Ogre Animation

Here's a scene I've been working on for the last few weeks. It's the story of a fierce ogre who's a gentle thespian at heart.

Making this scene has taken some time as unlike many of my other shots, where I have used sound clips from film and TV, for this scene I wrote the dialogue and found an actor to record it for me.

When I started this shot I was going to use a piece of dialogue from Modern Family where Cam (a camp gay man) finds himself in a situation where he can finally play the role of his dreams and switches from himself to the character.

"I see myself in the role I was born to play... STELLA!"



The reason I chose this clip was the change in character and the thought process during that change. I felt it would make really interesting and entertaining animation to see the characters journey in head.

The original idea was a beast set in his personal quarters in hell. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror before running out onto the balcony and screaming at the top of his lungs to a crowd of minions.

Early on in the process after sharing the idea with peers and lecturers I decided the change would be more believable if it was the other way round. If the beast was fierce and scary in public then once behind closed doors he was his gentle self. We changed the idea from Hell to a castle and I started blocking out the animation. I made a pre-viz animatic to play around with acting choices.





We had a visit from Louis Cook, a director at Aardman, who's comments were positive about the idea however he felt the change in character and the acting choices. These comments came at a good time as we were still just blocking and I completely agreed with him, so I started working on a way of making it all clearer and stronger. Unfortunately with this change I felt the audio didn't quite fit as well so I spent a short while trying to find a clip that would.

While I work I like to listen to podcasts from animators and while I was working I heard an interview from a Samy Ficeh and animator at Dreamworks. One thing he said really stood out that was always find your audio first so you can get to the heart of what's being said and who the character is before you work out a scene and environment.

As I was working as part of a team and the environment was already being modelled I couldn't just switch the whole idea so instead I felt like the best option would be to come up with something myself. I knew the character and what I wanted to express so I tried out a few lines of dialogue to best portray his feelings but also add a bit of energy and comedy at the end. I was really pleased with the line I went with. Not only did it have one opportunity for a change in character but it also had a second at the end. Going from fierce, to emotional and finally to comedy.

I put an ad on Spotlight in search of a voice actor and had a handful of replies, some were great and I picked a guy called Omri Rose as his reel was full of different styles of voices including cartoony sounding stuff that would work well for animation.

By the time I had chosen the voice I had already animated the first shot. Originally the character was just going to roar at the crowd below but after watching Robert De Niro's character in Stardust I felt he needed to be more scary than just a roar. De Niros character is a vicious pirate captain bu behind closed doors is a camp cross dresser. This was great reference and one thing I noticed from the cliup I watched was the how they showed him at his worst, throwing somebody overboard to their death, before revealing his character. I felt this is what my guy needed so I added a severed human head which he holds up then throws into the crowd.

I put together a video reference animatic made up of many different takes and acting options. I spent a long time acting out this shot as I kept having bright ideas and re-shooting. Unfortunately my favourite take couldn't work though as the rig was too large to get into the correct positions once I started blocking so I went back with that in mind to re-shoot again! I was also hoping to do the change in one long shot however while animated I was struggling to get the movement working and started getting frustrated. So as a bit of a cheat I broke it down into 4 quicker shots to make my life easier. I think I lucked out though as it still works with the cuts, especially the final reveal.

Here's an vid ref animatic and a below the first try as a single shot.




Once again I went back to the vid ref to try out some different options using the cuts. Now I'm just waiting for the final textures and lighting to be added and here's a couple of images of how they'll look. Changes that I might make are I think the inside should look a bit brighter and happier to help show that change but apart from that I'm happy with it.

 I had a lot of fun doing this shot it was great to do something from scratch and write my own dialogue. It was like a making a very short film! In terms of workflow and animation the video ref worked well for me on on this scene. I didn't just roto it which is tempting, instead I took the little moments I could find and pushed them as well as adding completely new actions and acting choices. I'm also speeding up a lot, the final shot was done from start to polish in a single day which makes me feel a bit better about being able to keep up with production schedules in the industry.

Now that you've seen the work gone into it here it is again. As always feedback and comments are welcomed!

Animsquad Update

It's been a while since my last post on here so here's an update of where I am. I've finished off the ice skating shot I started though unfortunately it's still waiting on an environment and some dynamics on the skirt but it's nearly there.

Anyway here's how it looks:


I'm not a huge fan of this to be honest. It was an interesting exercise but I spent far too much time on it and I didn't really make any headway it getting any performance out of the character which was my main goal when I started the course. I regret not taking the opportunity to work on proper acting shots while I was working with a Disney animator and unfortunately I feel like the shot is just a middle of the road showreel filler rather than something to be proud of.

I didn't want to make that mistake with this one, my final shot on the course. This time I picked a funny piece of audio from The Office (UK of course) and had fun acting it out. These first shots are the original ref and blackouts and after the first meeting Marlon was quite hard on me about pushing the acting a bit more.



 So for the second version I wanted to do something more interesting with the beginning to make him seem like an arse and also try to make the change half way through even stronger by making him cave with embarrassment. Here's my next ref shot, this took a a while of playing round with different acting choices:



This is so much better and I'm glad I started again rather than try to polish and tweak what I already had.



The animation didn't actually take too long for this one I started again. I would say about 6 full days and then a few hours here and there to polish and focus on eye darts etc. I'm pleased that I'm finally speeding up a bit I've been getting worried about how long things take and whether I'm ready for production schedules but i think with this shot not only have I stepped up my work flow and timing but more importantly I've done my best piece of work yet so I'm really proud of it.

As I write this I still have 1 more critique from Marlon so it's only going to get better once I get his professional feedback.

Latest Animation Showreel

Here's a reel of my latest work, still a long way from where I want it to be at the end of my final year in May but it's definitely getting there!

Student Reel January 2015 from ben wardle on Vimeo.

Animation Progress

I haven't posted for a while so I thought an update is in order. I've made some progress with all of my shots so here they are:

The first is the jungle shot, it's currently being rendered however after showing it to my mentor, who is a features animator at Framestore in London, there are some tweaks to both the camera moves and the animation. Though this is pretty close to a final shot and I really do need to ship it and move on so I can't spend too much longer on it.



I've also managed to finish my first real acting shot as part of my Animsquad course. Again there are a couple of tweaks I want to make, mainly in the arms and fingers but like my lagoon shot it really is time to move on and focus on other shots.


I have a friend outside of the course who is making and rendering the environment and his his first draft of the scene. I love what he's done so I'm really looking forward to seeing this finished now!

Showreel of my progress so far...

There's a screening this evening at the university and I've been asked to compile some of the work I've done so far this year into a reel to be screened. It's a timeline of the project and the majority of the work in this reel is never going to be used but it's interesting for me to see how it's progressed and evolved so I thought I'd share it so you can see for yourselves. It feels like I've done barely anything even though I've been working every day but so far it's all been a good learning experience and practice so I'm not too worried about the amount of finished work in there just yet.

Animsquad progress

I've signed up to the online animation school, Animsquad. My workshop tutor is Marlon Nowe. Marlon is an animator at Disney and has worked on films like Tangled, Frozen, Wreck It Wralph and Big Hero 6 so I'm really excited about working with him.

My first assignment was to choose an audio clip to animate to. I chose a clip from Modern Family that I noticed while I was watching it a couple of weeks ago. It's a reaction from the Mum, Claire as she hears some good news.

The reason I chose this particular clip is the change of emotion that the character goes through. She starts off excited then tries to reel it back and play it cool and not show her emotions. I thought this change would be great to animate as it's a change to show real life emotion and thought process within a character.

After passing the Marlon test I shot some video reference. My idea for the clip was a girl reacting to being proposed to, excited at first she tries her best to act calm. It took me a good few tries which was great as I started getting a real feel for the character towards the end. My first few takes were really stiff so it took me a while to loosen up. Here's the acting choice that I went with.



After selecting this clip I showed my reference to Marlon who approved it first time and sent me off to block it out. I tried to follow my video reference so I added a video plane to the maya scene to follow so I wasn't flipping back and forth between screen or programs.

This was my first rough block:

It was OK, there were a few of the right poses in there but it was a little stiff in places and the staging wasn't very good. With the help of my uni lecturer I tidied this one up a bit focusing first on my arcs to try and loosen the poses up and also on the staging. I used the Golden Ratio rule to help plan my shot by laying an image of the famous table over my camera then placing the characters within the beauty spots on it.

My next pass was much better. It was more pleasing on the eye due to the wonder of the Golden Ratio and now my character poses had more appeal and I felt confident enough to show Marlon my blocking.

The feedback from the meeting was fairly good overall. He liked a few of my poses which is great but gave me a few notes to work on. He suggested simplifying the beginning so the audience had time to register what was happening and also pointed out a few niggles with the body mechanics towards the end of the shot. I did manage to jot down his comments during the meeting but luckily our Skype conversation was recorded so I could go over the notes again and catch anything I missed. After addressing everything on the list here's how my shot looks at the moment.


I think it's already a big improvement so I'm keen to show him my progress and hopefully take it to the next phase on animation.

Animated Jump

This is a shot I've been working on for the jungle scene we've been making here at uni.

Since my last post the scene has changed somewhat. It became a 45 second short film when what we really wanted from the project and what we set out to do is to simply make a couple of scenes. The plan was to keep it nice and short so we can get the best quality of work out of it so in the past week or so we've scrapped our animatic and most of our shots and started again.

What we have kept though is a shot of the guy jumping across and canyon then grabbing onto a broken rope bridge and the lagoon shot where a guy jumps across rocks attempting to get the the other side.

Here is the progression of the shot in question from the earliest pre-viz to the first shot of finishes animation. When we first started working on the shot it was part of the full story so the idea was that the guy tried to get across then stopped at the end when he realized he couldn't.

We felt that this shot was a bit boring so in the next version we changed both the environment to try to get the most out of the shot.

This is basically just a blockout but I added splines to show in the weeklies we have here:

This is the point where we decided to scrap our animatic and focus just on 2 shots. As this shot didn't need to have a story line of the guy getting stuck in the middle we decided to change it up a bit and have him make it over to the other side while still keeping the off balance-ness that he has.

The first thing I did while the modeller was tweaking the environment was shoot video reference.

What I really likeed about this was the bit at the end where I get tired and slump on the floor. And I like the way that it starts off energetic then slows down as I lose my balance.

As the shot was now just a stand alone and not the shot that needed to slow down a fast paced video like before I decided it would be best to add some nee camera angles and really beef it up a bit. I added the cameras to the scene which took forever. I managed to make them look great but when I added a character it was all over the place. I found that the point of interest on each cut was changing massively as the character would dart from left of screen to right of screen etc.

So I added a pre-viz character and timed it out based on the vid ref. Now I could make sure the cameras flowed and your eyes were always looking in the same place from shot to shot. Here's how it turned out:

This was great as it not only gave the scene a more cinematic feel but it broke the shot down into 4 bite-sized chunks that I could focus on one at a time. I feel like my problem is always biting off more than I can chew and stressing myself out about not finishing a shot so now I had small ones that I could animate to polish before moving onto the next one. And here's the first finished shot:

I'm really pleased with this and the best thing is it only took a day which gives me confidence in not only my animation speed but the fact that I can get everyone done in time! As for the animation what I'm pleased with is the sense of weight and the bounce. I also like the mid air pose, I used computer game style animation as reference for how I wanted this pose and it came out nicely.

It's only 35 frames but it's the first finished 35 frames of our project and I finally feel like we're on our way with it.

Jungle Scene: Lagoon Shot

Here's my progress on the first shot to be animated on my jungle short film. This is a days work and I'm pleased with the progress it's making me relax a bit more about time. Of course there's a lot more work to be done on this shot but the bones of it are there and it's something to build on.

The first shot is the original block out:

This next shot is the the first linear pass. I've changed the time a bit from the blockout and for a linear pass I think it's a good start I'm looking forward to getting stuck into polishing it.

Rumble In The Jungle - Part 01

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on the first of 5 scenes for my demo reel. The walk cycles I've been working on have all been for this scene.

This first one is the body mechanics scene. Originally it was just an excuse to practice walk/run cycles and general body mechanics but it's turned into it's own little short film as we've progressed.

To be honest I'm not overly happy about this, the whole point of this project was to focus solely on animation and not worry about story and editing which I've been doing all week. But it's taking shape now and I do think it'll be something we can all be proud of at the end rather than just an exercise for me to practice animation.

Our deadline, for animation anyway, is the end of November which is still certainly do-able even around my job and dissert****n and then I'll be free to focus on the acting shots that I'm looking forward to doing.

Here's the first cut we did over the weekend:

It's starting to look like an entertaining little scene and the people that we've shown it to have all got the story and what's going on so that's good.

I went through it shot by shot and tried to think of ways to make it more entertaining and appealing. A lot of that will come in the animation but I also had a play around with the staging and timing.

Here's the first shot that I focused on. The screen direction is right and it makes sense but it doesn't look very appealing so I changed the angle to try and immerse the viewer in the action rather than watch is from a far. this is something I want to try and do across all the shots. It's animation after all we might as well make the most of it and run and jump with the characters rather than just watch them.



This is the new angle. It's much more exciting and the audience is much closer to the characters.



This was the next shot I played around with. It's very similar to a previous shot of another character and it doesn't cut very well the side on fixed camera shot that follows it.



So I turned it to a three quarter angle and added a quick camera wipe to try and make it look as if the camera has gone ahead of the runner to a scene ahead of him.



I started the shot that follows it with a short camera wipe so it looks like a continuation of the previous shot. I also had a little play around with the posing of the character follwoing shot to make it look like he's stuck in the middle of the lagoon rather than just cutting away half way through as it did in the last edit.

Here's the latest cut. Any feedback on how I can push the shots to make them better will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Powerful Run Cycle

This is what I've been doing today. Another run cycle for my jungle scene. This time it's with Ugg, a fierce monster type character. The run itself is on 10s rather than 8s or even 6s, I've done this because his stride is so wide I felt like he didn't need to go too fast, also as he's such a big lump I wasn't sure his character would even be able go any faster!

This is by no means finished, I still have some polishing to do especially around the upper body and I want to add some extra polish to the torso and hands.

I would love some feedback if anybody can spare the time. Thanks!

Run Fatboy Run

Here's a run cycle I created for my jungle rate race scene. This is the first run cycle I've created for a character of this shape and size and I'm pleased with the outcome. It's also I've used one of the rigs from this body mechanics rig pack and I found really good to work with. The controls are nice and simple but as you can see it also has the ability to make the belly wobble which is great and adds to the final look of this run.

Having spent a couple of days over the summer working on walk cycles for Engine House VFX and making a bit of a meal of it (it took much longer than I had hoped), it's my aim this year to get comfortable with creating fun walks in a short space of time. I kept having the issue of sliding feet when I added it to the scene so with this cycle I've made a point of trying to think logically about my keyframes and I've made sure both feet are exactly the same distance a speed apart in there movement. After that worked it was really fun just adding wobbles and head bobs etc

This took me a day and half and I feel that I could easily get that down to a day with a bit more practice, especially now that I have a formula for getting the feet right.

After sleeping on it and coming back with fresh eyes, I decided to make a couple of changes. The arms looked very boxer-ish and a bit rigid so I did a bit of running around the studio to get a bit more of a feel for it and noticed that although my arms were up in that kind of position my hands were really floppy and my shoulders were further down as if I didn't have the strength to hold them up.

So I made a couple of changes to the arms and hands and I opened the grip out to loosen him up more. I think this really worked as this latest animation works much better as a tired run cycle. I also added a bit more of a head bob for good measure.

As ever, if anybody has any thought on this or any more of my work I'd be really eager to hear from you.

The Big Pitch

Last Friday... Hold on, no the Friday before that, was the day that me and my  collogues pitched our 3rd year project idea to a panel of pros. As well as some ferice judges we also had an audience of over 100 people which was nice and nerve racking!

As none of us are actual concept artists we decided to pitch without artwork. Instead we presented mood boards, character poses and we knocked up a very quick scene to show the judges what it is we're trying to achieve.

I took a 3D character and made a walk cycle, Oly our modeller made a pier and gave it some basic textures then Matteo our VFX artist comped everything together and lit the scene. I had a bit of trouble with slidey feet but that was my fault but not making sure the feet moved the same as each other.

We're fairly happy considering it only took a couple of days but it really doesn't show our full potential so other than this blog and our pitch we won't be sharing it on showreels etc.

Here's the finished shot:


As well as this shot we also made a showreel of some of our work over the last couple of years. This was to grab the audiences attention and show the judges what we do and we're capable of.

We then went through scene by scene and showed some character poses followed by the mood boards for each scene.

The reception was fairly good from the judges I think we got our idea accross well and we got 3 green lights and an amber to go ahead with the idea. 3 beats 1 so we're good to get going on our project. Here are a couple of nice flattering shots from us pitching.

New Character Rigs: The Mery Project

I've just found this new character rig which will be perfect for one of the scenes in my demo reel. I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet but the style is great, she has a real Disney feel to her which should look great in my reel.

The rig was created by Jose Manuel Garcia Alvarez and Antonio Mendez Lora and from what I can tell they've done a fantastic job. I'm looking forward to animating this gal.

Mery Project Presentation from Mery Project on Vimeo.

Animquad: Online Animation School

I've signed up to an online animation course to work on along side my degree course. The reason I've done this is that I don't feel like I can get the most out of my animation by working on it alone. And though the lecturers on my course are all very experienced and talented none of them are feature film animators and as that is my goal I felt that I needed some extra help to achieve that standard of animation.

The online school that I chose is Animsquad. Animsquad is run by working Disney animators and supervisors and the reason I went for this one is the Disney link. I've grown up with Disney and it's always been my inspiration for animation and my dream is to one day work there myself so to work with and learn from their animators will be a fantastic experience.

A few months ago I bought this animation masterclass from Animsquad which is a live recording of Zach Parrish (head of animation for Big Hero 6) and Brent Homman (animation supervisor) animating a scene from scratch.


Animsquad Masterclass from Animsquad on Vimeo.

I still haven't even finished the 17 hours worth of footage but I've already learned so much about their process and I can't wait to put it into practice and learn even more from the tutors on the course.

The workshop I took is the intermediate which focuses on pantomime acting and it runs from November to January. We get the rigs and lectures some time in October so I can't wait to get stuck into it. 

3rd and Final Year pt_01

Judging by the recent hurricane and the daily rain showers it seems that summer is in full swing here in England. But once it's over I'll be thrust back into school to start my 3rd and final year of my degree course and my final year project will begin.

I say begin, I've actually done a fair amount of planning for this project so before it really kicks off I'd like to share with you my idea and what I've been doing recently.

Back To The Start

When I started the course I wasn't quite sure what it was that I wanted to get out of it. I knew I wanted to work in animation but I didn't know exactly what as. I was fairly confident that I wanted to focus on the ideas side, the writing, story boarding etc and I was also pretty certain that I wanted to work in 2D.

Well that changed. After getting a taste of all aspects of animation from 2D to 3D and pre-production to post I fell in love with animating. Until I started the course I had never actually animated anything, I had never experienced the joy of bringing something to life and seeing my drawings move. As well as hand drawn I was also introduced to 3D animation in Maya which, when I got over my fear of the software and interface, I decided was the path for me.

Unfortunately the course itself hasn't really catered for a 3D character animator and the majority of our projects have been design based or 2D so most of my CG animation until now has been done in my own time and if I'm honest I've been a bit slack with it. However towards the end of year 2 I started working a bit harder on my animation and I started seeing results. I'm still behind where I would like to be but I'm progressing and, last month I even landed my first 3D animation job for a games company based here in Cornwall called Anti-Matter Games. At Anti-Matter I'm working on a first person shooter game and I'm the weapons animator, so basically any time a gun moves in a game be it a reload action, a rifle stab or just a simple shot that's me making it happen!

The project

So this leads me onto my 3rd year project. As I'm fortunate enough to know exactly what I want to do, which is to become a feature film animator, and having listened to every podcast and read every article about how to get to where I want to be I decided my best option for a major project would be a demo reel. A chance for me to practise, and hone my animation. I basically want to spend every minute of my final year animating. I want to leave the course ready, or at least as ready as I can be after 3 years.

My idea was met with some disapproval from my tutors at first and I had to work hard to try and bring them round to the idea, which if I'm honest pissed me right off. I felt like I spent most of my time arguing my point rather than getting on with work and being aided by them. I don't know why they were so against it but in the end I think their attitude actually had a positive effect on me and just gave me a bit of drive to work hard and win them round (prove them wrong).

I began work on the project last year, spending many hours trawling through film clips and TV shows trying to find good sound clips to animate to. I don't know exactly how many I ended up listening to but it was in the hundreds. I decided (eventually) on 5 clips totalling 1 minute and 30 seconds worth of animation.

These are the five clips:

Audio Clip 01:

Audio Clip 02:

Audio Clip 03:

Audio Clip 04:

Audio Clip 05:

These aren't my original 5 clips, over the last month or so I have chopped and changed a bit in what I'm trying to achieve. This is partly because I can never make up my mind and I over think things but mainly because of things that I have read and heard about what people look for in a reel. I've tried to choose clips that not only have subtext and give the audience a chance to see a character have to think but also clips that take the characters on a journey. I've also tried to find clips with comedy. I love comedy and I want my animation to have a comedic element. Although the main reason behind my choice of clips is that these are the kind of clips that I not only want to animate to, but want to see myself.

No I in Team

As my goal is to spend the whole of my final year animating I would have no time to make my shots look pretty. I don't want to spend my time modelling or lighting my scenes so I'm teaming up with 2 fellow students who have similar ambitions to me for this project as in they want to focus on specific jobs and finish them to the highest possible standard for their reels. On board is Oly, who is interested in modelling and texturing and Matteo who wants to focus on effects, lighting and rendering. Together we hope to achieve 5 professional looking scenes.

So far we have only met a few times to nail down the plan so there isn't much to show yet. But what we've decided on is:

Audio Clip 01: This is set on a deserted dock late at night, a big scary zombie jumps out on a lone sailor and the sailor tries to talk himself out of trouble.

Audio Clip 02: This will be set underwater in a kind of creature comforts documentary style. The character talking is a great white shark and he discusses his favourite foods to an interviewer off screen.

Audio Clip 03: This scene takes place deep in the jungle. An explorer tries to keep his cool in front of his young attractive assistant.

Audio Clip 04: A man tries to seduce a woman he meets in a library but it doesn't take much for her to talk him out of it. Much to her dismay.

Audio Clip 05: This is set in deepest darkest hell as Satan tries to get himself a place in Heaven.

As I said, still early days but we're all excited to get working on this. Apologies for all the words. Hopefully my next update will have some artwork and storyboards.