Mon, November 30

Showing concern without a face—12:08 PM

I've already bitched about the difficulty of properly communicating the state of being "concerned" without having any facial expressions – and with the added restriction of my self-imposed war on context-giving props or storytelling situations. (My hard-line stance has been validated by classmates farther along in the program, so I feel good about it.)

From the beginning, I knew I'd be dealing in varying flavors of concern. One idea would be concern mixed with suspicion:

Another (admittedly, a little bit contexty) had more of a concern/caution mix to it. Maybe Stu had heard something Under the Rug and investigated with concern for his safety?

After laughing off those initial attempts, my mom pointed me to a picture of GM CEO Fritz Henderson from her issue of The Week magazine. (If anyone has reason to be concerned these days...)

I ended up submitting that one, because it came the closest to pure "concern," even though it was also the dullest pose in terms of appeal. It turns out concern just isn't all that appealing.

Still, a part of me couldn't help liking the more active style of the caution/concern poses, so I created one more. Never really caught on with my classmates, and even though family and friends liked it, they didn't feel like it communicated "concern" in particular. Fine, people! Whatever!

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Wed, November 25

Wouldn't you be concerned?—1:13 AM

As previously mentioned, I'm required to come up with a pose that says "concerned" by this Sunday afternoon. While I was killing time today waiting for a phone call, I started sketching a few brainstorms. This one won't do for the final assignment, due to its overdependence on props, but I thought it was pretty funny so I threw it together to share.

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Mon, November 23

Stu gets strong and Ballie walks out

More from the world of animation – a pose of "physical strength" for our old pal Stu, and a "vanilla walk" for our new friend Ballie. (Read more.)

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Fri, November 20

The comment I stop just short of posting on nearly every single Facebook update I see—11:20 PM

"I can't imagine why I should give a shit."

(Not your updates, of course!)

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Thu, November 19

The first good argument against assimilation—1:02 PM

Saw a woman at the store today using her snugly wrapped hijab as a hands-free cell phone holder. She just wedged the handset in there, then she could talk and shop with both hands. Clever girl!

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Wed, November 18

Animation: Now with Animation!

At long last some video clips to demonstrate the work I've been doing in class the last few weeks. (Read more.)

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Stark White Dystopian Synchronicity Dept.—12:18 PM

It's positively uncanny how many times in the past 3-5 weeks I've checked the clock and it's been exactly 11:38 on the dot. (Morning or night.)

I'm the kind of person who writes down the date, time, and phone number when I call customer service, in case I need to refer to it later. I've had to talk to a lot of doctor's offices, insurance companies, and banks lately, and it always seems to be at 11:38. Today, I talked to the hospital billing department at 11:38 and then to a doctor's office at 11:41, but then I looked a little higher up my notes and saw that when I called the same office last Friday it was... 11:38!

And at least three or four times lately when we're getting ready for bed, I'll flip on my phone to see what time it is, and it'll say 11:38. It's weird. When I was a young film geek and excited about George Lucas's in-jokes, I used to buy exactly $11.38 worth of gas sometimes. (This was back when gas was so cheap you could stop the pump on a given penny. Now you'd be lucky to stop it between $11 and $12.) Today, of course, I hate him and all that he stands for (I keed), but 1138 is still following me everywhere!

Sadly, this has never happened once at 1:13.

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Sun, November 8

Devastation: Anywhere

If you've been enjoying the escapades of faceless, mitten-handed 3D character Stu in all sorts of adventures, here he is trying to look devastated. If you haven't, you may wish to steer clear of this site until around March 2011. (Read more.)

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Fri, November 6

Half the Battle

In which I deconstruct Nicolas Cage's Knowing, since I still can't figure out why it was America's #1 movie for two weekends in a row. (Read more.)

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Thu, November 5

The Evolution of a Pose—11:01 AM

I am still in animation school, and it's tremendously fun. I can't even believe it some of the time. Over the years, I've thought about pursuing my dream job of becoming an animator, but now that I'm actually taking real tangible steps toward that goal – the sort of steps that, to an outside observer, would seem to lead toward accomplishing the goal – it feels surreal, like a dream. There will be video clips soon. So far, I've animated three short clips, with another one due this Sunday afternoon, but I haven't encoded video for onebee in over a year and I forget how I finally got it to work, so I have to dig up the instructions. (It won't be worth the wait – just a bunch of balls bouncing around, I'm afraid.)

Each week's assignment is due on Sunday at noon Pacific time (for the Pacific is where animation is made, where all dreams come true). Thus, each Sunday at 3pm Eastern, I am frantically putting the finishing touches on something, and each Sunday afternoon and Monday I am huddled in a corner somewhere awaiting judgment. Thus, I keep forgetting to update you guys on the progress! From now on, I'll have to make that part of the weekly ritual.

We left off shortly after my first assignment had been submitted and reviewed. I sketched some poses from real life and then interpreted one of them into a pose with a 3D character provided by the school. The second week's assignment was to devise some poses of my own, communicating "excitement," then select one to bring into 3D. The challenge here is that you just get a still image, so you have to work hard to get your point across with just that. Also, being artistes, all of us are prone to avoid the cliché poses, like 3, 4, or 8, below:

I drew them, anyway, because you never know what might inspire you for another pose, but I knew I wasn't going to select them as my pose for the week. Pretty much all week I knew I was going to pick pose 1, which was based on a move Peter Griffin made on the season premiere of Family Guy (I believe it was when he decided to poop in Cleveland's vacated home). I paused the TiVo as soon as I saw Peter make the pose, because it seemed unique and interesting, and I dashed off a quick sketch of it:

The re-sketch (circled in blue on the sheet above, as part of the series of sketches submitted for class) was never able to capture the raw energy of this quick version, so I mainly worked from this sketch all week as I posed the 3D character ("Stu").

The first thing I had to realize as I moved into Maya and started working with Stu is that his proportions are not nearly as forgiving as the proportions I can create with pencil and paper. (For one thing, his head is freakin 'uge!) You can get curves out of his arms, but not big, sweeping curves – just gentle ones by bending the elbow only slightly. Also, due to a fascinating concept introduced in class, called Contrapposto, I needed to switch the curve of his spine and thus swap which legs were kicking in which direction. This seemed small at first, but later as his left hand began getting closer and closer to his right knee, it created more of a problem.

When evaluating the pose of an animated character, we look at a few key things: one, does it feel natural? Could a person do this – or at least, could a person in the slightly exaggerated world of animation do this? The poses above failed this test on the rotation of the right foot. In my sketch, it was sort of a Goofy run, with the legs wheeling freely, the right leg coming up from behind, and thus we were looking mainly at the underside of the right foot. But in the 3D pose, the legs are more or less under the body, kicking him up into the air, and in that case it looks like his ankle is badly broken. Also, we look at the "silhouette" – if we were to darken in the entire character, and just look at his shape versus the negative space around him, is it clear what is happening? Here, the left arm is a bit of a problem, but obviously we can't be slaves to the silhouette in every case – otherwise every pose would have the character spread-eagled across the screen. Finally, we look at "twinning" – are corresponding limbs and extremities in identical positions, or do joints create unnaturally similar angles or areas of negative space? I'm proud to say, no real issue with that here – I had that in mind from the sketch stage onward. The only hint of a problem is that the thighs are a little close to parallel, but I don't think it's close enough to present an issue.

Aside from slight adjustments to his pesky left arm, the main change in these two versions was Stu's hands. In the original version, Peter Griffin was snapping. (If you've seen The Aristocrats, Drew Carey explains the importance of this move to the climax of the "Aristocrats," joke – although, if you haven't seen the movie, for God's sake don't see it just for that.) Stu can't really snap, because he has "mitten" hands (no fingers) – his model is intentionally spare, to focus us on the essentials. But the clenched fists made his pose look too much like he was pumping his fists ("Yesss!") which wasn't the pose I was aiming for. A few minutes of trial-and-error yielded the improved version on the right.

Some valuable feedback from my classmates and a few more hours of tweaking yielded the following final version:

A lot of work went into the legs, and I was surprised to find out how much they changed the look of the upper body. Putting more "kick" into them made his torso and arms look more "jumpy," too. The all-important tilt of the head also consumed a lot of time, and trying to get the swing of the arms just right. In the end, my mentor wasn't completely sold on the way his left arm was swinging across his body, twisting him through the air with joy, which means the pose was not a complete success. Probably, it would have helped to rotate his shoulders and upper body further to Stu's left (screen right) to help show the progression of this action. (Though this would've moved his right shoulder behind his head, inviting a visit from the Silhouette Police.) But I knew I was tackling a challenging pose, so I'm glad it came off as well as it did, and I definitely learned a lot about the nuances involved in communicating emotion through a posed figure.

Next time – Stu goes from excitement to devastation! Stay tuned...

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