Manar Al Tawam

Line of Action.

2012-02-08T15:59:00.002+04:00

Our mentor John Nguyen shared with as a very nice article that might be known for some but not for others!!
It talks about the line of action, and the Rule of Thirds..

Here, check it out!!

AM - Class 2 / Week 4 - Assignment

2012-02-08T15:39:00.002+04:00

This week we had to polish up the last shot to make it final, I got some comments on it looking slightly over animated
so I had to tune things down a bit.

Also we started planing for a new shot that we'll be working on for the next three weeks, this week is only sketching and
shooting / gathering video reference..
For the first time we're gonna animate Stu with no arms.. it will be fun!!

AM - Class 2 / Week 4 - Lecture

2012-02-08T08:37:00.000+04:00

Walk-Through: Blocking to Final

Yet another lecture hosted by Ethan Hurd explaining his way of approaching a shot from start to finish.
Ethan is such an amazing animator, he animated on famous titles like Toy Story 2, Shrek 2, Madagascar, Open Season, Surf's Up, Bolt, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and Gnomeo and Juliet.

Its really cool to see professional animators walking us through there process of animating a shot..
They are humans!! just like us!!

AM - Class 2 / Week 3 - Assignment

2012-02-08T08:10:00.003+04:00

This week's assignment was to spline out the shot from last week,

I felt that the blocking was too monotone, so I tried to break off the rhythm a little bit!!
Still I have one more week to work on this shot.. this is what I made so far..

AM - Class 2 / Week 3 - Lecture

2012-02-08T08:00:00.000+04:00

In-depth Look at Hips

In this lecture, Bobby takes a closer look (through real life references) at hips & how they move.

When we watch beginner animators reels we'll notice that the hips is often ignored!!

Well.. actually everything starts & drives from the hips, and to start understanding how hips moves you'll need to analyze
live footage & see how the weight is distributed between the hips and legs.

One thing to keep in mind is that the center of gravity is always above the point of suspension.
In a well balanced character pose; you should be able to draw a straight vertical line between the base of the neck and
the supporting foot on the ground.

Another thing is that the hips (in most cases) counter rotate the shoulders, this will make the pose rather appealing.

And like we always say, once we understand the principles of hips rotation, we can exaggerate it to serve the purpose of
that shot.

AM - Class 2 / Week 2 - Assignment

2012-01-23T21:40:00.001+04:00

The assignment was to block the shot I've picked and planed last week.
Since that the action in the shot was too fast, I had to block it on Twos ( set a keyframe every two frames )
Here is what I have..

AM - Class 2 / Week 2 - Lecture

2012-01-23T21:32:00.000+04:00

BLOCKING TO FINAL

This was another lecture that talks about animating a shot from Blocking all the way to the final stage.
It was hosted by Dimos Vrysellas who is a great animator, worked on a number of features like:
The Wiled, Shark Tale, Sindbad, Spirit, and The Prince of Egypt.

AM - Class 2 / Week 1 - Assignment

2012-01-23T21:23:00.001+04:00

The first week's assignment was to choose one shot from a set of pick list, this shot will take us four weeks from
start to completion, I chose the ( About Face ) shot from the list.
We started now with planning, gathering references, shoot video reference acting the shot.

AM - Class 2 / Week 1 - Lecture

2012-01-17T08:26:00.003+04:00

CLARITY IN BLOCKING.

Blocking is setting up the foundation for a shot.
In order to sell the idea to your self or the director first you'll need to block it out , blocking should convey your thoughts
on the shot with a bunch of posses, this is the best way for you to know if your idea is working or not.

1 - Things you need to know before you start blocking:
-Understand the shot.
-What are my goals in this shot?
-What dose the shot calls for?
-What are the limitations in the shot?
-What is the duration of a shot?

2 - Once you answered all these questions, you can go a head & find / shoot a reference video for the action you're about
to animate, even if you know exactly what you need too do you still need to take this step because it will help you finding
this nice little gestures in the reference that you can slide into your shot to make it more interesting.

3 - The next step is to draw little thumbnails poses with the help of the reference, its good to accompany the drawings
with frame numbers to know on where each pose will fit in the timeline.

4 - Then you start blocking in Maya with Stepped Tangents keyframes.

5 - After you finish blocking, re time the posses in the timeline

6 - Push your posses further (exaggerate) to get the most out of each pose.

7 - convert your keyframes to liner, at this stage show your work to others ( director, colleague, wife ) to get feedback.

8 - After you're done with blocking here is a check list that you need to double tick:
-Dose the shot reads correctly??
-Are the posses looking interesting??
-Is the animation looking interesting??

If all the above are OK, you can proceed to the next steps, which is Blocking Plus, then Splining, and finally.. Polishing.

Have fun!

AM - Class 2 Starts !!

2012-01-10T09:21:00.001+04:00

For Class Two, I got assigned to mentor John Nguyen.

John has been working in the industry for over 13 years, he worked at studios like Disney, DreamWorks, Warner Bros,
Digital Domain, and Rhythm and Hues.

I'm sure its gonna be a great learning experience with John, wish me luck!!

AM - Class One Q&As

2012-01-09T21:27:00.003+04:00

Yayyy !! Finally.. Class two has started after two weeks of waiting!! but before we get into that I still have some unfinished business with class one!!

I would like to take a moment to talk about the Q&As we had with our mentor Adam Green.

As I probably have mentioned in earlier posts, each week we have what's called a Q&A session where we get to see our mentor live through a video camera talking about different aspects of the animation industry, and we get to ask questions. Working at Disney and BlueSky, Adam had so much information to share from his past experience,but since our small
group of students was the quiet type, it was all up to him to fill this weekly hour with juicy tips & interesting stories.

On our last Q&A he told us about his inspiring story struggling to learn animation, and all the devastation he faced from people around telling him that he made a bad choice for his career becoming an animator because he sucked at it (at the time).. but he ignored all that and kept on practicing and climbing up the ladder until he became the animator he is today.
He used an inspiring phrase that caught my ears which was "the ones who make it through are the ones who don't give up"
So always keep that in mind young animators!!

Anyways, here is a couple of notes that I wrote down during these Q&As:

- Characters are very similar to a bouncing ball in the way they move, squash & stretch, hang time.
- Workflow is very important, take your time on planning & blocking, it will make your job of splining the shot easy later on.
- Keep your timeline & graph editor clean, so you'll be prepared if there is any changes in the future.
- When animating a walk, offset the keys of the body a couple of frames from the foot for a better sense of body wight.
- When applying squash & stretch, stay faithful to the the material your animating, rubber, wood, metal..etc.
- Everything moves in arcs, so always keep track of your arcs.
- Do not over animate your shots.

At the end of each term, the mentor will make an assessment for each student he mentored during the class.
Here is what Adam had to say for me:

Areas of strength: EXCELLENT first term Manar. Overachiever through and through. I could fill this page up with positive things to say about you. You have a bright future and I'm excited to see what you do in AM and in your career. You have a lot of talent, great instincts and a huge imagination. Nice work.

Areas of improvement: The only thing I can say is that your one weakness is letting your enthusiasm for animation sometimes overwhelm what you're trying to say with the animation. The animation can be too broad or too busy. At Disney, we call this "over-animating." When you're animating a film for a director, many times over-animating can be worse than making bad animation. I think in the future you should focus on being more discerning about your choices, and finding a balance between nailing the focal point of a piece of animation, versus bombarding the audience with tons of motion (no matter how sophisticated that motion is). I think you'll find that the more you "keep" from the audience, the larger the contrast will be when you "really give it to them." It's all about finding that balance, and I've learned that the best animators are masters at minimizing what's unimportant as much as they are at maximizing what is. Regardless, you're very talented and you'll go far. Never stop learning. Good luck Manar!!!!!

With this highly appreciated advice from my mentor Adam Green I will wrap up my posts for class one.

Class Two.. coming up!!

AM - Class 1 / Week12 -Assignment

2012-01-01T02:15:00.001+04:00

This was the last week for Class One, Unfortunately.. I missed watching the lecture, As for the assignment it was to collect
all the work we've accomplished during this term in a progress reel and upload it to AM site... Hope you like it!

AM - Class 1 / Week11 -Assignment

2011-12-26T23:17:00.000+04:00

This week's assignment was :

- Splining out last week's Ballie personality walk.
- Sketching poses that demonstrate Balance.
- Pose Stu character like one of the sketches.

AM - Class 1 / Week 11 - Lecture

2011-12-26T23:05:00.000+04:00

Week seven lecture was a continuation from week seven about Graph Editor spline editing in Maya.
It was hosted by Victor Navone, one of the best animators at Pixar, he has some great tutorials on his Blog, Check it out.

AM - Class 1 / Week10 -Assignment

2011-12-26T22:38:00.004+04:00

This week's assignment was to:
- Block AM character Ballie Personality walk.
- Sketch poses that demonstrate Exhaustion.
- Pose Stu character like one of the sketches.

AM - Class 1 / Week 10 - Lecture

2011-12-26T21:41:00.000+04:00

In week 10 lecture, Carlos talked about Walks with personality.
Walks are important because they define who the character is, it could tell us about the personality and physicality of a character, as well as size, attitude, & mood.

If you are animating a personality walk, the first thing to do is to get the key posses right, then play with timing & spacing
and the inbetweens... and the possibilities are endless..

Its always a good Idea to film yourself for reference.

AM - Class 1 / Week 9 - Assignment

2011-12-13T00:45:00.000+04:00

Week 9 assignment was to :

- Spline the blocked vanilla walk from last week.
- Draw sketches that demonstrate Concern.
- Pose Stu character to one of the sketches.

AM - Class 1 / Week 9 - Lecture

2011-12-12T08:14:00.001+04:00

This lecture was about : Exaggeration.

Animation is all about exaggeration, if we copy real performance as is while animating a character it will look very plane,
therefore.. we need to exaggerate to make it more interesting, so exaggeration in animation is taking reality and push it further, so it will not look boring.

Exaggeration could be in : poses, time, ideas, and personality.

- exaggerate timing by giving more time or less time to certain poses.
- exaggerate the essence of an idea you're trying to convey.
- exaggerate emotion & wight.. for example, happy character feels lighter, sad character is heavier.
- exaggerate a very carefully chosen moments or actions in a shot.

So.. in brief words, exaggeration helps to sell the idea, if you over do it you will confuse the audience, if you under do it
you will bore them.

Here is a list of some animated movies with cool characters to analyze :

Character of Dopey - "Snow White and the 7 dwarfs".    Character of Ichabod Crane -"Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
Character of Slue Foot Sue - "Pecos Bill"    Character of MacBadger - "Wind and the Willows"
Character of Sir Giles - "The reluctant Dragon"    Character of Sheriff of Nottingham - "Robin Hood"
Character of Baloo - "Jungle Book"    Character of Hopper - "A Bug's Life"    Character of Woody - "Toy Story 2"

Thanks for reading..

AM - Class 1 / Week 8 - Assignment

2011-12-06T09:31:00.002+04:00

This week's assignment was to :
- Block AM character Ballie vanilla walk.
- Draw sketches that demonstrate Physical Strength.
- Pose Stu character like one of the sketches.

AM - Class 1 / Week 8 - Lecture

2011-12-06T09:11:00.001+04:00

This lecture was an introduction to animating vanilla walks.

Vanilla standard plane walk is one of the hardest things to animate, well.. at least for me!!
If I want to animate a personality walk I could make so many critical mistakes in the body, hands, & legs rotations, and
hide behind the fact that this is A personality walk, BUT.. when animating a vanilla walk I need to get all the body mechanics perfect otherwise it will look wrong.

This week at AM we focused on getting the rules and mechanics of a plane walk right, then we can exaggerate and push it farther latter on.

So, here are some important facts about walks which I learned the hard way :

- Walks are a controlled fall, with each step we take we are actually falling forward, then the leg in the back will move fast to the front to catch up and prevents us from falling.
- While walking, the body is moving forward evenly, NO ease in or outs.
- Careful observation on how the wight of the body shifts between the legs will lead to a proper animated walk cycle.
- It takes some energy from the hips to lift the back foot off the ground.
- Knees are always progressing forward.
- For a good walk cycle, you will need at least 150 to 200 frames to loop, so it will not look repetitive.

There are number of key posses that every biped character walk should have, I created a frame to demonstrate the key poses :

Once you merge these frames together (after removing frame 0) it should show up something like this :

Then of curse you'll need to fill up the inbetween and work on there spacing.

Hope that was helpful!! Till next time : )

AM - Class 1 / Week 7 - Assignment

2011-11-28T08:21:00.001+04:00

The assignment for this week was to animate AM Tailor character bouncing with a proper overlaping action on the tail..

I think it needs lots of tweak.. I'm gonna revise this one when I get some free time..

AM - Class 1 / Week 7 - Lecture

2011-11-28T08:01:00.004+04:00

This week's lecture was short, more technical / Maya centric, focusing on the Graph editor and how to edit your spline
curves in Maya..

Nothing much really to say about this one..

AM - Class 1 / Week 6 - Assignment

2011-11-08T00:21:00.000+04:00

Overlapping Action - Pendulum Assignment.

AM - Class 1 / Week 6 - Lecture

2011-11-08T00:17:00.000+04:00

This weeks lecture was about Overlapping Action.

Overlapping Action is braking off the movement to add flexibility to your characters so it will not look mechanical & stiff.
It consists of several sections: Follow Through, Successive braking of joints, Drag, Lead & Follow.

In a chain, the root (parent) driving force always moves first, then the lower sections (child) will gradually flow with a slight delay. For instance, in human body an arm is moving to reach out for a glass of water, you might think that the driving force
is the hand, but that is wrong, the initial source of the movement comes from the shoulder, it will start to move first, then the arm will follow, then the hand.

The principle of Overlapping Action is based on real life laws of physics, we just need to observe & comprehend these
laws to be able to apply them to animation, but just be aware of over using it too much.

AM - Class 1 / Week 5 - Assignment

2011-11-07T22:35:00.000+04:00

Animating a ball going through an Obstacle Course.
Sketching poses that demonstrate Devastation.
Adapting one of the sketches into Stu.