Winter Gala Animations

FINALLY, here is a reel of my work from the KCAI Winter Gala Animation Class. The first piece is a short narrative showcasing effects animation. The following clips are all textures that will be projected onto various costumed performers. I own, NONE OF THE MUSIC

"La Seine"

You NEED To Watch This, nuf said.

This is not the final background, but I used this to test the final rendering process for my animation. Everything seems to be working well together. I have roughly 12-15 seconds of animation still needing to be colored.

Pencil Test Depot

http://www.penciltestdepot.com/

I blame this website for the loss of all my free time. I just can never get enough of watching these. To know the finished product and then see the drawings; I suppose this is how astronomers feel when looking at nebulae. You know the beauty that is clear and present to everyone else, but you gain a totally different understanding of it when you see its birthmother.

VOGUE

My apologies for the Madonna reference. I really enjoyed working with a rig in Maya to throw down some emotion key poses. Feast Your Eyes!

SEXY

 SOPHISTICATED

 FASTIDIOUS

New Online Location

I'm putting together a website. Nothing special. Just a more cohesive place to put up my stuff online.
http://drmeloche.com/

Putting Things In Motion

Here are a few successful weight tests animated in Maya. I resolved the exporting issues I was having with playblast, yeah. Now all the videos are in a nice, consistent aspect ratio for easier viewing.

Bouncing Ball - Acting in MAYA

The following exercises are to communicate different forms of movement using the graph editor and key frame animation in MAYA. Sorry, the exercises are short and I'm still finding exporting from MAYA to be tricky.

Collaborative Animation: Progress Report

Last week I began pre-production with Amanda Freeman on a collaborative short animation involving our two characters, Madison & Rico.
Storyboards are all roughed out.

And here are some color tests for possible background color schemes.

Here's another pitch that was considered, but we ended up moving to another idea for the sake of time and wanting to bring the project to completion. There's continuity errors and screen direction flaws, but hey, it's a first pitch.

Maya: Reboot

Didn't want to you all to think I've completely given up on Maya. So, here's what I've produced over the past month in that fantastic (yet relentlessly challenging software).
Here are a few camera shots from the small set that I built (still in progress as far as I'm concerned)

I also have a video (below) of my first successful animation in MAYA. Excitement has begun, oh yes.

MAYA_Bouncing Ball from Douglas Meloche on Vimeo.

Character - Frederick "Rico" Alonso

Age: 26

Eyes: Deep Blue

Hometown: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Languages: English/Spanish

Describing Frederick Alonso is like describing the wind itself. You can know his name and see that he enjoys a simpler way of life, but only when you stop and really feel his music can you come to understand him.

Frederick, known to his friends as “Rico”, was born to a lower middle class family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He spent most of his high school days working as a photographer for the city newspaper and teaching guitar lessons in the school gymnasium. His father worked at the local foundry and often encouraged Rico to consider a trade school. Instead, Rico went on to pursue his musical career and studied classical music on a college scholarship.

Rico participated in a study abroad program that allowed him to spend a year in Barcelona, Spain. There he became heavily influenced by Flamenco. He spent several months, performing with a group of Spanish musicians and they recorded an album that gained some local popularity. He made lifelong friends in Barcelona and promised them he would one day return.

Like all good things, his time in Barcelona came to an end. His sister, Juli, had just been accepted into law school at Penn State University. Overjoyed by her success and at being able to see his family again, Rico returned to the states in good spirits. Juli’s induction ceremony to Penn Law would be an occasion forever marked by tragedy. While Rico was driving Juli home from her ceremony, they got into a terrible car accident that claimed Juli’s life. This threw Rico into a depression and he was overcome with grief and remorse.

The next few years were exceptionally difficult, his father’s health began to rapidly decline after Juli’s death and Rico’s father passed away in a few short months. Rico struggled to make ends met so that his mother could keep the house, but they eventually had to move into a poorer neighborhood. He was able to then find work as a bartender and he attempted to get back into music by joining one of the bands that performed each week. His time with them didn’t last long. He quickly discovered that hard rock called on him to express too many things he just didn’t feel.

Rico came to cope with the death of his sister and father through his music; which now reflects the guilt that he carries, but is brightened by the memories of loved ones and the hope that holds together what remains. Rico is not a man of any particular faith or creed, but as a spiritual person, he recognizes a higher power. He hopes that Juli’s spirit can forgive him and that they’ll see each other again in the next life.

As far as relationships are concerned, Rico finds it difficult to become deeply, emotionally involved with one person. He finds enjoyment in surrounding himself with larger groups of people. He’s drawn to the excitement of crowds and the exchange of ideas. He has formulated strong opinions about the world, and can at times appear cynical. He’s fascinated by new people and will happily spend hours just talking with complete strangers.

Despite his outgoing and welcoming nature, when he finds himself alone with another person he becomes uncomfortable and insecure. Internally, he wants to say the right things and keep the other person happy, but he also isn’t sure of what he wants out of a relationship and is not particularly confident after all that’s happened. This causes him to appear distant and uninterested.

His musical career is getting back on track now that he’s returned to teaching guitar lessons. He is trusted and respected by most of his neighbors, because his guitar lessons offer the younger school children a productive activity that keeps them out of the local gangs. He’s also working with a local recording artist to help share his songs of healing. It is a distant dream, but Rico plans to save enough money to move himself and his mother to Spain. He still keeps in touch with his fellow musicians in Barcelona, who assure him that there will always be a place for him should he manage to return.

Stylistic Inspiration:

The visual style of Alberto Giacometti has always intrigued me with it's kinetic appearance. It has a striking lifelike quality while ignoring any sense of photorealism. These images immediately have an emotional impact on me that feels tragic, and that drives me to empathize with the character.

Renoir and Max Beckmann both have this fantastic way of approaching the figure in a way that is gestural and yet also structural. Renoir is able to reference the figure by implying key features and hinting at the movement in the scene. Beckmann is very detail oriented and his figures take on a more geometric look, but the mass is clearly communicated. This particular image from Beckmann is a self portrait he did in 1918 before his mental collapse. Striving for these qualities in a animated character would bring out a more dramatic nature in the character and aid his story and overall situation.

Finally, I had to consider how an animated character with a more gestural appearance would move on screen. The most striking visuals I can recall with a consistent energetic movement are a few music videos that employ rotoscoping techniques to give the narrative of the song more depth and grit.

In the case of "Take On Me" by A-ha, the fact that the male and female characters are separated by two different worlds is emphasized by the more graphic appearance of the comic world the male lives in.

Linkin Park's "Breaking The Habit" uses a sketchy, harsh style to illustrate the fragile lives of the characters in the music video. The main character goes from a state of non-movement and actually reverses his death by a decision to change his fate. This moment is communicated through exaggerated camera moves and the movements of his body forcing the perspective of each shot.

Animatic- Mary Mary

Some of the timing needs to be tightened up. The beginning can move along a bit faster and the ending shot needs to resolve more quickly. Once fully colored and all that good stuff, then this will be pretty banging. I am totally feeling the "School House Rock" style digi-puppet caricature.

Daybreaks with After Effects

Daybreaks_edited lighting from Douglas Meloche on Vimeo.
Thank God For After Effects!! The lighting on the original file for this is absolutely awful. Color Correction and curves cured a lot of that. I know most of the shots are now too yellow, but hey, it was my first stop-motion short.

Collaboration Complete "Great Fugue ~excerpt"

This project has been a work in progress for roughly three weeks now, and I'm very pleased with what we came up with. I owe a good portion of the success to Kelly Major, a sophomore at the Kansas City Art Institute. I composed the after effects animated punctuation and did some of the pastels based on the animatic she generated. Kelly then put together a carefully timed slideshow of the pastels for the atmospheric feel in the background. The music is a twenty second excerpt from Beethoven's "Great Fugue". Enjoy

Look Who's Talking

You've probably been wondering what I've been up to for the past week or so...your life must be very uneventful if that's the case.

After interviewing a fellow student, with their consent, I've generated a character that will be lip-synced to their voice. Here's the animatic with some rough animation and timed key poses.


look at that sexy background image. Yeah, I made that.

Color Tests

Okay, I expanded on some of the motion tests and discovered "Colorize - Set Gradient" is a more effective way to give color to my pre-comp layers than "Colorama" Why? It gives me more control over how the color will look overall, it has an eye-dropper tool that can match any color onscreen, and it doesn't alter any opacity or masking layers.


Color Test 2 from Douglas Meloche on Vimeo.

EUREKA!

After many cups of coffee and a few days to build up my patience with MAYA, I discovered that the Normals on the cloth were being disrupted by intersecting polygon faces after having extruded it. I went into the Hypergraph: Connections and deleted the extrusion step. Now, I have a beautifully rendered still life with much more desirable shadows.

MAYA Troubles

Maya has this habit of making me feel really good and then taking a cyber dump on my self-esteem.
Here's my pretty little still life that I modeled and created the materials for. Heck I even lit the thing.

After all the time I put into it, I was feeling really good about the whole ordeal. I was chilling in class, watching the tutorial thiking, "See what happens when you really apply yourself..." Unfortunately, the answer to that question came all too soon.

What on earth happened?! The right side of the composition looks great. The middle can be improved. The cloth decided to take all the shadows and add a dose of stupid. I checked all my light and render settings. They're fine. I even conformed all the cloth's Normals once I made sure they're facing outward like they're supposed to be.

If there's any Maya gurus out there, I'm all ears.

Internship: Paul Mesner Puppet Studio

This internship is going great so far. It's exactly what I was looking for. It's laid back and teaches me valuable skills I can use. Not to mention that the scheduling is flexible. 

I am learning to use a sewing machine. The stitching and pattern for the hands of cloth puppets is tricky. Plus, I was using their "training material". It's rougher to work with, but it's a cheap muslin. So, I can afford to make mistakes. Pipe Cleaners are placed in the fingers after turning the hands. When turning, always turn the fingers inside out BEFORE the whole hand. This saves you the trouble of fishing them out later.

Below, are two forty year old marionettes that I'm helping repair. I whipped up a few replacement ankle joints by taking a bandsaw to a sturdy plastic bin.

ROSTO'S ROCKIN

This news article I came across has only heightened my sorrow that "Monster of Nix" from Studio Rosto A.D will not be released in the USA, BUT this is all very exciting just the same.

This article does a special effects breakdown of how "Willy" the lead role of Rosto's latest production was brought onto the screen. Rosto's style of computer animation has always baffled me. I keep asking, "Was there stop motion mixed in that shot?" or "I would swear that's live footage". Turns out that a few members of "U N R E A L" (the Netherlands special effects studio that is working on "The Hobbit") participated in the process of modeling a 3D scan of a LIVE ACTION actor playing Willy, in costume. Modern motion capture software just wasn't matching the level of detail needed for this film. So a scaled replica is scanned and rendered into the software and then motion capture is able to step in.
THIS IS GOOD STUFF - http://nextengine.blogsite.org/?p=56

Oh, and just so you have an idea of the finished product...The official trailer!