Archives For Film Animation

Andreas Deja Masterclass Notes

January 13th, 2013 — 4 Comments

First post of 2013 following a long holiday visiting with family in Australia. I’m terrified of 3 things in life; sharks, spiders and great heights, so it only made sense to dive off the Great Barrier Reef, venture into the tent-spider colonies of the Daintree Rainforest, and hike the sheer cliff staircases of the Blue Mountains among many other adventures. I actually found Australia to be a lot like Canada, only without the shit weather.

Anyway, I’m quite a bit late to this as it took place when I was somewhat occupied, many months before snow was falling here in Montreal, but here are my notes from the Andreas Deja Masterclass I was privileged to attend late last year. Many thanks to my good friend Sam Youssef and her Studio Technique for organising the day’s event.

Andreas Deja - Lion King

Since joining Disney in 1980, German-born Andreas Deja has breathed life into some of their most memorable villains in their classic films, and has spent the last three decades charting what he refers to as “the rise and fall of animation”. Much to his disappointment, he entered Disney at exactly the same time as many of the Nine Old Men retired, but lucky for us he spent time visiting them at their various homes around the country, with much of the talk being about passing on what he learned to us – essentially a new generation of animators – with a focus on the philosophy of bringing characters to life.

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Ghibli Game

June 24th, 2010 — 1 Comment

I used to love anime when I was a kid, growing up on Akira and the Japanese/French series Cities of Gold, and patiently waiting for Manga UK to import each episode of  The Guyver into my local game store. That was until I realised that beyond a small collection of gold, most anime is utter shit, (or rather, culturally at odds with my western sensibilities). The only studio that has continued to peak my interest with every new release is Studio Ghibli – surely the Pixar of Japan – so it’s really exciting to see a videogame co-produced by them, Level 5, and a guy called Joe.

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While I can’t fault the animation, it would be nice to know if they experimented with removing the in-between interpolation to more accurately recreate the 2D feeling, as some charm is lost when the motion is smoothed out during the initial comparison they give. Regardless, I’m sure the studio’s consistently endearing characters come through in the story as much as in these great visuals.

Now either students are getting more talented at rendering, or 3D packages are becoming more democratised and so affording more time to learn, but here’s a fantastic videogame-inspired piece by Yongsub Song.

You know your artform is maturing when even homages are becoming part of pop culture – especially when the BBC picks up on this. It’s worth watching ozzy Simon Cottee’s pixel-art documentary referenced in the article – I’d never before considered the comparison between pixel-art and pointillism.

Sign Of The Times

January 11th, 2009 — Leave a comment

Just watching the Golden Globes awards there, and the Best Animated Feature award was announced with the preface that the nominees’, (Wall-E, Bolt and Kung Fu Panda), collective box-office income amounted to the impressive half-billion dollars. That’s the same sum GTA4 took in just its first week – I guess kids just don’t have that much money any more.

Check out these initial pre-vis tests for the Dark Knight movie’s Batpod, done by my old college buddy (and fantastic animator), the equally fantastically named Brendan Body.

One of my most enjoyable parts of game development is the pre-visualisation stage preceeding pre-production. It’s when your imagination can run wild before the harsh realities of real development take hold. I find the animator in a strong position here as complete sequences and gameplay scenarios can be mocked up without any need for a programmer.

ILM On Building Iron Man

December 31st, 2008 — Leave a comment

Just sneaking in before then end of the year, here is the second and far more comprehensive talk I attended at the earlier ADAPT conference. Happy new year everyone, et bonne anne tout le monde.

Industrial Light & Magic: Building Iron Man

Marc Chu – Animation Supervisor

Beginnng with his history, Marc joined ILM in 1994 and has since then served on 20 films, perhaps most notably as Animation Lead on “Pirates of The Caribbean” character Davy Jones. As Ironman was Marvel’s own first fully self-financed feature, they had 6 different companies competing for VFX work. It was interesting to see that despite its reputation, ILM must still compete for bang-for-buck value as film studios are keen to shop around. It comes as no surprise though, that the work was won in part on the back of the impressive Transformers work.

To this end, he showed a rough animation test of Iron Man taking off done over the course of two weeks. ILM has plentiful archive footage from which it can draw resources, and for this piece air footage repurposed from Ang Lee’s Hulk was used to create a high-quality flight sequence.
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OK, back to business. The first of two sessions from ADAPT 2008 – members of the Disney team working on incoming CG film Bolt talk about their road to enlightenment regarding an intelligent solution for driving blendshapes to maintain a high quality of deformation on a character lacking clearly defined limbs and a neck area. Of note, TD Hide Yosumi was actually a former member of SquareEnix, having worked on Final Fantasy X and the Disney-collaborated Kingdom Hearts series.

Walt Disney Animation Studios: Building A Hamster Named Rhino

Clay Kaytis, Philippe Brochu & Hidetaka Yosumi – Lead Animator, Lead Modeller and Technical Director for the character Rhino.

This presentation could easily be split into two parts, with the first concerning the solution achieved to maintain model fidelity in a character that could easily move between biped and quadruped movement, and the second on their general deformation solution for all areas of body/limb movement.

Beginning with an exclusive new trailer, the speakers began by describing the requirements of the rig which required the dual functionality of quadruped rodent-like movement and bipedal anthropomorphic acting. The character Rhino was described as essentially a ball of fat covered in fur that exists primarily inside a hamster-ball. While the ball-rig setup may have proven an interesting topic enough, with the TD writing special software for this alone, it proved enough of a challenge to overcome the transition between 4 and 2-leg stances.

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It’s certainly some time after the event, (it’s slow going when you’re in the middle of a full production), but I’ve finally collated my remaining notes from this year’s Game Developers’ Conference that relate to animation and characters in games. So to start off, we have the head of R&D on last year’s landmark film featuring virtual actors, followed by a trio of Japanese developers giving insight into their approaches to animation and character development.

Sony Pictures Imageworks: A Believable Character Postmortem: Motion Capture on the Virtual Set of BEOWULF

Parag Halvadar – Lead R&D Engineer

Hailing from the same studio that created Monster House, Halvadar’s talk concentrated on facial motion as that’s a recent topic for games industry. As is often the case with movie industry approaches they couldn’t directly be recreated for use in a game development situation, but nonetheless provided an interesting insight into some of the lengths that must be gone to in search of the (some say, false) holy grail of truly photo-real virtual characters.

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Pixar Technical Notes

March 19th, 2008 — 1 Comment

I just discovered this nice little treasure-trove of technical notes from Pixar covering animation and rendering topics used in their film productions.

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As ever, we can’t directly use anything from film in our games due to the huge discrepancy in rendering times (30 frames per second vs 30 hours per frame), but they do appear to be leaning towards shortcuts for hair that avoid complete simulations.

Fantastic Imagination

January 14th, 2008 — Leave a comment

Jurie Horneman, (Champion of the recent Manhunt 2 credits fiasco), has posted links to several galleries displaying animation of Eastern European origin. I don’t know about North America, but these kinds of disturbing and unsettling images were all part of growing up as a kid in Europe, especially a kid interested in animation.

Les Maitres Du Temps

Lately I’ve been hunting on the internet for some of the more obscure feature-length animations I soaked up at a young age and repeatedly came across the work of the late René Laloux, creator of Fantastic Planet, Gandahar and Time Masters (shown above) among others. I’d highly recommend looking out for any of these – there’s something about classic European fantasy, (and absent from their Western counterparts), that takes the imagination to a somewhat more unsettling yet provocative place.

Fire And Ice

Speaking of the West though, I did find a similar tone in Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice. Of interest is the fully rotoscoped approach taken by the film that not once conflicts with the cartoony visual style – something quite encouraging in these days of motion capture.