I was blessed enough to have one of my shots from this year featured in the Animation Mentor Student Showcase 2017! It was my 3rd Advanced Body Mechanics shot mentored by Keith Sintay. In my first 2 shots, I based them off of American Ninja Warrior reference. Mostly studying how the body moves in these extreme exercises. The first shot I did was mostly a jump and roll. The second one was more upper body strength and overlap in the body. So for my third shot, I decided to make an attempt at not just copying the reference for realism, but try to exaggerate it more. Make it more cartoony. So I decided to take reference from the show Wipeout and have a character go through the Big Balls obstacle.
ANALYZE THE REFERENCE
Here’s my original video reference:
Wipeout_Big_Balls_Fail-VIDEO_REFERENCE from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
I started out by analyzing the reference. I do this by making a Image Sequence out of my video reference and importing it into Autodesk Sketchbook Pro’s Flipbook feature. Once I have my reference in Sketchbook Pro, I study the reference frame by frame and try to decide which frames will be my key poses and breakdowns. I’m looking for changes in direction, contacts, holds, etc. Once I decide on those frames, I do draw-overs on those frames only. As I’m drawing over the reference I’m mostly looking for line of action, and also what the limbs are doing. When I’m done with my draw-overs, I hide the original video reference and just look at my drawings in motion to see if they make sense or if any adjustments need to be made. Also, this is when I play a little with timing, since timing is usually different for animation that live action reference. I have generally found that I need to remove frames to keep things from feeling floaty. Here’s what it looked like at this point:
Wipeout_Fail_INITIAL_DRAWOVER from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
APPLY FEEDBACK FROM MENTOR
My mentor, Keith Sintay, had a great suggestion that added so much entertainment value to this shot! He asked me to have him do a showboating pose in the air right before he fails. That was so much fun to figure out! So I did another draw-over animatic to what this might look like. I also changed from a stick figure to drawings that look more like the characters body type so I could try to figure out how the poses would translate to that particular rig. Here’s what I came up with:
Wipeout_Fail_CARICATURED_DRAWOVER01 from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
APPLY MORE FEEDBACK FROM MENTOR
At this point, I still haven’t opened up Maya, except to try to model the environment and figure out the layout of the camera. I’m still in planning mode drawing out animatics trying to solve problems. My mentor told me that it would probably work better if my character landed on his back after showboating in the air and then flipped over and flailed his arms. I had a little trouble at first figuring out the timing of this…as seen in this animatic:
Wipeout_Fail_CARICATURED_DRAWOVER02 from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
FIRST BLOCKING PASS
In my first blocking pass, I just worked out the same poses and timing from my drawn animatic. Left it in stepped mode and tried to see what it would look like. The timing is all off, but I’m mainly focused on the poses. Here’s my first blocking pass:
an03_shot-003_animBLOCKING01 from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
Blocking Plus
Now I’m adding in more breakdowns, and still trying to nail down the timing. That darn last flip into the water still doesn’t look right, but it’s looking better…
an03_shot-003_animBLOCKING_PLUS01 from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
Polish Pass
I fixed the run at the beginning to look more believable. I also tried to find ways to offset things and get some overlapping action, especially with the ears. Cleaning up my arcs and the final flip is looking better…
an03_shot-003_animPOLISH01 from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
FINAL PASS
On this pass, I continued to add overlapping action, and smoothed out arcs. I also put the character into a bathing suit to make the shot more entertaining. I added a splash effect in post using Adobe Premiere and a splash video that I found on google. I got the colors I wanted for the balls and tried to make the water look more like water. I also added a platform at the end, since this obstacle should have one there. Here’s how it turned out:
an03_shot-003_animFINAL from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
Animation Mentor Lighting and Rendering
I know absolutely nothing about lighting and rendering, so I am so grateful that Animation Mentor helped out with that to make my shot look even better! Here’s how it ended up looking for the Student Showcase:
Tom_wipeout_shot from Tom Engelhardt on Vimeo.
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