Briefing Week & Documentary Animation

[Second Year] Making of Integrated Practice (M.I.P)                                & Creative Collaboration (C.C.)

 

Mon 23rd Sept 19 (M.I.P.):

So today was the briefing for Making of & Creative Collaboration (as Annabeth combined the modules). Annabeth told me as part of these modules we would be making a Animated Documentary (For the Creative Collaboration) and a making of that documentary. Whilst we were being briefed for the modules she showed me a video of an animated documentary telling me about what an animated documentary was as seen below:

We were given the choice to choose our own teams for this collaboration. During the lecture and after hearing this information Hasan was giving me the look to tell me he wanted to be in a group with me.

By the end of the lecture, Annabeth gave me a mini brief for Mental Health Day (10th Oct 19). The brief was the Creative Collaboration Challenge. The class needed to make individual animations of 2 to 4 seconds in length to make a chain animation of the same theme but made of separate animations.

After being told the brief the ideas were flowing. The ideas I came up with was a brain doing yoga and meditation. Annabeth also gave me suggested ideas for the animation on the presentation. The ones I liked was "A walk in the park" & "Playing with your dog".

Fri 27th Sept 19 (C.C.):

On the way to University on the train Hasan texted me that we might "team up for the animation documentary today." So Hasan said we should team up with "Him, Me, Bobby and Urwah". I agreed with him but with one condition, If there's no slackers as "I don't like slackers." and "There's no I in team". After thinking it through for a while I wanted to change Urwah for someone else. I want people with the best skills that just teaming up as friends. I thought that Patrick would be a good teammate as he's good at concept art . David would be a good teamworker and idea contributor. Hasan wouldn't decided there and then so he said "we will decide at Uni" as he was busy getting ready for Uni at the time.

When I got to university I didn't know where this new computer lap was. Annabeth said "It was in the new building which I didn't known where it was so everyone on group messenger said we should meet up in the maker space as we knew where that was. So when Annabeth got to the maker space she took us over there. (Now I know where it is for the future.) In the computer lap, the lecture started and the topic was the History and content of Documentary Animation.

Documentary Animation Presentation (CLICK IMAGE)

First we went over the Documentary Modes of Representation (by Bill Nichols)

I don't really understand these Modes of Representations and I don't know what they are. I will need to research these in detail for another blog post.

Educational (or propaganda?) documentaries 

Victory Through Air Power (1943 by Disney)

Dumb Ways to Die (2012)

I though this video was very weird, and I hated it, but the song was very catchy which I hated because it got caught in my head for the whole day till something changed it. THANK GOD!!!

Mental Health animation (I Slacked off)

After learning about the history of documentary animation, Annabeth gave me time to start making the Mental Health animation. So I first started finding a brain 3D rig to create the brain doing yoga animation. But I struggled finding such a thing, all I found was a very realistic model of a brain which wasn't free. I would have needed to create arms & legs for the character which would have took a long time.and I didn't know have to create / rig the body so I gave up with that plan.

But I realised that there was a fully constructed rigs given you me by university.

The Buckid Rig...

...which I used last year for Animation 101 & 102. But I didn't want to use this as it was too simple and over used for other modules and I wanted it to look professional.

 

The Walter Rig

The Emma Rig

So out of the Walter and Emma Rigs I was going to use the Walter rig for my character walks for Performance and Character Module. So Emma was leftover to do the second idea of a combined idea of walking a dog in the park. So I started looking for dog rigs and I found a great one on CG Meetup website called the "Cody rig" which was free.

So after downloading the model I started animating Emma to walk on the spot. But found it really hard to do so. I turned to bobby on my right to ask him how to do a treadmill walk so he showed me this video to help.

Then I realised how long the video was (43 mins long) I would have to the same walk with Cody (with 4 feet) which would have be twice the problem and twice the amount of time. So I gave up on that and kept long / research other 3D rigs on CG Meetup like Pink Panther, Homer Simpson and a Minion.

Then I started messing with them which wasted some of my time then got bored to the play with the paper plane some people was throwing around which took us up to the end of the lesson.

Sun 29th Sept 19 (At Home):

At home I tried to do more animation with the Emma rig I found out that my Maya software wasn't working properly as when I opened the Emma rig the polygons wouldn't show up on the viewport 2.0 renderer (as seen in the 2 images below).

So I sent out emails, posts and messages to everyone I thought could help me saying "I'm having a problem with Maya at home for a while can anyone help me because I don't have to fix it. The mesh isn't showing. How do I fix it?". James sent me an email analysing the problem saying "There are lots of possibilities, you could have accidentally broken the rig by deleting history. It could be a hardware or driver issue, or a bug especially if it's a x.0 version. You could try changing the evaluation mode in settings-animation. If it's parallel, switch to DG. Otherwise, try and open the same scene in uni and see if it replicates. If not it will be your hardware or version or combination of the 2." I didn't delete the history of the rig. So I read the rest of the email and would think of what he was taking about when I asked him tomorrow morning in Performance and Character module.

Another response that came through was Joe getting back to me, on the Facebook group chat, was "Hi Jordan, could this wait till tomorrow as it might be something simple, as in you turned the mesh off, or a glitch that we might be able to recreate and fix with the help of James.". He got my name wrong calling me JORDAN but he might have just called me by my last name because he was annoyed with me for asking on a Sunday. I never turned the mesh off because that the most simplest solution that I could of figure it out but didn't. But the recreate of the glitch at university would be a  great idea.

So will do the animating of Emma at university on Monday if I have time to do so. (NEXT POST)