.... just kidding!

Shock, the last videos had nothing to do with the animation I sent to render.

So since our short is drastically different from the time that Grissom's brother composed the score, the music no longer works, therefore I no longer have a beat to match. So while I always animated as if the music were the same, when it came down to it, it was more important to have a strong animation than sync to the music. So, I ended up going through the scene section by section by segmenting out major movements and then scaling the keys to be longer in some parts and shorter than others... I'm not really sure if this is a legit technique but I was thinking about a waltz tempo... just a lot of variations of slows and quicks. I also completely reanimated the breasts and Sarah Grissom and I cleaned up her arms and hands. Voilà:

scene 10 animation from Romina Barrett on Vimeo.

I may be composing/recording a piano arrangement to match our short once the shots are compiled, which is exciting! I love making music.

Process and Progress

I've more or less finished the dance sequence for Chance of Rain.. one of them, anyway. There is still some funkiness going on with her arms and breasts, but Sarah Grissom, our team lead, has a fix for it so I'm not too concerned about that. Here is my process:

Scene 10 Lower Body from Romina Barrett on Vimeo.

After blocking in (see earlier post), I hid the entire upper body and worked just with her gut, legs and feet. Even without touching the keys I made with the rest of her, refining this made the whole thing look better and it was cool to try to get some personality out of just her hips.

Scene 10 Upper Body from Romina Barrett on Vimeo.

Once I felt the lower body was strong by itself, I unhid her upper body but kept the arms hidden to keep them out of the way. Because of the work I'd done with the gut, it was pretty easy to fix up her spine and neck.

Scene 10 from Romina Barrett on Vimeo.

And, here is the final as it stands now. Once again, there's still issues with her arms and breasts but I'm pretty pleased with everything else. We're starting the compiling of animation, environment and effects tomorrow and then sending it off to the render farm! It's very exciting to see this finally start to come together.

Bouncing Ball and Chance of Rain

Career Day was today and it was great! Got a lot of good feedback from a lot of cool people.

I found this bouncing ball test I did freshmen year when we focused on 2D animation and it makes me want to go back to the light tables.



Also, here is an updated version of one of the scenes from Chance of Rain. We had to go back and completely redo the rig, thus losing all the animation I had done... But it's alright really, because I have a better understanding of Fatima now than I had previously. This video is of the blockin stage of simple pose-to-pose.

Scene 10 Blockin from Romina Barrett on Vimeo.

Chance of Rain First Pass

So, here is the compilation of shots I'm doing for Chance of Rain. This is all super rough first pass of blocking in. The way I went about it is using the mocap data for timing of major poses, matching the framecount to my thumbnails, and then roughing my poses in 3D entirely based on thumbs and video ref and the mocap just for placement.

We ran into some weird stuff going on with the rig in the arms since hand rotation and arm rotation are the same controller right now... So when that's fixed it won't be as goofy looking as it does now. And I won't lose my keys, which is excellent.

Anyway, this is all super rough and I still have about 40 frames left at the end of the last shot but I like where it's going. I didn't touch the boob controllers at all (even the close up of them... John Mark did a great job rigging them), nor the fingers or hair or face morphs so there will be a lot of new things added for the next pass. All in all I'm pretty pleased with where it is right now.

ALSO I LOVE LOST.

Chance of Rain Dance First Pass from Romina Barrett on Vimeo.

Chance of Rain Dance Thumbnails

Entering my final semester of school has been pretty intense. I'm animating, or doing something related to animation, about 10 hours a day in addition to actual classes, a part-time job and an active social life. Despite my ridiculous insomnia, it's actually been a lot of fun.

For the past week, whenever I'm not studying sociology and secretly looking for Lost clues, I've been blocking in my scenes for Chance of Rain. This has insofar entailed going frame by frame through the video reference, re-acting things out for myself to answer any questions it doesn't clearly answer, and thumbnailing different ideas for poses and progressions.

Here are a few pages of thumbnails:

I've skipped the thumbnailing process before and it didn't end well, and I'm already glad I took the time to do this. Little things like realizing where the weight goes and how it moves, silhouette explorations, and identifying leading edges are so much faster to solve in a 20 second sketch versus spending hours exploring by moving controllers around in 3D.

Another thing that's really nice is that, by thumbnailing major poses and inbetweens, I've really quickly animated a movement a few times before even going into 3D, so when I do I already have a solid idea of where I'm going.

At this point I'm almost done blocking in my three dance scenes. Tomorrow's my deadline so I'm chugchugchuggin them out, but I feel good about where I'm at.

I'll do a better job of keeping this blog updated. Things are exciting right now.

Chance of Rain Choreography

For my senior project, I am an animator on team Acid Rainbow. Our short, Chance of Rain, features an overly obese, Gaia-archetype woman named Fatima performing an acid rain dance to purge a post apocalyptic, pollution ruined world.

As an animator and dancer of several years, I was responsible for choreographing the dance. It took some time; we of course did a lot of research, shot tons of video reference and even visited a motion capture studio in order to provide ourselves with more extensive reference and option to do a pseudo rotoscope (although, to be clear, we are not using the motion capture data to animate the rig for us in any way). Everyone is warning us about the immense challenge of animating a dance sequence and we are taking every concern to heart. In any case, I'm excited that I have the opportunity to take such a risk as a student and learn from what ever lessons lay ahead before I entire the professional world, and it is also rewarding to have two passions of my life come together so beautifully when I had only associated one with the other as merely similar in principle.

The following is an early video we shot of the choreography to send to Kamal Siegal (a professor at DigiPen and owner of Digital Double, the mocap studio). It does NOT represent the shots we'll be using; it was just to address any possible concerns about the mocap rig capturing the movement. It went well. The song was composed and produced by Sarah Grissom (team lead) and her brother, Tommy Grissom. Interspersed with the footage are storyboards of the environment shots, all of which was done by Sarah.

Chance of Rain Choreography from Romina Barrett on Vimeo.

Visit Sarah Grissom's blog here.

The choreography itself has since undergone revisions, but most of it is the same. Choreographing is by no means my forté, but the response was favorable and working forward has gone smoothly. Overall it's been a pretty enjoyable experience.