Animation Update: Wall Dismount

A little test I did waaayyy back in June in lunchtimes and between projects.

Hope you enjoy.

So life!

Hi all! Wow, it's been a while hasn't it? Sorry for not keeping everything up to date, it's just been such a huge year! A FANTASTIC HUGE YEAR.

Summer 2014

 Where do I begin? So I graduated from University of South Wales last year, had an amazing time there, and met so many animation geeks like me.

 Then I worked in the summer as an animation workshop assistant, with Turnip Starfish, as part of First Campus. They ran a course for kids aged 10-18, and I had the inspiring opportunity to work with these young people on their films. You can check out their work here:

Also you should check out their channel for other goodies, like how to draw Elsa, and Showreels from previous summer school years.


Then I had a fantastic opportunity to join Aardman for work experience for two weeks. I worked with Matthew Rees during this time, and saw many exciting projects in their various stages of production. It was amazing! I have a shot that I was working on there, however i'm currently retopologising a prop, as it's far too dense for my computer to handle! I shall write up more about this at a later date I promise!
But it gets better
As of October last year, I became a Junior animator at Oysterworld!!

I feel like the luckiest person, I still don't know how to process that, haha! It has been an indescribable experience. I get to work every day doing what I love, with truly inspirational people. They're all so talented, and I cannot wait to show you what I've had the opportunity to work on.

I've been so fortunate the past year, it might not come across how truly thankful I am of it, seeming the small paragraphs, but that's because I don't know how to describe it to you... How do you go about describing an experience like this. I've wanted to do this since I was a child, and now I am, and it leaves me speechless. Which, if you know me, is quite an amazing feat.

I'll update you with more... sooner this time... haha! As a side note.. I really need to update the colour scheme of this blog don't I?!

Hope all is well with you readers,

Claire

From Start to Finish - PMF Director

Hi All,

For my dissertation this year, for which I scored a high 2:1 - YEY, I studied the 12 principles of animation. More specifically my dissertation looked into the 12 principles and how they are applied differently to the different mediums. Eventually the conclusion was CG uses motion blur to aid in quick movement that is often seen in 2D animated films, however, like 2D, it also uses 'smear' frames; where one segment will stay with the beginning, or hit the end, of a big movement. This technique causes huge extremes in certain part of the body...

So how did this work with this piece:
Obviously I ended up using ARNOLD's motion blur features, however I also used some features on the malcolm rig (which is insanely flexible), to stretch out some features to aid the blur. In this piece, fingers were elongated, arms bent and stretched, and the head sevaerly stretched until it didn't really look like a head anymore!

Obviously I will be experimenting with the technique in future animated pieces, including the full film of this.

Hope you enjoy!

Oh yeah! That's me, and that's my dialogue too...

See you soon,
Claire

Current Showreel: May 2014

Will give  a  better blog update soon!
In the mean time please check out my new showreel:

See you soon,

Claire Hodges

Pigs May Fly: Poster Time

(Caution they are CMYK)

Some posters I made for Uni to promote my work.

Sorry for not posting much lately! My major deadline is Friday and well... There's so much to do!!

See ya soon,

Claire

Ffresh 2014 award for best Game/Interactive goes to!!

So you know last year... Around about this time, you saw the guy on here with the spade staff and the hood. He was part of Form Wars, a project directed by Conor Moloney and Pavel Tsihhotski. I had the amazing chance of animating one of the kings on the game, the one leading the nature fraction.

So all that, and we won a Ffresh award for it! How fantastic! Will get a photo up of us with the trophy as soon as I get one. In the mean time take a look at the game:

See you soon,

Claire

BFX Storyboards: Post hand-in submission

I recently teamed up with a couple of others to submit an entry for BFX, as everything is hosted... and I have not managed to post some storyboards for a while, I thought I would post them here.

It's Sinbad and the Roc... btw...

See you later,

Claire

PMF: Producer

(You should be able to HD this...)

So I had to reduce the time for PMF... Because we're only meant to do 20seconds of animation for each project, and the lecturers liked this segment, which was fine for me.
The whole point of this exercise was to prove that I could animate a character who reacts to things being said for 20 seconds... In a subtle way... this was the point. This was artistic intent as, if you've seen the other vids, the Director is incredibly cartoony and hyper-active!
This was a lot of fun to do, as I am not a serious, or subtle person (I am the Director).. well apart from when I have to be...
Anyway! Lavs will be up next week for laughs!
Morpheus @ Josh Burton

See you later,
Claire

What have I been up to?

RIGGING!!!
Which is insanely fun as I am applying some MEL script I have been learning, (incredibly basic, mostly variable naming then recalling and stuff.) But really cool, have more or less done a Rig in two weeks... which would've taken me four last year! It's also more robust!!

Anyway, deadline is approaching, so I thought I would briefly update.

So while I was completing other pieces, I was communicating with Pierre Laffoux, an amazing ex-grad of Glamorgan, who made just about the most bulky, broad and well built character I had seen that year! Obviously I wanted to rig it! Please check out his website.

We both communicated to each other ways to improve the mesh for better deformation, which was a learning curve for both of us, as I am not known for modelling and Pierre seemed to enjoy what I did know.

Just a few notes I sent to him after one model evaluation session!

I have now got a fantastic model to rig, and I hope my Rigging skills are up to the standards of his modelling!!

See you later,

Claire

Website is ONLINE

Hi all,
In prep for FMX, and because I needed it done anyway, I have completed my website!

Any constructive criticism would be loved - what draws your eye, what repels it? Is it warm and inviting, or just plain chaotic?! Would love to know.

Website is HERE

Also my latest showreel is up and active, so take a look!

Also... that lady's voice? Yeah... That's mine!


See you soon,

Claire

Practical Process: WIP - Editing

Hi all,

Thought I would add some more progress shots of my PMF project.. This time of the other character, she's a director, but I need more props to show that... Anyone got any recommendations?

A new part of my process is to take my latest playblast (When I can't think of anything else to do to it, but it doesn't feel right), and draw over it in photoshop... This helps me produce more exaggerated shapes, follow lines of action easier... and just generally have more fun!

Ta for listening,

Claire

Deer animation

Hi all,
I don't believe I posted that deer sting I was on about... So here you go (please view in HQ!):

I was in charge of (in Pipeline order): Research, story idea, pose ideas, storyboarding, being a camera woman, deleting rolling shutter, working as a team to matchmove, Rigging, Animating, Rendering and post production - including colour correction, roto and shadow correction!

Thanks for visiting,

Claire 

Find me at FMX

Hi all,

I'm going to FMX next week with some new business cards, my portfolio and a sketchbook. If any of you are going... I'll probably search you out! However I'm hosting the university of South Wales stand at 12 on Wednesday, and would love any company I could get - I promise to be a good conversationalist, especially about animation!

I'm very excited by all the companies that are attending the conference, and am looking forward to all the talks!

Ta for now,

Claire

PMF - Producer Dialogue

So much for those sketches the other day right? Sorry, I had a couple of deadlines to attend to, but most of its out of the way now, so I get to host more stuff for you guys now! Including this:

My current version of the Pigs may fly lipsync... I'm a bit worried because I am only meant to be doing 20 seconds for each topic.... HMMMM... Oh well!
Hope you guys enjoy,
Any feedback would be appreciated!
See you soon,
Claire

Industry Indents: MPC

MPC is another amazing VFX company based in London, Vancouver, Montréal, Los Angeles, New York, Amsterdam, Bangalore and Mexico City. With these many facilities it will come as no surprise that they produce such a great volume of fantastic visuals.

MPC has worked on Advertisements and film, made possible by a team of talented and enthusiastic artists. Examples of their amazing hard work can be see below:

So.. why does this inspire me? Well, how can such awe creating team work not inspire a person in this medium?

More importantly when did this company become inspiring to me? On Feb 27th this year, I attended a VFX masterclass  presented by MPC's Adam Davis, on the VFX and crowd simulation in World War-Z. Davis described to us the difficult use of motion capture data, caused by the awkward twists a half dead zombie makes while grasping for the next host; well... the guy mimicking the zombie at any rate. The studio brought in people who could twist their extremities in such ways, the motion capture data was getting confused and glitched. Davis also described the hero animation system MPC made up for both World war-Z and Lone Ranger. Their VFX breakdowns for world war-Z can be seen below:

MPC has a great diversity in the realistic animation they produce, with many different subjects, in both advertising and feature films, has made me aspire to produce such diversity in my work. They have character, creature and object animation in their commercial reel alone, and I should aim to have the same in mine! Hopefully I will have a diverse, realistic, and dynamic showreel for VFX by the end of summer...

Thanks again,

See you soon,

Claire

Industry Indent: TRIXTER

Established in 1998, TRIXTER has worked towards creating stunning character animation and visual effects for television, commercials and feature films. In its early days, TRIXTER specialized in creating CG characters with powerful and emotive character animation. Recently though TRIXTER has become know for its visual effects pieces, which includes, but is not limited to, Captain America: Winter Soldier, X-men: First Class and Iron Man 3.

As I'm keeping an open mind with regards to the style of animation I want to head into, cartoony, realistic, etc, (I find it important to learn all of them if I am honest), animation used in visual effects certainly holds a bewitching quality. The best kind of visual effects will go unnoticed to most viewers, and I will be honest in scenes, such as the iron man fight scene above, its becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between real props and digital ones. I would love to one day help making these illusions, especially object animations, despite having only bouncing balls as object animations so far.

 TRIXTER is based in Berlin, Munich & Los Angeles, and as I am based in Europe and know enough conversational German, I would like to think I could adapt to the whereabouts...

TRIXTER creates stunning animation that matches live-action footage, for instance the shield in Captain America, as well as its own key-framed animation for realistic creatures,  such as the wolves in wolf's blood. Studying the animation produced by TRIXTER will help my understanding of  how to create realistic footage of animals, the acceleration and weight on objects. Take a look at more of their recent work in this showreel below:

Now to go and study!

See you later,
Claire

Industry Indent: Blue Zoo

Blue zoo is a multi-BAFTA winning animation company, who produce:

• Commercials
• series
• Idents
• Development trailers
• and many other types of animation (Check out their styles here)

I first became interested in Blue Zoo when they visited the USW in 2013, however my interest spiked with the Blue Zoo Christmas short, Xmas 2013.

Their use of warm-cool colour contrast and arcs for character movement fascinated me; especially the squirrel character (who I do believe is a Jackalope?!?!), who floated believably. More on this short in a bit... Blue Zoo has won 2 British Animation awards for their series 'Those Scurvy Rascals' and won a BAFTA in 2012 for 'Best independent Production Company'. The different style used within the studio is what makes Blue Zoo so appealing to me, from 'Lessons in the force' to their animal planet stings, their range of styles shows their adaptability in their work. I personally love their pieces for stings and commercials the most, mainly because of this diversity. Most of these feature a hand made look, rather like the Xmas 2013 short, in which you can feel the artist's influence and hand in the pieces. Even shiny pieces like the Rugby League World Cup 2013, stings, you can see the thought behind the style used, and the simplistic shapes used for the characters only highlights their animation teams' ability.

Their diversity in animation styles, not just textual, is my main pull to this company. As a student now working to diversify my showreel for multiple styles, studying Blue Zoo's studio pieces is proving integral for my studies.

Looking forward to seeing way more from them soon!
See you later,
Claire

Background textures and scene setup - Office

So you guys do not know about my projects for university as of yet, however I want to show you some of my render tests I have been making for my personal project... As well as texutres... Turns out I'm going down a generalist route, I only need to add modelling to the CV!

Following images copyright details:

Morpheus rig, suit,

Following came with no textures: Darts and Dart board, Clock, Chair, Desk, iMac, Desk Caddy.

Room Texture

City texture

Textures made in photoshop for this project include the 2D textures on the walls (inspired by 101 dalmatians backgrounds), and the background cityscape. The city was deliberately coloured to contrast the blue cool colours inside the office. Blue being the character's colour scheme, as he is a very calm, collected character.

Glass test render

Final room render

I also installed large areas of glass into the walls of the room to allow better lighting of the character.

CG assets, like the dart board, originally came in untextured, texturing selected faces of the object quickly rectified this problem. Tacks and paper were made and textured by myself as well.

Final Desk render, came out better than I thought, the 2D city image being reflected nicely in the table surface added to the texture of the background I think!

Now to progress to animation!!!

See you soon,

Claire

Production Pipeline : Pre-Production

A third year university collaboration project, working with Modeller Beks Rootes (link for her work to come), we were tasked to make a short sting for a TV studio. This involved making the characters, background, story, basically the whole sha-bang of production from scratch.

As the animator/TD (technical director) of this project, for preproduction I created character concepts, ideas for poses, but most importantly the story itself. 

We originally looked towards an E4 sting, as most projects worked to the E4 criteria, but as the look evolved we aimed for a company where we could explore cute more. We kept in mind the modeller's sculpting criteria for her brief, so the simplistic designs were scrapped.

 If I am honest here, maybe one of these poses originated from a deer? Most came from pouncing cats and dogs, hence why in some pictures I am struggling with proportions... although back flexibility (or lack of) was kept in mind while making anatomy adaptations.

However thumbnails above did come from deers...

This sequence was turned into an animatic.

As a TD I was in charge of creating a rig for this project as well. This was a basic rig diagram I created for reference in production.

Soon to come - The sting itself!
The process of production as well....

Update on that Gallop animation from yesterday... Getting there... I think.