Animadness

Family Guy

2009-09-23T10:17:00.001-07:00

So normally I don't find Family Guy all that funny. In recent years it's sort of devolved into an intentional parody of itself- which is a little annoying. Occasionally, however, I'll be surprised. I was watching an episode, and was struck by a downright intelligent reference- and not to sound pompous- one that most people probably would not pick up on. They took a quote almost verbatim from Marshall McLuhan in a cameo in Annie Hall. I grew a little more respect for the writers after seeing this. Below are the two clips. He doesn't appear in the Annie Hall one until the last 20 seconds or so. And the Family Guy scene is around 3:45. I know this is quite a bit of effort to point out a little reference- but it shows that even stupid shows can have moments of brilliance.

Hambushed

2009-09-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

Hambushed is done!!!! (ish). This morning after a week of absolutely busting our butts I submitted it for SCADanimate. We're still going to fix some sound issues before sending it off to festivals- but it's pretty much there. YAY!!!!

Suck It Up is also done and in. YAY again!!!!!!

animatic

2009-09-12T21:13:00.000-07:00

Here's another animatic I did over the summer. We were given 3 images to construct a story around. Unfortunately I no longer have those images, but they were an old lady, a dog, and a bank. If this story doesn't bring a tear to your eye, you clearly have no soul.

*Amended- I do still have the pictures.

Thesis

2009-08-20T12:04:00.000-07:00

I decided to create a blog dedicated solely to my thesis work. It is thesis.harrisonstark.com

The link can also be found to the right.

whoops

2009-08-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

So I just realized that my "home" link off to the right didn't actually link anywhere. It's fixed now, sorry about that.

Animatic

2009-07-27T18:22:00.000-07:00

So I'm in a storyboarding class right now. This has been the first thing I produced in it that I was mildly happy with. So I thought I'd share. Also, disregard the closing music. I was scrambling to find something to put in.

Secret of Kells

2009-07-26T23:25:00.000-07:00

A fellow at the SAS conference, Thomas Walsh, was talking about a new movie from Ireland- "The Secret of Kells." The style looks absolutely beautiful, and I am already super excited about this. Any time something like this comes along every so often to completely blow away anything mainstream. Persepolis did it, Waltz with Bashir did it, and I'm guessing Kells will as well.

Auto Rig

2009-07-19T14:45:00.001-07:00

I figured I'd post something about my auto rigger I've been working on. This is of course an ongoing long process- but I hope to have a functional prototype maybe by the end of the summer (unrealistically). So far I've got the skeleton generator portion totally functional (at least for a biped). It creates a bunch of locators for you to place in the appropriate parts of the body, then replaces those with properly orienteed joints. It has a nice little feature where you can choose the number of fingers, and also, if it's symmetrical, you only have to place one side and the other aligns automatically. I'm pretty stoked about this one.

I'm currently working on setting up the spine. Again, you can choose you many joints, whether it's FK, IK, or FK/IK, and whether it's stretchy and maintains volume. My big thing about this auto rig is that I want to give the person as many choices as possible- so they can keep it super simple if that's all that's needed, or make it complex and really powerful.

In other news, my FK IK matcher is still about 95% complete. I suppose I should finish that one, too, so I can incorporate it into the auto rig. I'll add all of these to my website for download as they get finished. There's already some nifty scripts up there that you should check out.

post conference

2009-07-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

So yeah, the SAS conference was pretty cool (after the flat tire I got on the way there). It was pretty intimidating presenting in front of the likes of these people, but feedback I got indicated I held my own okay. I mean I was presenting on a panel with Paul Wells- that's pretty awesome.

There were a bunch of really interesting papers, and some that I didn't follow so well. Perhaps my favorite was outlining a new genre of parody nostalgia in animation- using shows like Harvey Birdman and Robot Chicken as examples. It was pretty interesting. Not to mention a fantastic round table about how to form curriculum for teaching animation. All in all it was a good time.

Wish me luck

2009-07-09T16:42:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow I leave for Atlanta for the SAS conference. I don't present until Saturday, so hopefully I'll get a feel for it tomorrow and be totally prepared. If anyone's curious about what I'm presenting, here's the abstract

http://blog.scad.edu/sasc/2009/03/18/harrison-stark/

2009-06-27T12:37:00.000-07:00

This was something I wanted to try doing. These are four different stages of an animation project. The top left is just my camera layout- the object was to focus on the reactions from the other character to what was being said, not the character speaking. The one next to that is my initial blocking. The bottom left is blocking 2, with breakdowns, anticipations, settles, etc. And the bottom right is the final inbetweened version with facial.

You may notice that there were some pretty major changes made pretty late in the game. I don't normally like working that way, but as I unstepped things and got further along, Moom (the one wiping his nose) had way too broad and fast movements in such a short time. I decided to make him a lot more subtle, and take out most of his movement to allow for more thinking time before he says his last line.

Also, the line is from Christmas Vacation.

animatic

2009-05-04T19:39:00.001-07:00

Here's my rough first pass at my thesis animatic. I'd really appreciate any feedback at all- especially if you don't know anything about what I'm doing. I need to make sure the story can be read

news

2009-03-19T04:32:00.000-07:00

longest quarter of my life- but we got both films done!! I'll keep updated as we polish them and try to submit them to festivals and whatnot

in other news, I'm going to be presenting a paper at the Society for Animation Studies conference over the summer. It's on the portrayal of clash mobility in animation- using the simpsons as a case study. It seemed pretty relevant. Now the hard part begins- to seem like I know what I'm talking about.

Another rigging analogy

2009-02-23T12:54:00.000-08:00

Someone else I know compared being a rigger to being an ombudsman. Nobody comes to you if everything is going well. People only come to you when something is wrong. There's no such thing as positive feedback to a rigger.

The Thankless Job

2009-01-29T23:49:00.000-08:00

I think my teacher put it best when he said "Being a rigger is tough. If the rig is good, people are like 'wow, look at that animation' but if the animation is bad, people blame the rig."

Yet I still want to do this? Crazy.

Facial Final Rig and Animation

2008-11-22T20:16:00.000-08:00

This is the final rig for my facial class. The fantastic model was made by Sunny Kwon. This is just a playblast showing the control scheme and some canned expressions.

And this is the final animation to test out the rig. The animation isn't great because I really only had two days to work on it. If you can guess what movie the audio is from I'll be your best friend.

Americanification

2008-11-14T18:17:00.000-08:00

This is a project I worked on last year that I completely forgot about. Watching it now, I like it even more than back then. The object was to explore various stereotypes. The ending I don't think worked very well, and we never did tweak the audio or some of the animation. Oh well, it was a fun thing for the three of us to do.

It was inspired by Bruno Bozzetto. Here's one of the pieces that directly influenced us.

And sorry about the distortion and stretching on the video. I'm not sure what happened during uploading.

Coach McGuirk

2008-11-03T20:34:00.001-08:00

This is my first animation from my facial rigging class. I didn't make this model, I just rigged it. This method was done entirely with blendshapes for the facial. There's some funky stuff with the elbow towards the end, but since it's a facial class, I took some shortcuts with the rest of the rig. Oh well. And yes, apparently that's supposed to be Teddy Roosevelt.

Also, H. Jon Benjamin is one of the greatest voice actors of all time. I wish I could use him for every dialog animation.

Animation Show of Shows

2008-10-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

So Ron Diamond his touring animation show to SCAD this year, and it was pretty amazing. Some of the shorts this year included Presto, Pixar's new short which expectedly got the most favorable reaction, probably because every person there had already seen it at least once. Glago's Guest, from director Chris Williams (who is responsible for Disney's upcoming "Bolt") was a fine example of what is going on in mainstream animation today. I was kind of surprised to see this and Presto there, however, because of Diamond's personal mission to spread independent animation to those that may not be able to see it otherwise. And in his own words, he didn't put this show together to pander to those that may not know or like animation- it's for those in animation who want to see what's new.

There were some gems, and some that I felt were a little flat. The show opened with Keith Reynolds Can't Make it Tonight. This was an uproariously funny narration to stick figures. This was followed with La Maison en Petits Cubes, a story about one old man trying to survive and remember in a completely flooded world. One entitled Kudan featured a blockheaded father in some bizarre world trying to save his son (there's much more, but it would literally be impossible to explain this one without seeing it). It was honestly a bit too weird even for me. There were three rather funny shorts- Hot Seat, a story about bunnies in an office trying not to get stuck with a broken chair (it was basically Dilbert with bunnies), A Mouse Tale, a run-in between a mouse and a lion with an unexpected ending, and KJFG #5, the short that ended the show. This was the simplest, but one of the funniest shorts about a trio of forest critters in a band.

The most interesting came with Franz Kafka's Country Doctor, created by Koji Yamamura. This was a bizarre and rather confusing story, with some outrageous animation. I loved Yamamura's Mt. Head, and I think I could really like this one too, I just need to see it again- and not when I'm really tired and have a terrible headache. During the credits there was considerable chatter about this one, indicating some liked it and some hated it. I haven't made up my mind yet.

By far my favorite was Skheizein. This short was about a man who is hit with a meteorite and is transplanted 91 centimeters from himself. It's ambiguous as to whether it's just his perspective that's changed, or whether other people see him detached from himself as well. I thought it was just about his perspective being off. This was fascinating, both funny and tragic.

On a whole it was a rather enjoyable show. I kinda wish I was feeling better during it. Oh well, I hope to see some of these again.

Naturalistic III

2008-10-11T23:10:00.001-07:00

yeah, here's my attempt at actually integrating it in live action. Clearly, I'm not a compositor

Naturalistic Live Action I

2008-10-06T18:52:00.001-07:00

So for this assignment we had to shoot something, then animate a character into it. Depending on how well the animation goes, I'll render out some shadows and composite those in as well (definitely at least if I use it for my reel), and mask out the rope I used to pull the chair. But here's a pretty rough version of the animation. Still a long way to go.

Naturalistic Subtle

2008-09-30T06:13:00.000-07:00

This is our first assignment for Naturalistic Animation. Basically we just had to do a really subtle animation. This one was a mixture of Gary Sinese in Of Mice and Men, Alan Arkin in Glengarry Glenn Ross, and myself acting it out. Having gotten the grades on it yet, but there are a few things I would tweak more.

Cartoon Animation Final

2008-08-28T23:02:00.001-07:00

For my final I expanded on my first project- fine tuning it, adding facial, and adding the second character. This is easily the most complicated animation I've done thus far. I'm pretty happy with it.

review

2008-08-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

Whew, wish me luck. Tomorrow I have my preliminary review (my first of many reviews). Pretty much says, "yes you can continue on the program" or "no, we don't want you here."

Spunky Final

2008-08-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

I figured I could put up the clip I was trying to emulate. Since I'm only putting this up as a reference, I don't think it'll cause any problems. Like I Said before, it's from the Rocko's Modern Life Pilot episode.

Here's the clip.

And here's my final project. There's still a few things I could tweak- and there's really no facial on there. If I ever decide to use this for a reel (I doubt I will) I'll go back and fix that stuff.

Spunky

2008-08-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

This is the second 3D cartoon assignment. For those of you that know Rocko's Modern life I took a clip of Spunky eating the green stuff out of the garbage from the pilot episode. Really cute clip. Anyway, this is adapted with some pretty heavy modifications from the source. It was surprisingly difficult to take something with really limited animation into a 3D environment. I haven't done much tweaking in the graph editor yet. This is pretty close to finished, but a couple more days work is needed.

3D Cartoon II

2008-07-16T00:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's my final render of the first project. Got pretty positive feedback on it in class today. Leave your thoughts.

3D Cartoon Character

2008-07-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

This summer I am taking a 3D Cartoon Character Animation class. This is in stark contrast to the naturalism and realism that's pushed in most of the classes. This is challenging, but fun. Below is essentially blocking 2 for our first assignment. We had to take a 2D clip, and transform it into a 3D animation. I chose a few seconds from a Tom and Jerry short. This is one of the most difficult rigs I've had to work with, but once I got the hang of it, it proved to be really powerful. There are just an insane number of controls. It allows us to really push squash and stretch, it's just really tough for it to not deform like crap. And I even had to make some modifications to the tail to make it functional. Sorry, I didn't mean for this to be a bitch session about the rig. Anyway, here's blocking 2. I still need to fix some balance issues when he's crouched down, and I think I can push some of the poses even more exaggerated.

Dialog Final

2008-06-21T22:06:00.000-07:00

I forgot to post this when I finished it. It's a piece of dialog from Taylor Mead in the closing scene from Coffee and Cigarettes. I wanted to do something really subtle and introspective. Interestingly, this was perhaps the most difficult thing I've had to animate thus far.

Caricature

2008-06-21T22:02:00.000-07:00

This is a lovely caricature of me by Sammi Dougherty. If you don't know what I look like, this is pretty much the spitting image.

Mel Blanc's 100th

2008-05-30T02:15:00.000-07:00

100 years ago today, one of the greatest voice actors of all time, Mel Blanc was born. To celebrate everybody should watch at least one of his cartoons.

Simple Rig

2008-05-19T00:32:00.001-07:00

Here's my first basic rig. Basically it features IK/FK spine controls, IK/FK blending on both arms and legs, Foot Roll, Heel and Toe Twist, Side Roll, Stretchy Limbs, Automatic flexing biceps, an extra gimbal helped control on the shoulder, clavicle controls, Various Finger Controls, Combined and independent eye controllers, with pupil dilation, Smooth switch, and face control GUI. It's not much, but I'm learning a ton right now, and over the next few months I'm going to be taking advanced rigging, and facial rigging. Hope to learn a lot more. Also, sorry about the crappy video quality, my first time using a screen capture video.

New Stuff

2008-05-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, I figured I'd put up the final for the box reaction. I'm not terribly happy with it, but it was enough for an A. And I got some really good feedback, so hopefully I can fix it to demo reel quality.

And here is blocking 1 and the start of blocking 2 for the next assignment- a dialog piece. I chose a really subdued serious clip because I wanted to do something poignant and meaningful. Most people are doing some goofy funny quotes, so I'm pretty happy with my decision. It's tough, though, getting such subtle emotions to read. I'll give you undying respect if you know where this line is from.

Blocking 1 Box Reaction

2008-04-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

Well, here's blocking 1 for my next acting piece. The assignment is to have a character come in with one emotion, look inside a box (or in my case just see it), and have the emotion change. I'm not going to tell you what the emotions are, because I want to know if the story reads from just the gestures.

I'm not terribly happy with this pass. I think a lot of the poses are stiff and kind of ugly. So I'm revamping a lot of it in blocking 2, which is due Tuesday. So let me know if you think this reads okay.

Ollie Johnston

2008-04-21T04:32:00.000-07:00

"No school like the old school"

-Ollie Johnston
1912-2008

Backflip Final

2008-04-18T09:36:00.001-07:00

This is the end result of the backflip I was blocking in my previous posts. It's not flawless- meaning not quite demo reel quality- but it's close. I just need to push the weight right and left a tad more, and I may have made his arms a little too loose. One of the comments I got was that they looked like wet noodles, so I may have to dial that back a smidge.

My Animusic

2008-04-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

I absolutely adore Animusic. If you don't know what it is, just look it up Youtube, or go to their website. It's just some wonderfully imaginative animation set to music. They have some software that takes the music and converts it into keys for their animation. Since music plays a major role in my creative process, I was inspired by them, so I did a little thing myself. I didn't really know how to do this, so I just had to develop my own technique. The water droplets are all particles, so I had to time up when they hit the strings, and trace back how long it takes them to fall and key their generation. It's only 20 seconds, but I'm hoping to go back and do the full piece.

Learning blocking

2008-04-10T14:23:00.001-07:00

I'm in my first real character animation class right now, and I'm just starting to really learn about blocking. After only doing it for a few weeks, I think it's the bees knees. I have a couple playblasts of blocking 1 with just the bare minimum of important key poses. Then with blocking 2 I started adding the breakdowns, and anticipation, as well as trying to introduce some drag. Keep in mind I'm only just beginning to grasp this process.

Blocking 1

Blocking 2

Welcome

2008-04-09T17:07:00.000-07:00

I've had a blog for a while now with movie reviews, but I've decided to start a personal one. I'm an animation graduate student working on my MFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and I figured I'd start this to keep a record of my goings on. As the title suggests, animation is nothing but complete madness, and anybody who wants spend their lives doing it is nuts. Of course, I'd never want to do anything else. Hope you enjoy.