11 Second - How I made my animation

When creating an animation, the rigs to use are proven to be a major decision for the animator to make, since he'll be dealing with them all at all times during this process. It's a complete system whose performance and efficiency will determine the outcome of the animator's work. In this case I chose the Morpheus Rig, due to its fame and large community of users since I thought that, being a beginner, I'd be better to learn having lots of available resources. The 11 Second Club forums were very helpful as well and I'd recommend them to any kind of animator. However, of course, I encountered some problems in Morpheus. One of them was due to its use of IK Handles, which don't make it easy to move the elbow while maintaining the arm's angle. This caused me a lot of trouble, especially in the beginning and whenever I tried to rotate the wrist, since both the arm and the wrist moved. This was painful to work around, and that's why the first movements of the Michael character aren't that smooth. In my defence I'll say that I learnt to control this better with time, you can actually notice later in the animation. I'm definitely taking special thought of how a rig's arms move in the future when making a rig or in choosing one. Setting the cameras proved to be a bit of a struggle at first, since I'd never used them before. A couple of YouTube tutorials helped me grasp their behaviour. The fact that cameras ended up being just another object with attributes within the animation made it easy for me to use them, since I just had to animate them as if they were any other part of it. I didn't choose to make them "float" around changing their perspective since the animation was very short and also it wouldn't benefit of dynamic cameras, so the framing is very static. To animate eyebrows, eyelids and other symmetric parts, only one graph had to be made, even if those parts were handled by more than one controllers. I simply had to focus in the animation of one of them, and then select the entire graph or parts of it and paste it on the second part's graph window. Otherwise, parts that should move the same way would have visible irregularities and the animation would be much less smooth and more time-consuming.

11 Second Animation - Video: Final Animation

11 Second Animation: Video referencing

In one of my previous posts I explained the relevance for the animator of video referencing. This time, the task was to film myself acting the scenes of my animation.

11 Second Animation: Animatics

By creating an animatic we can have a first look of how our animation is going to end up. In this process, soundtrack and storyboard are put together in sync for the first time, so of course, to do this we need to have both of them available.

11 Second Animation: Storyboard

Once a script is finished, the next step in animation design is the storyboard.

Video referencing

Animators should have good knowledge of how the human body moves so their future animations are realistic. One good method to learn how to animate a scene is filming it with real actors or looking up video references. These give the animator a good idea of how body language and gestures should work in an animation.

11 Second Animation: Script

This semester's big project consists on a eleven second animation, for which we had to search a soundtrack. I chose a little scene from an Arrested Development episode which I find quite funny, so this is the script that I made out of it.