Hey everybody,
this is
the amazon. I am the animation director and they had artist for coming on this
amigos.
I'm gonna take one of the shots
and
go over it the way it was in the beginning
to lay out and all the way to animation and the polished version.
And hopefully I can open the file and we can take
a look at what it looks like from the inside.
So the open the blunt file and I can give some tips regarding how I worked on it.
So
let's get going.
Yeah,
person.
Mm
mhm.
So that's the scene,
the scene is a fight between llama and the penguin
riding a cart.
No,
Okay,
yeah,
great stuff. Great stuff.
So let's take a look at what it looked like in the beginning.
So here
is the original
original story board by Mattias and Pablo
now, no sound of course.
So this sequence
was never really fleshed out fully because we had, we had a lot of ideas,
we wanted to put a lot of gas.
This was originally
way longer than the water ended up being.
So we had so Mattias did this amazing drawing
of uh two of them in a cart. So it looked like something from Indiana jones.
So this really cool adventure sketch.
Um so everybody wanted to make something
Maggie out of it.
Problem is we never really
at that stage, we never really
pin down what we wanted and what worked.
So given this information,
I needed to make a layout version
that would also be kind of a pitch
just regarding the overall timing the amount of shots.
If I take some of the jokes like for example, you have here. The
the joke of coral hitting these beams.
And
I think in this original version there were no berries.
I think I think in this original version, the
the penguin or tape, he,
he's just trying to find his way back to his parents or something like that.
So he gets a little bit lost and coral decides to help him out
and they have this adventure together. It was a way longer version.
Um less snappier. I think it's more heartwarming.
Good stuff though still. But we ended up
needing
to have the characters have this one convergent point.
So they have a common interest
and that that's where the berries came in.
Now, penguins don't actually eat berries surprise.
But in this case we decided that what is a
particularly like a weird little penguin that loves berries and
why not? I don't know. I'm not even sure llamas eat penguins and he's a guanaco.
He's not even
Okay,
let's do this.
So
in the original sketch you can see that coral
and
like the scale of them
is quite nice. But
when you have the actual models and the actual characters of science,
uh,
the
the ratio between them is is way bigger. Uh, coral is so much bigger than I thought.
Let's let's take a look at the next segment.
All right. So here's the first pass of the layout
that I worked on.
It was kind of a struggle to get water. That's this,
you know, coral, It's this huge stood here. Even here, the guy is cheated.
He is really cheated in the camera to make him feel a little bit smaller.
And I think even the,
I think even the neck is a bit scaled down and he's a little bit uh pushed downwards,
pretty sure his entire body, if if he was actually sitting in this card,
he would
be way higher in it.
Uh, So I needed to cheat his entire body further down, especially his head.
Um,
and I decided also that
it would be a
it's it's the disregarding the staging. It's better if this struggle happens
pretty much straight on because then we can have
a really clear staging of artists on the right side
and corals on the left side.
So, when you have this kind of push and pull situation, you
you don't
um
everything is supposed to be happening really quickly.
So that's going to help a little bit with
uh
the clarity off the shot. Sorry,
I'm tired.
Okay,
just do it.
So here's my first pass of the layout.
So, as you might see
the it
it ended up being really close to the final product,
there are some changes that were made.
But overall it has the same, it has the same beats.
I think the timing is slightly different.
It's the final result ended up being a little bit snappier, a little bit shorter
but it has the same beats. It has the overall expressions.
So this little penguin version is a version I made just for the layout
because at that time we,
we only had
the notion of a baby penguin. We didn't actually have
the character design of the penguin.
So
I, I needed to somehow just
make something that I could work with.
So I ended up making because in an earlier version of the story,
the little penguin was supposed to be born out of an egg and quarrel
was supposed to take care of him as kind of
fill in the mother role or father rolled the penguin.
Therefore, I think Pablo had the idea that it would be super to it if the penguin
we're still kind of act shaped, which is, I mean that sounds adorable.
So I made this really rough version of a
act shaped little penguin
and I think I think Sarah when she was doing the character
design, I think she took
a little bit of a hint of that layout version
and it ended up being something like fairly similar,
which is cool
that way. I
by sheer luck, I wasn't going way off the rails in another direction.
So you can see that
this really primitive version of that.
He is big enough
in the shot but that's kind of because I faked it a little bit
just with the staging
and I really wanted
Coral
to come down towards him
also. I made sure that there's
this one little berry
and it's kind of just dangling off on its own
that way. It was a little bit less of a headache
that way. Coral could just
kind of go down, grab it with his mouth
and
I wouldn't have to deal with way too much
intersections regarding all the other berries and whatnot.
We knew that there would be some struggle between them. There would be
Maybe three beats of pushing and pulling and pushing away,
pushing in the other direction.
A little bit of a tug of war.
But
we never really
discussed all the way through
why Coral then goes up and gets hit by the, by the planks.
We were, we had a lot of different ideas.
One of them
was I think I suggested squirting one of the berries in the eye
and I think this ended up being this little pitch because I
had no idea if this was going to work or not.
And I think it was a little bit risky because
it's really hard to pull it off
in the short amount of time and make it read
because these berries are kind of small
and it's a tricky thing to animate.
So you see when it happens
uh for somebody that's what's this many times, it's obvious.
But if you, if you're seeing it for the first time.
It
it's a little bit tricky and I think a lot of people
that came for the weekly and we're
watching, watching the current version of it.
They got a little bit confused what happened,
We ended up fixing some of that stuff and make it slightly clearer later on.
But it was good enough and the joke was like funny enough that
it justified taking it to the next level.
So he gets, he gets buried to squirt in the eye,
which makes him pull back, meaning that he lets go of the berry,
the branch
and he pulls himself up out of pain.
So I decided that it would be,
it would be pretty clear staging for the shot and then the next shot,
it would be funnier if we didn't feel the beams coming,
but we would get a hint of beams being there so you can see,
I put in the layout file
and the
and the layout version of the shot, these little beams on top,
so they do surpass one of these little rigs.
So that gives you a little bit of a hint that there might be something more coming up.
So if you actually pushes up,
there might be more stuff that
he gets hit by.
These are kind of two shots that got combined into one shot
and I think they worked fine,
especially given the timing,
but
because of common enters the style is a little bit closer to the,
to the Loony tunes,
it's not supposed to feel like a hand held camera or anything like that.
So every time I did something like that I
tried to be kind of conservative with the camera moves
and this is one of the times when I felt like it was totally justified, totally,
totally justified.
There's one thing in the,
in this version that I kept
that people didn't understand that it was just
I try to put as much information as possible in order
to get the joke through in order to get people go,
I I understand what's happening and why it happened and all that stuff,
but sometimes you,
you put in some information there
and it's not, it's not obvious enough.
So one of the things that was supposed to happen right here
is that he was supposed to look in front of himself as he is about to eat the berry
and freak out and as he fix out he goes wow and he drops the berry backwards,
well he's going really fast forward so you have all this wind in your face.
So as he just kind of drops the bury, it flies backwards,
I kept getting comments
from people seeing it for the first time
asking me why is he throwing the barrier way?
And that's
that's not what's supposed to happen, but
that's the thing if people were watching it for the first time, don't get it
and they look at it and they don't,
they get, not only do they not get it, they also get the wrong intention
then there's something wrong. And I think I ended up just skipping that
fixing it later on.
So after doing the first pass of the, Okay,
let me check my notes for the layout version.
There were a couple of things uh that I wanted to address first of all.
It's an action scene. So I wanted to make sure that
it didn't feel too long. It would be easy for this
little struggle that was happening
to
make it be too long
to have too many beats.
So every time I could I would shave away beats
or even take them down as much as possible.
So trimming the fat as we went along
sometimes
it's okay to do that a little bit later but
like do it in the animation face, but in this case
it really helps to sell the
like that little layout pitch that I was trying to do.
There's also the ambiguity of the penguin
meaning that what
you can see, you can see that coral
kind of goes from being a bit afraid in the previous shot
to being excited about the berries still being there.
But there wasn't anything clear going on without a and I made it
made his face to be a little bit ambiguous.
Not that interesting to look at. And then you had all these berries that is holding.
I was hoping that once you get into that shot, your,
I get strong to coral which is more important for the beginning of the shot.
After doing this
layout passed this first layout pass
we got a friend of ours too
to look at what we had.
We I think we had about
80% of the film
with total total out pass.
There were, there were a few drawings that were there still filling in
but it was really helpful to get him to
comment to get some feedback from a professional.
So it's Colin levy the director of central from back in the day
he's worked at Pixar has done some amazing short films on his own.
So like this too, it is professional, super nice guy also.
So he gave us some feedback.
I just want to play this one little clip regarding this
small segment.
This is amazing.
Oh my gosh!
So let's see. My one concern here is probably about
getting a little close to a match cut
because the size
of koro here is,
yeah,
is not too far away
from the size
in this shot. Right?
So it's just only slightly bigger.
So what I would do is because you probably don't want to get tighter than this
as
widen out on this guy
if it needs to be a cut at all
because I could imagine also you could just combine those two shots.
He hasn't durable laugh.
It's great to get some fresh perspective
on a lot of the shots.
So in this case he had some good points
regarding
the
the two shots being ending in such a way that the coral feels a little
bit similar in both in size and position and what not in the frame.
And you had a suggestion regarding
possibly trying to take those two shots
and merge them together
because we didn't, we didn't actually play blast this with
with a camera lens information.
He didn't mean he couldn't know, but
it really had different lenses. So
that's one of the reasons why that wouldn't
necessarily work or it wouldn't work as well.
But also the next shot afterwards,
we already have this camera move of
coral screaming on top of his lungs being hit by beams
and then that camera pulls down to the penguin.
So I asked that happens,
that's kind of two shots already that are merged together in one shot.
Now, if we emerged the shot before, also
it becomes
less of
the style we're going for just regarding camera position and movement
because then it starts to feel like it's a bit of a handheld experience.
So the cameras
looking at them from front,
something happens,
the camera pulls up and then something else happens. So the camera goes down.
Uh And I, I think at max we, whenever there was any kind of a camera movement like that,
it would have to be just this one movement and that's it.
And there were a couple of other examples of of two camera moves in the same shot
that we ended up just merging into this one camera move.
Ah
I think overall that that was a really good choice.
This is the revised version
after getting these notes
because we weren't able to do some of the solutions he was mentioning
with.
We did try to make the
Distinguishing the distinction between the end of one of the shots
and the beginning of the other one a little bit clearer.
And
as I took this further into the animation face, I tried to take a step further
so let's take a look.
So the camera
in the beginning
is a little bit different. We pulled the camera a little bit further back
and a little bit further to the side.
It's subtle
but also I took Coral
and as he flint his backwards
I made him go
twice the distance. He used to meaning that he shrinks down in the frame also.
Uh that that also is a little bit cheated because of the camera angle.
So you you won't notice it necessarily
uh
you wouldn't notice unless somebody pointed it out to you in the next shot.
I didn't want him to already be in the frame
and it was never the idea that he was already in the frame.
It was just that you and you
to the latest version.
You only put in so so much information and that was one of the things I just didn't do.
I should have added maybe a couple of more frames to
really sell the idea that he's coming into the frame.
Yeah.
And this is one of the things I would later
on enhance a little bit in the animation face.
So as you can see
it's
it's a bit of a
compromise. I mean it's not perfect
but I allow coral to kind of go out of frame
and then the next shot he's coming into the frame
so it's not as much of a match cut.
All right,
let's take a look at the next version.
Oh yes yes yes yes yes, yes. So
The amazing rendering team we had consisting of
two people Andy Carroll Chick and Pablo Vasquez.
They tried
rendering the layered version and it's really cool. Then you can see really
yeah. See see how the the light
and
the motion kind of affects the mood of the scene.
One thing,
well, there's a couple of things I would mention.
So
coral goes down,
grabs the little berry
pulls on it.
It's all good
and
there's a little bit of back and forth. All good.
Here's something
when he,
when the little penguin squirts the berry. Just smashes. That very
it's
we were still getting people seeing this for the first time that just didn't
ah
I didn't really understand what happened.
So they barely saw the squirt when it happened
and I tried to, even, even when I
position to him and
it's,
you have to cheat this position but you try to do it in such a way that the staging,
it's away from the silhouette off this choppy little
penguins or you're already kind of cheating it.
So when he does it he does it away from his body
but there's only so so much you can push. Uh so think one thing that Pablo did uh
think in the end version
and it was subtle but it was quite nice because it enhanced a little bit,
the readability of the squirt
is that these rocks from behind.
He ended up putting some snow on them. So when this moment happens
you can really, you can see a little bit more of a contrast of that squirt happening
now. Later on us as you might have noticed that squirt became
a waterfall
made
made by Andy, which was awesome. But yeah that was, that was one of the things when
we just, we just had to take it up a notch. People are still not sure what happened
and we had to take it to
uh just ridiculous proportions. Why not?
So I don't think there's anything in particular,
I don't need to talk about regarding
the final layout version.
So let's just
go into the first blocking pass of the animation.
It was a little bit of a hassle getting getting them into. I think that took
half a day or full day
just taking the layout file
trying to recapture some of the animation
which which ended up not being that feasible. So I had to redo most of the animation.
Of course
the penguin. He I had the layout version which is a totally different rig.
So I had to do him from scratch.
But also there was the
the issue of
the berry branch.
We never actually made it like that.
The diversion everybody was using was a really cheap layout version that I had made
and in a hurry.
And in this shot in particular,
the baby penguin needs to really be hugging
those berries and he's interacting with them.
And then he they get put down on the card.
So you really need to feel like the
every single
one of those berries is interacting with each other.
There's no weird intersections
and I ended up just reading the entire thing.
So I made a
brand new rig for all the different berries
and every single one of the little twigs and every
single one of the berries has its own little bone.
So that's all hand animated
which ended up being a little bit of a nightmare.
Uh
but it worked out fine. It was fine. It was so good.
All right.
So this was looking fine.
one note that I got from
that I got from calling. That was a good note.
Uh in the beginning
he talked about
the, he comes from the previous shot.
Coral
Comes from the previous shot being a little bit bewildered
and freaked out by having just fallen 200 m or whatever
almost to his own death.
And just
shot later he's there
and he needs to
kind of just go for the berries. He can't be stopping too long.
The issue is
that it's a fine line because
it's supposed to be a high tempo,
a lot of action, a lot of stuff happening.
But it feels
a little bit weird if for example,
in one shot he's really afraid for his life and then
you cut and he's in a totally other state of mind.
So I tried to trim it down. So
just in the first frame
he's already kind of looking at the barre a little
bit freaked out and he just goes for it.
He just goes for the berries.
Uh if you, if you look at it and you really think about it, it is a bit of a cheat,
but I think it works a little bit better
that that also did bring the shot
a little bit down. So it was a little bit faster.
Let's see, let's see. Let's see.
Yeah, you might notice that I play around with making the characters asymmetrical.
So you can see corals eyes for example,
you can see,
I usually make it so that
whatever direction is looking in.
So in this case is looking to screen right?
I make sure that his screen right eye is a little bit bigger
and the other one is just slightly smaller
and I like to squish.
So you get
so you get a little bit, I'm exaggerating right now. So you get
this kind of a shape going on
that's nice.
And then if you if you do that that also means that
the face
needs to be squishing
in this direction. So
if you squish the mouth
it goes here
so it ends up being all part of the same
arc.
Uh I just think it's a little bit more common with
human faces or humanoid faces
but this is kind of taking that
and just applying that to
a llama face,
the same thing with haughty he's looking to
the right so he's looking in this direction
screen, right? That is
so his screen right eye is a bit bigger.
Oh I'm doing this with a mouse,
I regret everything. Okay
so
cora also sticks out his tongue as he opens his mouth.
That was a little bit if it made more sense in
in an earlier version where he would have that extra half
a second or a second of a beat in the beginning.
So he goes from being built will alert to being excited and then kind of going for it
in this case it happens really fast. I think I ended up using it. But
I mean that that was that was really pushing it
push pull, push pull
it's a good blocking pass.
So let's just quickly go to the next version.
Oop. There we go.
Yeah. So
I was I started having some issues with
the berries because they were all looking exactly the same.
And it was getting really hard for me to just to register
which which
barriers which because if you're going from all these blocked keys,
You're stepping through 10 frames, 20 frames whatever
and something has changed but your eye
can't differentiate anymore because it's your assumed in on this
bunch of berries and they're all the same color.
They're all the same shape.
So I ended up making my own little temporary version of him
where I I tweaked the materials just a little bit and make them colorful.
It's like that small thing that
really made it more dummy proof and less of a headache for me in the long run
highly recommend is that
So there's one thing that I want to mention that was
so if I go back to the previous version
you might notice
the cart, the cart,
the version of the card that I'm using right there
is the layout version of the card.
It's the low rest version or low polling version or whatever you wanna call it.
The problem is
that I thought that
I thought the cart would be,
I had kind of forgotten what the card looks like in the final version
and usually with layout you want to have just the overall shape.
So you want to have to make sure that there, if there's dents or anything like that,
that they're they're in the layout version
of course simplified. But still there,
if there's anything that affects the way
you might animate or act out or do layout or whatever
problem is
the high res version. Of course,
I totally forgot about this.
It had these metallic things going on around here.
There we go.
These metallic beautiful things
with the starts going through
all that stuff, All this beauty
which looks great. But the problem is that it stands out of it.
And I had already animated
the penguin as he's being pulled and he's pulling back and all that.
I had already animated him on a flat surface, meaning that when he gets pulled
he kind of gets dragged
and when I switched to the high risk version
I had some issues
because now he was, his feet were totally intersecting. It didn't match up.
So I had to re
do some of that stuff
to make it match up.
So now when he's being pulled,
his foot
kind of
kind of goes conveniently over it
lands on top of it here
which which is already more of an awkward position or post that I
wanted because I really wanted him to have this really strong post of having
the card
foot
and the other foot and have him be a little bit off balance in the other direction,
meaning that this becomes this really important pivot point.
But
all of a sudden I had to take that
foot, push it up
so it becomes a bit of a weaker post for this intended
purpose.
But I think I think it's good enough and
I met him do like a little half step where he
kind of
gets into the post but
not quite.
And this is a super snappy motion by the way
I was trying to make it as snappy as possible.
I think it's snappy enough
and it's it's easy to go to snap it up sometimes
and meaning that
it makes only sense to you because you've seen it so
many times and then you brand new person sees the animation
and it makes no sense at all because stuff just happened so fast. Nothing registers.
Let's take a look at
the next version of the animation,
yep. Pretty much just added more
breakdown key frames in between breakdown poses.
Ah
think you can see though
that I put a little bit more effort into
thinking about how
coral reacts to this thing being squirted by the way that's squared that thing.
If you're thinking, wow like it did a simulation or something. No,
so it's a mush.
It's like here's the berry
he squirts meaning to bury. Just gets scaled down squashed
and then this mesh that's always been parented to
the head of coral
website
kind of
go through three
shape keys I guess I remember now
and then it ends up just kind of hanging out here
and you know,
whatever works and then it's just they're kind of lingering on top of his face.
It ended up actually looking quite nice especially after and
he did his little magic on top of it.
Ah
one big issue that I had
with the shot now that I look at it,
I really wanted
to have this firm grasp of the berries. So you would have these
this bunch of berries with little thing hanging out
and then you would have this penguin
holding on to his life
and
a happy little penguin
and this penguin
would hold on to these berries even though they're way bigger
like this.
So he would have this really firm
grasp of the berry branch.
Now that means that one of the arm kind of goes over here
and the other one goes over here
and just fine. And it's I think it's I think it's a really good post for this
instance.
No, the problem is
a little bit later because I decided to go for the whole
square thing
and I didn't want to mess up the timing that I already did in the layout.
I had a really hard time
with the timing. I already had
to try to get him into this post
and make it
stay a little bit longer
because of this because of this problem of
people not registering the post or not registering
what he's doing and that he's about to squash berry and then he squashed the berry.
So I
I took a few key frames away from him going into it and just allowed it to
allowed him to stay in that post for a little bit longer.
So he just he doesn't just go there for two frames and
squash like he goes there for 56 frames before the squash happens.
I also took away the whole layout version of him taking the hand up and
then squishing it that way because that also took away too much time to do.
You got it, you got to make it fast, you gotta make it snappy.
Now the issue I had is that
the beginning post here
fits perfectly
and the end posts here
fits fine.
The problem is
if he's already holding it
underneath,
like that hand here is holding it underneath,
how do you
how do you get from that
to this?
Because his hand, let's see
his hand basically needs to be
like this,
this is the opposite of what it was
uh because he needs to go from here
straight to the berry. Just grabbing the very straight away
because of timing because of reasons.
So
I think that
so you can see as he pulls here
because and pulls
as he pulls
I just made
his hand just disappear. His screen, right hand disappeared behind the berries.
And then when when quarrel pulls back
all of a sudden surprise, his hand magically there.
I think if you look at the scene and you try to
watch for that happening,
I think you notice it.
I'll kind of I don't know. I think I got away with. It
still feels a little bit weird to me.
Yeah, that's fine. Okay, let's take a look at the next one.
This is the next version, not the animation,
no drastic changes. Just flushing out some of the beats
and some of the poses.
I think at that point
I think just about every other frame is animated and all the arcs are working.
I had some issues with the constraints because you have
you have um
often has all these berries and they ended up being
ended up having this master berry bone that was parented to his torso.
And then in all the pushing and pulling.
I just ended up framed by framing
the
the kind of the llama side
of the berry
but which is fine in and of itself. It's a little bit of counter animation.
Just frame by frame animation. So as long as art is feeling fine and he looks fine
and I have the overall beats working.
Then it's it's just a little time consuming. But it's fine.
The problem is
when a t
needs to grab the berry,
he can't still be holding that thing and he needs to
go into a position in which he can squash the berry.
So I just made him kind of
put the branch down to the card
and it just hangs around there.
Of course. I made sure that
you can see every single one of these berries here that touch
touch the cart, they get
squished a little bit together and the rest of that's every single berry animated.
So much fun.
Yeah. So I was working a little bit on his reaction
and I was thinking I could probably take this
up a notch.
So so as you can see
the
cora's head
is like this
and this is the moment when he gets hit.
Now what happens is he goes into an arc in which he goes here,
it goes a bit
up.
Yeah.
And then he goes down again
and then
boom
straight up.
So
wait,
doing the sound effect for some reason.
Okay,
this was fine.
But I don't know I wanted to push it a little bit I think in the next version.
Well the next couple of versions I started experimenting
with that a little bit besides doing everything else.
So I do want to mention though that um
as I'm working on this
of course because I'm not
insane.
Every time I go to the file I would take the card. I mean we have the card
that's moving
in a particular path, we have the camera that's hooked up to the card
and then we have the characters that are also hooked up to the card.
Now, if I want to be working on that, I can just disable the animation on the card
and it's fine.
But, and then every time I want to do a play blast,
I just have to remember to add that stuff on top again.
But also there's this noise because in the beginning I tested out for the layout file
and for the first
pass with the blocking face,
I experimented with putting some noise modifiers on some of those axes,
some of those curves
which worked out great,
but you have to remember to turn them off on and off
and on and off every time you do a play blast.
So as as I go into the file,
I had to remember to take the camera shake, turn it off,
take the motion of the car, turn it off,
uh, take the shake of the card and this is all in different axes, axes
and switch them off.
So I ended up just having this really still cart that I could animate on top of
just fine and they, I mean, we could have,
I could have pushed the scene probably a little bit further
meaning that the car just doesn't go in a straight line,
but it's like suede,
but that would mean that they have to sway also as they're doing there
doing their performance and it would,
it was already quite a headache. We didn't have that much time.
So I decided to tackle it a little bit straightforward.
All right.
So as you might notice
it looks like in this play blast. I had,
I put on the noise modifier for the card,
but but it looks like I didn't do it for the camera shake.
So the camera's actually really still for that play blast version.
Just fine. It's fine.
Yeah. And the next one.
So you might be thinking, hey, how do you decide when to do a plate glass?
Uh, is it always in a, it's always at 5:00 or it's,
it's after you do three modifications or whatever.
No, it's, it just depends on a lot of factors. Sometimes it's because
the dailies are coming up and I want to show something.
Sometimes it's because a weekly meeting is coming up
and sometimes it's, it's just that I've worked on
three different things for five different things and I kind of
need to start seeing it from a big bigger picture.
So I see. So I have to
talk about everything on and just see if it's working together or not.
But it's um,
one of my mentors talked about
don't do one change and play blast
and then one change play blast
because then you're wasting your time.
You're wasting your entire day just doing these minuscule things.
So what you want to do is you want to look at the entire shot.
Make a make a checklist of all the things you see wrong
address every single one of those notes
to the best of your ability.
And then
like only then you're allowed to do a play blast of the entire thing.
It's helpful. That makes sense.
All right.
So as you can see,
I also added some
overlap too.
The little stem,
that was one of those polishing things that I could, I could just
wait until at the end to do
also the ears, the floppy ears of the llama
in the wind.
But you can also see that
I was playing around a little bit with corals reaction
and even
going so far as to take his foot up.
So it's a little foot here
goes up as it happens. Any kind of rubs his face a little bit as it happens.
I was imagining, what would I do if somebody squirted something in my face?
I would probably
just instinctively go back and try to shield myself from it or rub it a little bit.
And then the pain is so unbearable that he just
yeah,
goes up for a yell
of course as I would do as everybody would do.
Oh,
here's a fun little play blessed
just as a little joke.
Uh tackling layers on enough.
I thought, I thought it was kind of funny that when I tackled the characters off,
I could play blast the entire sequence
only with the berries
and I don't know, it looked kind of funny.
Okay. That I think that's a fully animated version.
But yeah, but it's the berries.
So it's like two invisible beings are are fighting each other.
Yeah, so this is the final
animation.
This has all the little things details polished. So you can see even the,
even the little highlights in their eyes.
But yeah, that's the final version. And
I also animated the
shot after that one.
So let's just take a look at that quickly
to see what it looks like together.
Yeah.
And then uh then the penguin has a little sexy moment with the berries.
I was I was not in the layout
at
cool being self.
Let's check out the final reversion
once everything has been rendered
and you might notice something hilarious that happened
when the squirt is about to happen. You can see
that Pablo had these
just normal rocks here in the background
and there
kind of dark ish.
But then when it comes to the moment when the, when the squirt is about to happen,
he had all these beautiful snowy rocks
behind
it really helps. Kind of
make it a little bit clear what is going on.
And then to really take it to the next level and they played around with
just changing it into a firehouse.
It's just, I love it. It's great.
And even with that sometimes we would get people that just,
I don't understand what happened
uh to a certain point.
You've pushed it so far that you don't wanna you don't want to make it
completely idiot proof.
That's good. That's good shot. Now let's
take a look
exciting, exciting stuff. So let's take a look at the file itself.
All right, so it's seen three
so many missing things. Oh no.
Oh no.
All right.
Oh really trusted. There we go.
Oh, missing.
Ouch.
Well let's go.
You're recording me uh little surveillance guy.
All right, let's take a look at the shot itself. What the blind fellow looks like?
It's incredibly slow. Of course, of course.
So if we want actually
look at this thing and work with it a little bit.
Got a simplified first
than
let's take the card
and change it into
the layout version of the card.
It should be a little bit better.
All right.
Now we pick a frame like frame 400 here,
go for
go for the bone for the card
and
disable it. So
stays put.
Still got a lot of shake going on. So that's the little top bone here in the card.
So we just to say it pulled the modifier on that one
and that one stays put
and the camera shake.
Take the moderate what modifier away.
And now that's still
also
there's
no need
for any
of this stuff in the background
and
not even a need for the camera itself.
So here we go
mm hmm.
It was just copy the beginning and end.
Yeah.
So here's the shot.
Let's look at the frame rate. Alright, I'm recording so
prominent. Isn't that great?
But it's good enough to actually, we'll just take a look at a little bit.
So here we go. Here's all day,
push this to the side.
It's that little guy.
And as you can see the little berries are
parent to his body.
And if we look at it from the side,
you can see how much I'm cheating
coral in that shot.
So I'm really trying to bring him down as much as possible.
Whoops. Let's see if I can
get something a little bit more Pablo esque.
There we go.
The color of Pablo
lock the frame.
All right. So
from the front.
All right,
he looks normal ish
from the side.
And I think even on top of this,
I
even on top of this, I took the bone here and I moved it down
and then even the head bone
that's over here. I took them down, took that down also
and his body. If we look at his body here.
Well, hopefully you can see it. Let me just draw the lines of the body is
roughly here
and the cart
is here.
So it doesn't actually fit in the car
the But goes down.
So that's a good example of cheating it for the camera.
So if we just look at this shot from the side view, we may want to
hide. Maybe art
and the berries.
So if you play it from the side.
Yeah, I can see a lot of cheating going on.
Even as he's
reacting.
He's kind of reacting to it.
You can see how I'm pulling that body backwards
and
he goes all the way back here.
It's fun to see it in another angle.
Mhm.
I haven't stretched.
Uh huh.
Yeah, I stretched the nose a little bit.
So you can see also how, how it doesn't make any sense from another angle,
yep.
With this little overlap thing here,
I'm pretty sure I just
on the on the X. And the Y.
So here's the X.
Yeah, it looks like here,
here's the X.
Here's the why
know that.
Uh huh.
I'm upset.
Sorry.
You can see those two
movements
and then I just put
a noise modifier on top of that
and I made sure that I put the same noise modifier on
the next bone and then the next bone on the same axis.
But I shifted it So
it goes, Let me see. This is
For example, if I took the X. one.
This shows face 21.
Next one x rotation.
This one says
uh
Face 21 also.
Am I? Oh yeah,
no, I meant the offsets.
So
face to anyone. But the offset is one you go to the last one.
The offset is too, so it goes from 01 to surprise, surprise.
It's offset by one frame
meaning that
whatever jerky motion is going to happen,
that thing is also going to happen one frame later
to the next bone and then the next bone.
So you're going to have this
offset. So no matter what happened.
Um, but on top of that,
of course to fit the frame and to make it
look a little bit better from the camera's perspective,
especially when it's pulled
back and forth.
I had to animate on top of that.
And sometimes when you put noise like that,
it's of course
quite random.
You you go through the face and you find
something that kind of fits what you're looking for.
But even then there's probably going to be a few
frames where it kind of goes a little bit wonky.
Um
or from the camera's perspective, it goes a little bit strange.
So you might want to go into those uh,
into those frames and just tweak them a little bit yourself.
Just do it manually. It's fine.
Here you can see
all the different glorious bones. I had animated.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Good times. Good times
with coral ears.
I did something similar
similar to the little
berry overlap thing. I'm a jake over there.
So yep, accent set
and
yeah,
same thing. So if I take the next one, I go to X.
Same values but offset what
go to the next one.
Same,
same values are set to
a little, it's like a practical little cheat.
one thing that you might notice
when you look at coral
and if you want to do coral, if you want to animate quarter yourself
ah
If you take the eyelid bones
so you take this islet up control
and you start taking it down.
He becomes
angry.
Look at that,
look at that angry guy.
So to kind of get off,
take this to keep oh you
so as he's going for a blink.
Yeah, it looks kind of unappealing and angry.
This
uhh
it's just an inherent problem with character design and the rig
and it's really there is really no elegant solution.
So what I did every time he goes for a blink or he's kind of squinting.
I needed to cheat it. So what I would do is that I would
take these extra bones
that controlled
the eyelids. The
It's the one right in the corner and the one closer to the corner corner,
especially the Upper one.
Sometimes I would tweak the lower one also
and just push it push it in.
Um
By doing that.
I made him so like, so this is the original post
And here's the one I did.
So you can see this massive difference
between pure anger
and being
a little bit more closer to
uh well coral, I mean corals, he's kind of he's always perpetually happy.
But even when he goes into something you don't want to have that weird angle going on.
Even if he's supposed to be angry. So you you make it a little bit milder.
And one of one of my favorite bones to play around with is this one
the mouth up tune.
So that one gives a lot of flesh to the, to the snout.
It's so cute.
All right, and
here's the little squirt
you can see, it doesn't even fit
just from the camera's perspective. It's fine but
doesn't actually fit.
Um I probably did at one point and then I tweaked something,
I fixed something and some stuff got
pushed to the side.
So I ended up just making something that worked from the camera's perspective.
And
this thing just has I think a shape key or something. Yeah, there's a shape key
and the value.
Do, let's check it will take a look at the value. Yeah. There we go.
To make it a little bit more dropped, like
and then I just flipped it around and it's still the same mush.
And there's nothing really happening now. The message just there.
Yeah.
So if you want to see more of this stuff, uh let me know uh
it's I think it's kind of interesting for people to see um
an animal going through the process and I'm going over the files.
If you're a cloud subscriber, thank you so much for subscribing.
It's uh your contribution is well appreciated and hopefully
we can make some more cool stuff with it.
Oh thank you
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