A quick update

To be honest theres not alot to update on a day to day basis as animation is in full swing. Myself Alec and tom are all animating each of our characters and trying our very best to make them look like stop motion. I have more shots/scenes than the other guys due to storyline however if work load gets too much I will pass on small sections.

I have found lip syncing to be the most time consuming process so far - Cornelius is the only talking character you see. I had a really bad day the other day as I spent a whole day animating the blendshapes and listening to Dave Ross' voice over and over and when I finally came to animate the actual body after finishing lip sync - the teeth and tongue compleelty messed up and flew everywhere in the scene - I was gutted to say the least and left for home disheartened at the waste of a day.

Friday was better as I produced the short but important blarghh scene. Alec helped me accomplish the exact confused facial expression pulled by Cornelius after William has just slapped himself. Its basically the point Cornelius looses his temper with the Will. that went well and I managed to animate more jerky and stop mo like. I found the key is to animate with less key frames, sharp sudden movements combined with a few subtle ones achieve the nice effect.

I thought I should post Team Pedro's 7 golden rules on how to accomplish the stop mo look after millions of tests:

1. A wave deformer. set to wobble only when the character is in motion. Stops when character is staionary. This effect ahieves the really nice look that the model is being prodded and squashed by the animators fingerprints each frame.

2.Animated bump texture. Again set only to translate when character is in motion. When done right - looks awesomeeee. The finger prionts go all over the shop and add to the stop mo amateur affect.

3.Sharp, stepped, minimally keyed animation. Results a very jittery linear style of animation. Perfecor stop mo even if it is hard to pull yourself away from the nice arcs and perfectly smooth animation you so desire.

4. RAM render at 25fps BUT skip 1 frame per sec in After Effects. Causes the animation to look even more jittery and stop mo like.

5. Occlusion is Vital.

6. Motion track the character and occlusion layer to match the moving camera background - prevents the layer sitting still.

7. Design style. Wallace and Gromit style mouth. Instantly looks like plastacine!

I dont really want to post any of the finished movie scenes so far as it will ruin the final film suprise :s Im currently rendering my new scene so gtg....