Animation Stages: BOZ

This clip that I animated for the BOZ teaser DVD was a fun assignment. It was also a bit of a challenge, as it was one of my earlier attempts at a new workflow. I'd hung on too long to my original workflow, where I would only create key poses with linear transitions, and then add all other detail after going to spline mode. The workflow I was trying to learn -- which is the workflow I use now -- is similar to 2D animation, where I would use stepped keys to "draw" key poses, breakdowns, and as much other detail as possible, and then convert to spline for final polish.

NOTE: The low quality of the playblast clips is largely due to our old playblast setup at Reel FX, which used really low quality compression at the time this was made. I did a noise-reduction pass and some other attempted cleanup before posting here, but it's impossible to put back what isn't there, so there's a lot of remaining clutter. Hopefully the ideas can still be read clearly enough to get the point of each stage.

	Reference video As always, it starts with a plan, and shooting reference video is a mainstay of my planning process. In this case, I was doing it partly for myself, and partly to convey my idea to the director. I looped the clip and shot a bunch of takes, then edited together the chunks that conveyed my idea the best, including flipping one clip horizontally after deciding to change the direction of that bit of acting. For the "monkey around" section, I wanted to get away from the stereotypical "monkey" action with one hand scratching the head while the other scratches under the arm. However, that particular action is just what the director wanted, so I had to go that route after all. (This was shot on a Friday at work, which explains the colorful clothes...a personal Friday tradition.)

	Rough blocking Depending on the situation, my reliance on video reference varies. In this case, the video was mostly a chance for me to run through a lot of options and pick my favorite ideas, and then get the director to buy off on those ideas so I could move ahead. I didn't intend to rely too much on all the details of my poses, as they would need to be pushed and refined to look good on BOZ. At the end of that refinement process, these are the key poses (and some rough breakdowns) that I ran by my supervisor for early review, including key facial expressions and mouth shapes for lip sync. The main comment that came back from this was to clean up the final pose. I had tried a little too hard to keep both of BOZ's arms in clear silhouette, but it made the pose feel forced and awkward. Silly animator...

	Breakdowns After cleaning up the final pose, I started adding additional breakdown poses. I was still getting used to this workflow, so I didn't add as many breakdowns as I would do now. Still, going through this process taught me a lot and got me headed in the right direction for later work.

	Smoothing, part 1 Once the breakdowns were done, I converted all the keys to linear interpolation, added any necessary duplicate keys for holds, ran an auto-tangent script on all the keys to semi-smooth things, and then started going through and polishing the body motion in chunks. In each chunk, I would start with the pelvis and polish its motion so the core weight worked well, and then work my way out the chain of appendages from there. I was still hanging on a bit to my old workflow, so in some places there was a lot of detail to add where I hadn't included many breakdowns, and I did most of that in the graph editor. This clip shows the first shot in mid-polish, with semi-linear transitions on everything else.

	Smoothing, part 2 This pass shows finished body motion for the first shot, and the second shot almost halfway polished. For the second shot, I treated each of the major motions/phrases as a chunk. There's a pretty clear dividing line where the polished motion ends and the earlier rough motion continues.

	Smoothing, part 3 In this pass, all the major body motion was polished. Aside from the face, the only things that still needed detail work were the ears and fingers. The comment that came back from this pass was that having an accent on each word of "me too" was too busy.

	Final polish After simplifying the "me too" moment to a single accent, I animated the fingers, the ears, and face, and added other subtle details like tummy wobble and squash-and-stretch on his head. For the face, I used a brief bulge on the eyes when they popped open at certain times to give the moments a little more emphasis. I also added a little motion to the beginning to give the impression that he's acknowledging the presence of the viewer after the curtain opens (there were curtain transitions separating each of the show samples from the intro bits on the teaser DVD). One side comment is that at this point in animation production, we were hiding BOZ's teeth a lot more than we do now. It makes for a bit of an odd look, but that's how he was handled back then.

	Final render I was asked to soften the final post-wink hold a little, and after doing that, it was approved and sent off for lighting and rendering.

	All stages Here's a combo view showing rough blocking, breakdowns, part 3 of smoothing, and the final render.