K.J.V. Schild

Animator, Photographer

[schild]

Animation update and side project...

Hello everyone. I have an update on my animation and another project to show off. Firstly with the animation project. I'm almost done with the blocking phase. I got some good feedback posting the animation on YouAnimator. I have some small changes I'm doing and then it's time for spline mode. This is the animation in it's current stage;

The character rig that I use in this animation is the Morpheus rig, and I sometimes also use the Malcom rig. But I thought that it was time I did my own rig. So I have been working on a rig as a side project. The Character is Mong;

This is a character from a short film project I was in a few years ago. It was modeled by me after the concepts of Karin Bruér.

The rig is almost finished, only some controllers left to do. So expect some animations done on this character in the future. All the best, Jonas

[schild]

Blocking update

I got some good feedback on my blocking and some suggestions on how to improve it. One of the things was the beginning of the animation. It didn't really look that good having the character coming in from the same place as from where he leaves. So I decided to redo the first part. Now the character is coming in from the left side of the screen. This is how the current version looks like:

The timing of the poses is still not 100% done. I'm still playing around with the poses, trying to get the correct feeling. For you that hasn't followed my blog from the start, I thought that I would explain a little of what exactly I'm doing. So this animation is part of my Master of Arts project, which is about emotions in an animated character. The idea is to animate a series of short clips with characters that's expressing different emotions. This is so that I can study, and become better at, acting driven animation. This particular animation clip is about anger and depression. It takes place in an psychologists office where the main character is the client and he is having a mental meltdown. Don't look to much into the story of it though, since the focus is on the animation . But I have been planing on extending the story to incorporate all the human emotions in one little short film.

I have now started on the second blocking phase and is planing on having it finished by the end of next week. Take care, Jonas 

[schild]

Posing

I'm at the moment working on going through my blocked animation, to see if I can increase the quality of my poses. What I want is to have a nice solid line of action through out my animation. So what I did was to take my blocked animation and painted out the line of action on each pose, to see if I can push some of the poses to get a clearer feel of the character emotions. To paint out the line of action like this is usually not that important, since it's much easier to paint it directly on the animation in Maya using a program like "Sketch It". But since I wanted to post it here, and to better study the line of action, I did one in Adobe Premiere.  

I also rendered out just the lines, to see if I could still see the emotions in the animation. Pose #09 is one that I'm aiming on improving. I want to push it more and maybe hold on that pose a little longer, so that I get a clearer anticipation. The same goes for pose #14 and #29. I'm also thinking on changing what's happening on pose #11. All the best, Jonas 

[schild]

First Blocking

I'm finally done with the first blocking of the animation. This is just a ruff blocking that follows my reference footage too around 80%.

The next step is to push each pose, so that the body language of every extreme pose shows exactly what is going on. I might change some of them completely as well. What I'm after is a clear body language and a solid line of action on every extreme pose. Stay tuned for more updates.

[schild]

A New year

Hope everyone had a good brake from work, or school, and that you all are as eager as I am to start working again. I have had a great holiday myself, traveling around Tokyo seeing all the wonders of this country. I had the pleasure of having some friend from Sweden over here in Japan. It's been a hectic, but fun, couple of weeks. But time to get back to school, and work on my projects. But before I start to write about my project I thought that I would write a little about  what I have been up to during the holidays.

Christmas this year was quite small, compared of how I usually celebrate it. But I still had a really good time having dinner with friends and drinking Swedish mulled wine. In fact I'm drinking a glass of it right now.

For the New Year we, quite unplanned, went to a Japanese Rock club and shouted in the new year.   

But before that we all had a drink at a bar in the Park Hyatt building, at the 41 floor.  

Good view of Tokyo from up there. This bar was a very high classy place, so the Rock club was a good contrast to it. PROJECT Now it's time I talked a little about my project. After a lot of studying and planning I have finally started the blocking of the first animation sequel. Since my project is to focus on animating character emotions, this first sequel will cover anger and despair. Right now I'm half way into my first blocking phase where I ruffly block out my animation to see if anything needs correcting, in terms of the overall layout and posing. I don't want to realize that the layout doesn't work when I have already put poses on 50% of the frames. Before I started with the actual animation blocking I planned the layout by drawing out thumbnail pictures and filming reference material of it. I have already showed one of the reference clips here on my blog, but I thought that I would show one more that is closer to what I want the animation to look like. Here it is:

That door_ref-WIP 2 from Jonas Schild on Vimeo.

I'm aiming on having the first blocking done by Friday and will post it on here. Till then, have a good start of the year. Best, Jonas 

[schild]

Singapore

I thought that I would write a report of the trip to Singapore and Siggraph Asia.

First of I would have to say that the trip to Singapore was a very good experience and I got to meet a lot of interesting people in the business. I don't think I have ever meet that many animators in the same place before.

The reason for the trip to Singapore was that the lab I'm in, here at Kanagawa institute of technology, was going to exhibit one of their projects at the emerging technologies. It was the Scritter project, which I have been writing about before, that got the honor of being accepted to Siggraph Asia 2012.

My job in the team was to create some of the material that was going to be used to showcase the system. That of being able to show stereoscopic and normal 2D film on the same screen at the same time. Since I was eager to try this out on some of my own animations I decided to render out two animation clips using stereo cameras in Maya. After some trials and reading up on stereo camera setup I got some good results that worked really well on the Scritter 2x3D system. We also used filmed material, that we had shoot on the first day in Singapore using a stereo camera from Sony. It was my and Khamlas job to convert the film files into a format that could be used for the 2x3D software.

Khamla and I also worked in the Scritter booth, to show the system to all the people that visited Siggraph. It was really fun to talk to so many people that were interested in the project. Our lab actually won a prize for our booth at emerging technologies.

But all of the time was not spent in the booth, we also got the opportunity to go around and see the many different exhibitions and sessions they had. One of the high moments was the recruitment talk that DreamWorks had. It was really interesting to listen to what new things we can expect from them and how their company looks like. I even got the chance to ask them what they look for in an animation reel. They said that what they really wanted to see was good acting in the characters, to give them that special touch that makes them alive. They also talked about the importance of body mechanics, to have some good run or walk cycles in the reel.

I also attended a session that Pixar had, about their Render Man. It’s so fun to see how many smart solutions they have on how to optimize their rendering process. Like for example how they only calculate the things that can be seen from the camera, but still get a good quality on the light and shadows in the scene without using all the photons of the entire area.

I was quite late for the session so I had to stand in far back of the room since all the chairs was already occupied.

At the end of the first day of Siggraph they had a mingle party where every one could walk around and socialize.

They had food

We stayed in Singapore for one week, which gave us some extra time to go sightseeing since Siggraph was only held for three days. Singapore is an extremely beautiful city and a place I will definitely go back to.

Singapore skyline.

Among the things we did was to go to the midnight safari. This was really fun and we saw a lot of exotic animals. But since it was during the night, and no camera flashes was allowed, there is little photos of it. But I did try.

Some flamingos in the dark.

The jungle.

[schild]

Keith Lango

Yesterday I bought an animation tutorial set from Keith Lango. He is a highly skilled animator and teacher. I have watched a lot of his tutorials before. But now I decided to buy his entire tutorial collection of 60+ video hours of animation tutorials. The price was only 99 us$, around 8500 Yen a believe. These tutorials will hopefully help my workflow and give me a lot of good tips and tricks in Maya.

I have also been working on the layout of one of the animation scenes that will be part of my character emotion set. I'm not fully happy with it yet and this planing phase is quite important, because I need to be absolutely certain of what camera angel I want to use ( so that I can create the right Silhouette and line of action) I also want to act it out in front of a camera, to try out different body language technics.

Here is one that I filmed the week before we went to Singapore:

That door, ref-WIP from Jonas Schild on Vimeo.

What needs improving is the body language and better line of action. Right now it's a little to chaotic and the arms are moving to much. I also want more solid extreme poses that really shows the emotions, going from despair to angry.

[schild]

Singapore

So we landed in Singapore yesterday and spend the first day walking around the city and relaxing. Singapore is a very beautiful city.

Today we are setting up all our equipment at Siggraph, to make sure everything works for the exhibition tomorrow. I'm right now rendering out some of my old animation in stereoscopic, so that we can use it on our 2x3D system.

But I have also gotten the time to walk around and see all the other exhibitions. I was just attending a Pixar conference where they where talking about the rendering techniques they used on Brave and many other Pixar movies. It was really interesting to watch all the clever solutions they're using to optimize the rendering process.

//Jonas

[schild]

First month...

So we're half way through our second month, here in Japan, and I thought I would summaries the first month.

We arrived here in Japan October 10:e and spent our first 3 days in an hotel near to the Hon-Atsugi station. During those first days we had to fix quite a lot of things to get settled in Japan. we looked for an apartment and signed all the needed papers, which was quite a lot. We also opened up a bank account so that we could pay our rent and bills trough a Japanese account.

On the third day we had all the papers signed, yea it really took that long to sign them all, and we could move in to our apartments. We also had to buy all the needed house equipment, like beds, sheets and kitchenware.

I think the first week was the one we spent the most amount of money. Roughly around  250´000 yen (ca €2350) was spent. But after that we also had bills like our health insurance, which is obligatory, to pay. The cost for that is 1400 yen a month.

Then we also had to sign up for a Japanese SIM card, for our phones, and that was a cost of around 4000 yen a month.

All in all I think I spent around 300´000 yen (ca €2800) my first month.

So for others planing on becoming an exchange student in Japan I would recommend to have a good budget and be ably to communicate in Japanese, which we had problems with since we hadn't studied the languages before we came here.

All the best,

Jonas

[schild]

Update...

I haven't posted an update for a while now. Been doing a lot of planing for the projects and testing out a few ideas.

I'm also going to Singapore on Monday to attend Siggraph Asia, together with the Scritter team. So we are working real hard in the lab right now to make everything ready for the trip.

But I thought that I still would post an update on my project. Right now I'm creating the layout for my first animation sequence. That means I'm staging the scene and trying out different camera angels. I find it quiet easy to film myself, to get a good felling of how I want the scene to look like.

This is a picture of how the layout of the scene looks like in Maya.

I'm aiming on having the layout done by the end of this week, so that I can start on the Blocking phase when I'm back from Singapore.

[schild]

There's a festival at our school, here in Japan. Khamla and I have been asked to host a Swedish cooking show. You can follow it here live.

[schild]

Projects

It's time for me to explain what projects I'm doing here in Japan. Because it's in fact more then one project. Professor Shirai, our main sensai here in Japan, has us working under a special method. During our time here we will be doing three projects. The projects plan looks like this:

30% Main-Project 30% Sub-Project 30% Hobby-Project 10% Blogging

This way we won't work our self blind on one project. And if one of the projects would fail, we always have the other ones to put more focus on.

Main-Project

Since I'm an animator my Main-Project will be about animation. I will put focus on animating human emotions. My goal is to study what makes the animations as life like as possible, when it comes to the emotions of the characters. In this project I will try to animate in 48 fps, instead of the cinema standard of 24 fps. This is to try an see if an higher frame rate will make the emotions easier to read, since I will be ably to get in more details.

I will try to keep the animations quite short, so that I can practice on many different expressions.

Sub-Project

My Sub-Project will be about emotions as well. But in this project I will study live acting emotions by filming with an high end, 4k resolution, camera. The plan is that this project will help my Main-Project by using the live acting clips as reference for the animations.

This will also be a good opportunity for me to study a high end camera rig and to polish up on both my directing and acting skills.

Hobby-Project

I have always liked photography, and my staying in Japan is an excellent opportunity to capture some really good photos. So my Hobby-Project will be about capturing Japan on photo as I see it. The goal is to have different sets of moods, ranging from quite country life to hectic city life. I'm aiming on having a photo exhibition in Sweden when I back.

And the Hobby-Project is also a good excuse to get out into the Japanese nature, and not be stuck in front of the working desk all day.

The camera I will use is my trusty Ziess Ikon Bob 510. You can see some of my pictures, taken with the camera, on my photo pages.

Blogging

I will spend 10% of my time blogging on the projects, so that you all can see how the progress is coming.

Thank you for the reading.

[schild]

A lot of impressive stuff, here at DCExpo

[schild]

DcExpo over for today. Time for some food. Eating Taco yaki in central Tokyo

[schild]

We're a few hours in to the first day of dcexpo.

[schild]

Sugoi!

[schild]

Preparing the equipment for going to the DCExpo tomorrow. We will be showing of the Scritter project there. I'll bring my camera with me, so expect quite a lot of updates during the coming days.