interesting way that previous stop motion animations.

Laika don't just work on feature films, they also work on adverts and short films. 

The Amazing World of Gumball

The amazing world of Gumball is a kids cartoon on Cartoon Network. It mixes 2D and 3D computer animation and computer graphics to create a unique style. 

The tv show follows the life of Gumball, who is a little blue cat, and his best friend Darwin, a fish with legs.

The show is really strange and slightly scary at times which I didn't expect from a kids show but it's also really addictive- I couldn't stop watching it! 

I really like the mix in styles and some of the characters are made out of what looks like real life objects- like a banana and crumpled paper. It's something new and different which is hard to come by in this day and age.

I also like that the backgrounds look pretty realistic, which contrasts with the mainly 2D characters.

Effective Presentations lecture.

Effective Presentation tips.

-Keep it Concise.
-Know your Audience
-Assume the audience know very little about your work
-Explain who you are, what you're about, where you're going and how you plan to get there.
-It's not about what you look or sound like.
-A presentation should not be stressful (if you're prepared)
-BE PREPARED
-Know what you're talking about.
-Keep it simple
-Use imagery to illustrate a point when necessary.
-Don't use too much text as the message gets lost.
-Every slide should be important and clear 
-Avoid bullet points
-All slides should be readable from 8ft (2.45m)
-Don't stress, people are there to listen
-Be enthusiastic, persuasive and expressive
-Don't look as anxious as you are
-If you make a mistake, stay calm and correct yourself and move on.
-Prepare your script-if you need notes, make notes
-Don't leave things to the last minute
-Practice.



PRESENTATION DAY

-Arrive early to set up/ check it all works
-Have fun
-Allow people to ask questions.

Character Design in Cloudy 2

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is by Sony Animation Studios and the designs of the food monsters, I think, are incredible. I love the way they've manipulated the foods to create creatures, and they've also given them hilarious punny names (Watermelophant, Shrimpanzee, Tacodile...) The way they've created hybrid's between foods and animals is inventive, interesting and generally awesome. The story is okay, it's not the best but overall it's a really good film, from an animation point of view. The lighting and background designs are also really well done. 

Agent Bob studios

Agent BOB is a studio based in London that specialise in CGI, illustration, animation and VFX for the global entertainment and advertising industries. They've been in business for about 20 years and work with some of the largest advertising agencies and brands in the world.

I love this advert for Sony Ericsson that  they did. This music monsters campaign is fun, adorable and comical.

http://vimeo.com/53942278

http://vimeo.com/53942278

http://vimeo.com/agentbob/spiderman

These vimeo vidoes show that their work covers a wide range of styles and for a variety of different companies and adverts for different audiences.

The LEGO movie

The Lego Movie came out recently and it is amazing. It's the first feature length Lego movie. It looks like it could be done in stop motion, which would have been a seriously huge task with the amount of individual pieces involved in the movie, however it is done almost entirely by computer animation. The way the characters move and the back grounds and everything perfectly embodies the idea of real lego blocks. This is because the animators made sure they included aspects of real Lego pieces when creating the characters and the backgrounds. 
Some parts of the Lego movie were created using stop motion, a total of 3,863,484 unique lego bricks are seen in the movie, however to create the movie only using Lego it would take 15,080,330 bricks which would have cost far too much to create the whole movie in stop motion.

I think the movie was beautifully done and even though a lot of it wasn't stop motion, they've really made it look like it's stop motion, and it makes the idea of the Lego movie story being a children's game more authentic looking like stop motion.

Birdbox Studios.

Birdbox Studios is a relatively new, London based animation house that creates fun shorts "Where a strong concept and a smart execution is key.

I think their animations are perfectly timed for comedic value and are flawless. 

On their website, they say: "We strive to create original and exciting films that are talked about, remembered and enjoyed by everyone." which I think is a really good thing to work towards. They don't set out to make a lot of money, they just want to create works that people enjoy and put a smile on peoples faces, and I think they achieve this.

They also use a variety of techniques, instead of just sticking to one style of animation. Wildebeest (above) uses 3D computer animation with a little bit of 2D animation thrown in on top, whereas Blues (below is all 2D animation and has a much more hand drawn effect to it. Both animations, however, keep the same comedy timing.

Not only do they make funny animated shorts, they also make funny adverts for TV. They keep their comedy timing throughout these shorts. My favourite is Three Olives (below).

I strongly recommend everyone check them out.

Mackinnon and Saunders- Character creation

Mackinnon and Saunders have created puppets for many stop motion films and commercials, with over 30 years experience, and even received a lifetime achievement award at Bradford Animation Festival this year.

Their puppets are intricately designed and built by a team of expert modellers. 

Some of the big feature films that they have worked on include Tim Burton's 'Corpse Bride' and 'Frankenweenie', and Wes Andersons ' Fantastic Mr Fox. They've also created the puppets for children's TV shows like 'Bob the Builder'.

Their characters are made by creating a metal armature made intricately with many screws and bolts etc allowing the metal skeletons to move fluidly. They then cast the faces and bodies etc in latex, so that they move better than they would with plasticine. The mouths and eyes can be controlled by tiny screws in the skull that can be adjusted to create realistic movements.

The costumes are then hand made by the costume department who make sure that their outfits flow and move realistically.

Lee Hardcastle

Lee Hardcastle is a freelance animator who works in stop motion with modelling clay. His use of clay brings an interesting feel to his animations- or claymations, as he doesn't smooth the characters off like Aardman does with their Wallace and Gromit characters.

Lee Hardcastle is funded by Kickstarter, which helps him create his claymations without having to worry about where the next pay check will come from for his work. It means he can work full time at his freelance practice. 

We met him at Bradford Animation Festival in October and we were able to see his 'Ghost Burger' animation which keeps within his style of weird and wonderful stories. 

His most well known claymation is 'T is for Toilet' which he did for a project with 25 other animators, to create a dramatic death for each letter of the alphabet. 

Copyright lecture

Copyright gives the owner, creator, publisher or author the right to control the way their material is used. Everything can be copyrighted, including: Film, Animation, Games, Computer apps, drawings, illustrations and music. 
Anything with an independent or collaborative intellectual effort can be copyrighted. Including scripts, lyrics and stories.
 If your work is produced in the UK it is protected by copyright.


Copyright means you can't copy, adapt, perform, rent, distribute or lend these items without consent or permission.

You can transfer of legally buy the rights to something legally.


Copyrighted things have different lifetimes depending on what it is. This means that after a certain time, the items become free from copyright.
Literary, Dramatic, Artistic or Photographic items have a life time of the artists life+70 years.
Sound recordings have a lifetime of 70 years.

You must always seek permission to use some work if you intend for the public to see it. 
Be careful what sites you share it on, as some sites take ownership of your images.