Animating at "A Dream"

In January and February us animators had a break from our own bachelor films, when we were send to animate on the final short films by the animation directors at the National Filmschool of Denmark. I animated at the short, "En drøm" (A Dream). In the course of eight weeks I made this:

The film is directed by Malte Pedersson, the backgrounds and character designs were made by Flemming Schmidt. Keld Nissen from my class animated the waiter in the first shot, and Ditte Frandsen inbetweened the shots where the woman has entered the taxi and the taxi driver starts the car. It seems to becoming quite a good film, so i recommend keeping your eyes peeled for it when it is due at June.

Trailer Project

Ever since the start of this semester our neighbor class "Computer Graphic Artist" has been working on the TRAILER PROJECT! Divided into seven groups, they've each gotten an old movie which they then have had to make a trailer of, with new design. In week 47 and 48 my class was then supposed to animate the their trailers, based on their animatics using their rigged models.
The CGA trailer I animated on, was based on the western "High Noon" now set in a caveman-like ancient evironment. Furthermore our trailer was a combination of 2d and 3d animation. I was in group with the CGA's Tommy, Tanja and Simon and Caroline, Carmen and Keld from my class.
Like the CGA's had divided roles, we should also choose a animation supervisor in our group. We divided it so that Caroline took care of all the paperwork and schedules, while I supervised the practical animation, which was alot of fun :) We also had Alex Williams as a general supervisor for the whole class.
I animated the following shots:


Everything was then colored, and the CGA's spend week 49 rendering everything. The final trailer looks like this:

I think the sum of all parts really came together in the end, I'm very happy about the done trailer :)
The other six trailers also turned out quite well. Take a stroll around on my classmates blogs and you'll see.

Scraps From Last Year

I'm starting at second year of the character animator line at the Animation Workshop now, hence these two animations from last year will probably be the last in 2d for some time:





Also, in week 21 we had colour class with Lawrence. Sadly, it was the last of his classes, but what a class! We used acrylic paint, but only warm blue, cold blue, warm red, cold red, warm yellow, cold yellow and white - everything necessary to create any colour nuance. The theory was gold! We learned everything, light, shadow, how colour mix, how to create long strips of nuances on the palette etc etc... We made several exercises, the last one involved creating colour thumbs for a composition sketched by ourselves, theme: monsterattack in the antique. Here's my thumb:
And here is the colour thumbs:
...Doesn't exactly match the sketch, but the improvement from the first to the last should be obvious. The final thumb took me less than an hour to create, and I had quite fun with it.

CA 09's Animation Jam

Week 17 and 18... Animation Jam. Two rough weeks where we in groups of 3 should make a 30 second long movie (credits and title doesn't count). It wasn't the whole school with foreign directors that was making movies this time, but just my class supervised by Julia Bracegirdle. This meant alot of work and alot of discussion in the group about everything from overall plot to the placement of flowers. So it was great when the movie was done! I was in group with Stine Frandsen and Adam Boklund and we made the movie "The Slughter."

Julia had made some bags from which we should pick the stylistic theme, an emotion and a random word. We ended up with the theme, "Disney 1928-1932 combined with Gary Baseman," the emotion "fear" and the random word "wig." Gary Baseman is a modern artist which can't quite be explained, but his pictures can be seen here: http://garybaseman.com/
Disney from 1928-1932 is basically all the black and white shorts with Mickey Mouse.
We choose to let the Disney shorts be the inspiration for the animation, while the style of the design was taken entirely from Gary Baseman. These choices enabled us to focus on funny animations and interesting background compositions rather than realism, in other words it gave us alot of creative freedom.
We all worked on the characterdesign. I made these sketches:

After discussing the different ideas for the design we devided the characters, so that Adam made the final design for the old lady, Stine made the designs for the slugs and I made the design for the final monster.
As for the animation then I animated, cleaned and coloured the slug's running scene, the scene were it dodges salt and the final monster scene.
Otherwise I had fun making the style for the backgrounds. We had devided the backgrounds into tinyworld backgrounds, medium world backgrounds and huge world backgrounds (Though the last one was just a sky with clouds). I made the very first background in the movie, and the mediumworld background with the floating trees and the windmills. I also made a good part of the simple bacgrounds that was just colour.


The final film:

Slughter from Stine Agerskov Frandsen on Vimeo.

Dancing Hippos and Flying Mountaineers

In week 14 the Danish animator Christian Kuntz came to teach us dance animation for the week. After spending weeks trying to make animation with uneven and interesting pace, and lots of overlapping actions - having to animate strictly within a beat that should be hit with the movement was a challenge.
I choose the hippo from Fantasia and the beginning of the Michael Jackson song "Smooth Criminal." I once worked on a musictheater where we put up the stage for a so-called "Michael Jackson" ballet. I thought it was weird back then, but now that I've tried to make a hippo dance ballet to one of his songs, I can kinda see the idea.

Dance of the Hippo from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Ten seconds of animation was taking things a bit too far, so not everything is animated.

Christian Kuntz is a part of the four-man company "framebender," you can see some of their stuff here: http://www.framebender.dk/

In order to expand our capacities to make our own films, we spend week 15 being introduced to the editing program Adobe Aftereffects having Henrik B Clausen as a teacher. We did some small exercises and finally got the assignment to create something that moves really fast. Out of these two pictures:
http://www.canadasmountains.com/Java/columbola_pano.jpg
http://dhpersonal.com/images/desktops/2009-07-08pano.jpg
and photoshop and aftereffects I made this:

Untitled from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

TVPaint animation with Fabian

After the winterbreak in week 7 our lighttables and pencils were exchanged with computerscreens and tablets, so that we may animate on computer - still in 2D, we draw in the program TVPaint.
It fell upon the shoulders of Fabian Erlinghauser to introduce us to the program and more advanced animation during week 8 to 12. Fabian has among things supervised the animation in the Oscar nominated 2D feature "The Secret of Kells." I think Fabian left a really good impression on the class, and it seems we left quite a good impression on him aswell!

Week 8 was a relaxed getting-to-know-the-program week. I made a bunch of animations, some of the more interesting was these two:

Untitled from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Hogarth Take from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

The last upper animation was a so-called "take," with Hogarth from "The Iron Giant."

The assignment for week 9 was to let our character of choice be tempted by a valuable item, ponder upon wether he should take it, but leave it in the end. I learned a lot that week - mostly by my mistakes! I choose Roger from 101 Dalmations. While the initial key poses I did were fine, having Roger freeze into them killed the acting and made him look more like a posing model.

Untitled from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

So I went into week 10 determined to make something better than the Roger animation. The assignment was a setting where our character was sitting alone on a date, realising that she is not going to come! I choose Bernard as my character:

Bernard's Miserable Date from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Its a few too many things that's happening, but I think the animation is much more lively than the week before.

In week 11 it was time to make our characters speak. We could choose between two soundbits, which our animation then should centre around. My character was Sinbad from the dreamworks movie, and the soundbit is the voice of Gandalf:

Foolshope from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Its rather amazing how much more real the animation becomes, once it breaks the silence and actually says something. Again, a bit too many things is happening - and how should anyone know that its supposed to be a cookie jar he is holding?! But I like the animation.

The last week was about monologue, meaning we had to do two characters. I thought I was beginning to get a rather good idea of animation, I just put too many things into them, so I wanted to make something where I only tried to tell one or two things, rather than tree, four or five! I choose Kerchak and Kala from Tarzan:

Wanna toke? from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Four seconds with two characters was a bit much, so the animation is in a bit of an unfinished state. I think its some of the best I've done though, so I might finish it sometime.

All in all, it was five quite good weeks. I learned a lot, especially on the acting part of things.

Finally I will recommend a visit to http://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/ - the place Fabian works. They got some really neat stuff going on with their experimentation of styles, especially the backgrounds in the short "Old Fangs" are very beautiful and not something I've seen before.

Popsickle Add, Midtyear Exam and Animation Jam

In week 4 we had storyboard with Tod Polson (www.todpolsonart.blogspot.com) who has been affiliated with the school for a good amount of years, especiallly helping out at the 3rd year bachelor films.
At first we were to make a 30 second animatic (or 25 since the last 5 should be reserved for a logo) for a Popsickle commercial, based on some work Tod already had done: http://todpolsonart.blogspot.com/2010/02/space-sicle.html
I made mine with Nicholaj and it ended up like this:



We made a another board of mastershots over our characters from "taste," but it seems the drawings is lost for the moment being..

In week 5 we had a midyear test exam, which basically just meant a week of animation without teacher. The assignment was to make a 5 second animation with the pink panther standing up and try to open a door without luck. The background was given to us.

Pink Panther Midyear Exam Animation from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Week 6... Now that was something. The school had a visit from 6 different directors which were to make 2 shorts each, with a group consisting of both the first and second year character animators and computer graphic artists. All the movies can be seen here http://animwork.dk/en/news.asp?AjrDcmntId=451
I was on Pritt Tender's movie. Basically he just threw out some ideas, designs and overall story, and then let us create all the fun and weird stuff that were going to happen and the ending. The two movies were to be connected to one, but otherwise we mostly worked in two groups, both using the first day to come up with things and make a storyboard and then the rest of the week to animate. The movie ended up as this:



I created the last scene. Since us 1st years hadn't been taught Tv Paint at that point, I created my scene on paper and then two second year students cleaned it up in Tv Paint. I think it has a certain charm in rough, so I'll post it as I made it aswell:

Scene 110 from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Basically I thought this should be a contrast to the rest of the movie - a moment of a certain grace coming out of - and into a rather mad and surreal movie. If we've had two weeks I would have made it at least 15 seconds, I think its hard for the viewer to catch all the small ideas that was in it in just 10 seconds.

Week 1 and 3 - Clean Up and Inbetweening

In week 1 and 2 the class was split up, one class would have clean up the other character design. We would then switch in week 2. In week 3 We had Inbetweening. I'm gonna talk about the characterdesign week in another (big) post. As for now, I can hardly call the work done in week 1 and 3 my own. Let me explain:
We had Clean Up with Lee Huxley who gave us about 13-14 frames from a short scene from the movie "An American Tale: Fievel Goes West." It was the key frames/breakdowns done by the animator, so we should clean them up - make one consistent line with a technical led pen, following the looser drawing made by the animator. Not very creative, not really my thing.



In the inbetweening week we were lucky to have Uri again. This time we got 11 frames from the movie "Balto" which was to be inbetweened with 13 frames. It was a bit more creative than clean up, but again it can't be called my animation:



We we're alsp supposed to make four poses with the character before the inbetweening:


Its supposed to be: Surprised, the conqueror, fleeing, and in love...

Week 46 and 49 - Goofy Animation with Meelis

In week 46 and 49 we had animationlessons with Meelis Arulepp, an animator from Estonia who among other things has animated on Asterix and the Vikings. We had animations exercises with Goofy as a model. In week 46 we had to make him lift a ball that should look as heavy as possible and in week 49 we had to make him look drunk.



The bouncing balls principles really shines through in these exercises: threating Goofy's stomach and head as simple balls really gives you a point to direct everything out from in these exercises, ecpecially the arcs becomes a play.



I really planned the last animation out very strictly, ironicly it is the last 10 frames wich I did very fast an loosely that is the best. But of course, you can't plan the loose kind of fluency: less planning, more fast pased sketching next time.

(note Goofy is owned my Disney)

Week 39, 40 and 41 Animations

Week 39 was the last week with Uri. Since friday should be a fun day, we got that's week assigment early: Animate a flour sack after a storyboard by Uri. I missed the inbetweening in the two middle scenes, so I had to settle with this:



As mentoined, friday should be a fun day and it was indeed! We watched pixilation movies before figuring out the plot for our own pixilation movie in groups. Then we shot it in 3 hours. Except for my hand you'll see in the movie, I did my best to function as the director - otherwise the credit goes to Sandra, Thomas, Christoffer and Atli.

The Pillow Hunt from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Since the animation was done fast, went fast and is without sound I figured the plot might be quite hard to catch, so to make the story (and a second view of the movie) a bit more interesting, let me tell it!
A girl sits uncomtable at a chair and decides to find something more comforting. She encounters a magic hat that gives her a magic turtle-compass. She fellows and finds a freezing guy, aids him and befriends him. After some travel they encounter an evil wizard! The friend with the scarf attacks, but the wizard curses his leg and forces him away, then teleports behind the girl, hits her, teleports and takes the hat... The beats him, he falls, and turns into a pillow - The End

In week 40 and 41 we had a teacher from MarkFilm (http://markfilm.dk) named Anders Nejsum to teach us basic walk. Walks are rather technical so at the first week we ended up doing a simple standard walk:



In the second week, we needed to come up with our own walk. I decided to go for a sneaky walk:


The Pink Panther is the property of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

First Animations

For the last 3 weeks I've been thaught basic animation at the school by Uri Kranot - an independent filmmaker/animator from Isreal. (You can see more about him at his site www.tindrumanimation.com). It has mostly been fun, interesting and very time consuming to finally touch what my education is all about. In the first week, apart from bouncing ball and pendulum exercises, each student made their own "short" which was to be "10 seconds long and about a frog and a fly." I made this:



In the second week we continued with the wave and follow through principles ending up each making our own short about a ball with a tail. The ball was to enter the frame joyfully, remember something, exit and come back in. Note that the ball doesn't jump in fear in the middle of my animation, but because it came to think of something it should get. Ofcourse that should had been clear in the animation.