My storyboard reel

My brand new storyboard reel for your inspection and (hopefully) enjoyment :-)

HPI racing

First teaser for something.... Stay tuned, I think there is much more to come.

"Wrapped Up" wrapped up!

I just finalized "Wrapped Up", a short film I wrote and directed. The DVD is on its way to Annecy festival. Here goes... :)

"Wrapped Up" is the result of a collaborative effort of CG artists, who liked the premise and agreed to participate for fun. The film was co-produced with Crew972, who generously backed up the film with facilities, pipeline, a place to work in together, moral support and manpower.

Credits:
Written, storyboarded and directed by yours truely.
Design - me, Rafi Ben Aharon and Irena Tsibulka, plus some help from Elin Rozen.
Original Score - Assaf Shlomi.
Sound Design - Nati Zeindenstandt
Modeling - Irean Tsibulka, Jonathan Katzman and Roni Yahel
Shading - Irena Tsibulka and Dana Gussman
Layout - Paul Wolf, Yonni Arroussi and Kobi Levi
Rigging - Menashe Morobuse
Animation - Liron Aluf, Gabi Berger, Shuki Gamliel, Kobi Levi, and myself.
Render - Irena Tsibulka, Yanir Kleiman, Arik Jana
Composite - Yanir Kleiman and Irena Tsibulka
Produced by me and Maria Veskan
Executive producer - Dror Daliot

Special thanks go to Irena, who worked tirelessly and made the film possible; Gabi and Liron, who did a lot of work and also designed a poster and a website for the film; Crew 972, who had been very helpful and cooperative in every way; my girlfriend and fellow animator Elin Rozen, who listened to my ideas and added her own ideas and generally put up with me working on this film on weekends and evenings; and Dror Daliot, who was the first to notice and mention that the stars are aligned to allow a short film to be made.

Thanks you everybody, and see you in June at Annecy!

Catch!

A while back, I tried to come up with a 4-legged animation exercise - and somehow ended up with this silly 1 minute short. Maybe I'll even animate it some day, who knows :0)

Click the picture to see the complete storyboard.

Bird flew

I've been wanting to try animating a small bird for ages, bun never got around to it. So when I started on this silly short film venture, I thought - hey, as long as it's silly, it might as well have a bird in it. So here we go - my first bird animation test. What say you?

Facial animation concept

This here is a very small test I made to show how a mouth might work for this character (right click + save as on the picture). The idea is that most of the time there will be no mouth, and it will only pop up for stuff like fear or laughter. Don't mind the actual animation, it wasn't meant to be perfect.
The "facial rig" is very simple. Most of the animation is done with free Translation/Rotation/Scale animation. There are a few morph controls for the mouth, and one squash/stretch control for the whole face, just to make it feel a bit flexible.

Walk test

Here's a walk test for the main character (right click+save as). The first link is a panning camera render, the second is a fixed camera.

Once again, it's not 100% polished - there's a lot of fiddling around to be made, especially around the arms. I tried to suggest an innocent and somewhat anxious personality. Oh, and the thing in his hand is a lunch box. :)

This walk was surprisingly difficult for me to animate. I made four or five really bad attempts before this one, two of which were in 2D. I knew exactly what I was going for, but every time I tried, I ended up with a boring, stiff, strange walk.

The first positive step was realizing that all my failed tests look more or less the same. It meant I was stuck in a pattern that lead me to the same dead-end again and again. The task was therefore to break that pattern; and the way to do that is always to think and to research.

First, I discovered that I was thinking in the classic "four keys" formula (contact, squash, passing position, stretch), whereas this fast walk feels more like a "two keys" kind of thing (up-down up-down, one-two one-two).

Research was a bit tricky, because no real kid walks on six (frames per step). However, I realized that my inspiration for the timing came from thinking of him as an anxious small animal of some sort; so, oddly enough, I chose to use the hind legs of a trotting fox. The research gave me my second hint: the contact position was also the high point of the fox's pelvis, and the passing position was the low point. This was an option I didn't think about, because in a usual human walk the pelvis hits its up/down extremes in other positions.

These two clues were really all that was needed for me to break the pattern and start going in a new and better direction. I hope you like the result.

As always, constructive comments are more than welcome.

First animation tests!

Here are my first two animation tests for the short (right click + save as on each picture).

Both test have been animated moving forward in space (the render camera simply pans with them). I said it before, and I'll say it again: you understand movement better when you don't try to cheat it into an in-place cycle.

Keep in mind that this is not furnished stuff, but a crude first attempt designed to research the contrast of timing and weight between these two 4-legged types. For what it is, I'm pretty pleased with the result. Constructive comments will be rewarded with a big smile.

P.S.

I know the bear thing is confusing, especially if you're not used to watching stepped animation. Just keep it running for a few seconds, I think it will fall into place.

Edited:
For those of you who can't stand the strangeness of smooth pan with stepped animation, here's an alternative render with static camera. Hope that's better :)

Quick & Dirty Storyboarding (2)

[continued from previous post]

As promised, here are some specific things I found useful in my quest for simplicity:

1. I started out drawing on a 400x225 canvas size, but later decided to go even smaller. The boards I posted were drawn on a 200x112 canvas, which physically limited my ability to refine.
2. My previous attempts had 2-3 frames per shot, as I would try to convey the progress within the scenes. Later I decided to try and keep to a single frame per shot, which really helped me stay with the big picture (for the final storyboard I will need more drawings, of course - but not for this initial stage).
   
3. In an effort to keep the staging simple and clear, I started attaching a short line of text to each frame, describing the "statement" of the drawing (e.g. "takes out sandwich", "notices bird").
   
4. Every time I felt a need to start fiddling with something that looked wrong, or I had an great idea I wanted to add - I attached a note instead . My rough board is full of stuff like "could be cut" and "camera closer + pan up". Once it's there, I can relax - I know I'll remember to change it in a later stage.
   

I hope these ideas would help others avoid some of my mistakes. If you have more ideas about how to avoid complicating stuff, don't hold back! :)

D.

Quick & Dirty Storyboarding

So here it is - the raw, crude, totally not-working-yet storyboard for my silly gag short film. If you don't understand what's in it, that's because it wasn't meant for anybody but me to understand. If you do understand, well, just don't tell anybody how silly it is :). The reason I'm posting it is to share some thoughts about the process.

I know that some people are such master draftsmen and storyboard artists, that they can draw and tell a story at the same time. Not being a master anything, I need a chance to explore my storytelling ideas without having to actually draw.

I therefore decided to go through the whole story and just note (not draw!) visual ideas as they come, trying not to edit myself too much. I knew the result was going to be far from working - but at least it would be something to work with. The result is in front of you. I think it worked - I feel that I now have a solid piece of raw material that I can start molding into shape.

In the next post, I'll mention a few "tricks" that helped me stay out of too much detail. I'll also say a few words about the excellent storyboarding software I used, called springboard. Stay tuned.

Environment concept sketches

As promised, here are some attempts of exploring environment ideas for my short. The first one was supposed to be a quick exploration sketch, but got out of hand and ended up taking a couple of hours. I still like the result though... The other 3 were done very quickly. Hope you like.

All in Photoshop.

A thumbnail suggestion for the my short film's main characters. The dog is probably going to be change a lot though.

Girl character

Thumbnail concept for one of the characters in my short.

A journey begins...

This here is the rather silly beginning of a short film I'm currently working on. It started out, as animation shorts sometimes do, with a need to beef up my portfolio. So I cooked up an idea involving a lots of different creatures: kids, grown ups, birds, 4 legged animals, huge purple aliens - it had everything! The story itself was nothing fancy, just a silly gag - but it provided a fair excuse for lots of fun animation. So, as long as I wasn't trying to sell it as the story of the century, I figured it'll do the work.

Anyway, soon after drawing the character study above, the idea kind of took off and evolved into a real story. The new story has only a few characters and, unfortunatelly, no purple aliens. On the other hand, it does have meaning and honesty and drama. Can't win 'em all, I guess...

As a lesson from past experiences, I've decided this is not going to be a "project" - it's going to be a hobby. So I'm kind of playing around with it. I don't know if and when it will be finished, and I don't care. We'll just see what happens.

This blog is probably going to become a bit of a project blog - probably more than half the posts are going to be short-related. Hope you guys enjoy the ride; I certainly do.