What have i been up to?

Well, i've managed to complete all of the animation for Joseph! YAY!

Over 3 mins of animation which has worked out very well considering my time constraints.

Ritchie and i will still work on our film adding wonderful music etc. But up until now this is what i have learned and achieved by working on this dream of a film with my buddy Ritchie:

Artist:

Concept drawing of the characters
Model Sheets
Character Sheets
Coloured Character Sheets
Filmic Language (Thank you Mike Hirsh!)
2D Animatic

Technical:

Rigging - Adjusting joints and bones on Ritchies rig making the movement of the character more manageable and realistic, also adding more controls/handles so customising the rig to my preferences.
I learnt how to create set driven keys allowing me to create easy to use finger controls, i also adapted my set driven keys by using the different blend shapes for Josephs face and creating whole expressions by moving all of his features: eyebrows, eye shape and size, mouth brow and cheeks then creating a set driven key allowing for easy expression animation.
I learned a great deal about clusters. I created a model of the boy that was able to move well using cluster as apposed to painting the weights which we didnt actually use as weight painting seemed a far more successful way of manipulating Josephs mesh.
So, i weight painted Joseph from head to toe learning a huge amount an the way.
I also learnt how to do a jiggle effect that i ended up hating. We almost had jiggle on Josephs big hair.... it was horrible!
I have also been doing a lot of compositing, using after effects and premiere to create and edit my animatic (1&2) and the blockout. I learned how to add effects to the frames and also animate mildly on there (condensation on window in Train Scene).
I have also learned how to use the graph editor and many other technical functions on Maya that allow me to animate well and also quickly.

Animator MY MAJOR!... WOO!

I have animated around 3 minutes for the film, all of Joseph. I have improved very much since the beginning and have taught myself many things including a good animating work flow, technical things like the graph editors curves and tangents etc and for me, most importantly, i have improved greatly at giving the illusion of weight, fluid movement and adding character to a piece of animation!
I have done a lot of character animation for Joseph and also all of the short animated parts in the Blockout. I have also animated props like doors, binoculars, suitcases etc in the film.

This almost finished beauty of a film was a great team effort by Ritchie (Director and working machine) and myself (... assistant :-) ) and i never want it to end. Hope you enjoy the finished film at the degree show and i hope you like what you see in my 3 folders - Animator being my Major. I suggest Watching the development i went through from storyboard through to animatic 1 then 2, and then the blockout - this way you will familiarise yourself with the story and you'll be able to see and understand what is happening in my playblasted animations for the final film.

night for now