Week 1 - Introduction

This week was the start of a new term and new modules, one of them being 3D Animation. The last time we properly covered 3D animation on the course was a little under a year ago. I was happy to be starting a new assignment in the module. Today being our first lesson we were briefed on how the module will be broken down other the next 12 weeks and what we are expected to produce for our assignment by the end of the term.

The brief was that we would be placed into groups of 3 - 4 people and work together on a show reel that at the end of term would be suitable and great enough to show to maybe future employers. The show reel will display each team members skills in 3d animation. For the show reel we could use the Norman and Max rigs that we have used before and used to, or we could even use other rigs from the internet. I feel for my animation I would want to use either the Norman or Max rig, maybe the Norman one (due to me using Max last year). We could also use objects found from the internet to help with our animation if we need the character to hold a gun or push a crate. In our groups we are expected to produce in the end excellent results all round as for example if two members of the group have produced good animation and the third member's animation is not up to standard of the others then in the end it shows the whole group up. Each team member would have to produce 4 animations that will be shown in the show reel. For example one animation could be a character standing idle (minding it's own business), then the second piece of animation could be the character kicking, then crouching down could be the third and finally have the character punch or some other action. Each person in each group would have to animate their own character, meaning that each group's show reel should contain as many characters as their are members in the group. Also all the characters had to relate to each other and almost tell a small story.

So far I felt comfortable with the assignment and believed that once I get into a group and we start to come up with ideas for what we could animate that this could be a great module and we can come out of it with some great work. Research would play a big part of the module as to get our work to be great we would need to collect a tone of research primary and secondary. Primary research would be us filming each other acting out what we would want to animate. Secondary involves collecting research from other games and films for examples of character movement and their actions to help with our animation. With our secondary research it could involve finding a piece of animation from a film for example a certain scene that you like and have our other team members act out that animation which then makes it primary animation.

We were able to choose our own groups, I felt this was a great idea as we were able to work with people we know and trust to get work done on target. In my group I'm working with two people who I know very well and really hard working, Joe Cooper and Krzysztof Chrostowski. In the lesson we were able to sit in our groups and start to get ideas onto paper. Krzysztof came with the idea that we should base our show reel on fighting games. We wanted our 3 characters to be based and influenced from that genre. I was happy enough with going with that theme for our show reel and we started looking at trailers from fighting games we had played like Tekken and Street Fighter. We watched these to help us with getting ideas of what we could have our characters do in the show reel. We agreed that for tomorrow's lesson that we would come in with ideas that we can go through and maybe find bits from each that we can incorporate into one.

The next lesson we pitched different ideas to each other with the hope that we could combine elements from each others work to combine into one. Not being overly thrilled with the ideas, we went back to the drawing board and looked for other inspiration. We discussed working on a James Bond theme show reel. We wanted to base our animations on the opening sequence from Skyfall. After studying some the main key scenes from the film, me and Joe came up with 4 animation sets for the three characters.

Brief story

Agent slowly walks down corridor, comes across an injured hostile, Agent opens fire and chases down hostile, additional hostile then opens fire which commences a shootout.

Animation sets

Agent

Idle - (holding gun down) (guard pose)

Walking - while gun is up

Opening door –

Shooting –

Bad Guy #1

Idle – Injured

Walk – Injured

Dodge –

Fall – Death

Bad guy #2

Idle – holding gun on guard

Shocked – brought to attention

Shooting – retreating fire

Crouch – taking cover

Walk –

Once we finished and had it gone over by Sam, we would now class this as our brief for the assignment. Over the 12 weeks we could change the brief and what actions and animations we would want in the show reel, but however for the mean time this would be our brief.

Later on into the week I started producing storyboards based on the above brief to help my team visualise how our show reel will play out.