Rigging with 3D Technology

Here's where things start to become more complicated. I just took a 3D Animation class and, I gotta say, it really opened my eyes on how complex animation can really get. There were so many gizmos and gadgets on our modeling program that it made my head spin. There are many modeling programs that deal with 3D. The program I learned with was Maya. Maya is a fantastic modeling program that a lot of professionals use to design characters and animate characters. Animation industries such as DreamWorks and Disney uses Autodesk Maya to create their movies. Pixar just recently created a program called RenderMan that they now only use, and I hear that it's a lot better than Maya. But, you know, all of these industries are coming up with a ton of new technology to be added to these programs that makes their movies look all that realistic.
Rigging is a major aspect in those programs. Rigging is what makes the characters move. It only exists in 3D animation or flash animation done on computers. It's hard to explain its elements without visually showing how it works, but it's basically building a skeleton around the 3D character model and attaching controls to its joints and limbs. If you think about it, it'd be a lot similar to manipulating a puppet. The strings are connected to elbows, knees, hands, feet, shoulders, hips, and the head. From there you can control the puppet by moving each string in a way as to where the puppet is moving in a certain way. Rigging a character is adding those controls so that it'll be easier to move the character around. Creating rigs is a very difficult thing to do in animation, but there are people who do it and it makes the animation flow so much smoother. I've worked with a rigged character and it was really fun to play around with, but it's very time consuming to get the character working smoothly. This type of advanced technology has really come a long way in the animation industry and it very clearly shows with today's movies.
Zootopia has quickly become one of my all time favorite Disney movies. I'm not sugar coating it, I've seen this movie five times in theaters. I simply could not get enough of it. The animation is so beautiful and the story line is fantastic. Disney came up with a new program to make animal fur looked realistic on screen and they did an amazing job with it. I'm making it a goal to try and work with Rich Moore in the future because he's managed to help produce two of my favorite Disney movies; Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia. I'm shooting for TV animation, but I wouldn't mind ending up working on movies either. If you haven't seen this movie yet then I'd definitely advice seeing it because it's freaking awesome. If you have seen it, who's your favorite character? I don't really have one, but Nick and Judy are adorable.
Coming up, sketchbooks and internships!

From Our World to Theirs

 

So when I said I'd be back soon, I meant that I'd be back eventually. Eventually starts now...many months later. I apologize. I'm still working things out with my life. Moving on! Just thought I'd start with a little fun one here by talking about mixing animation with live action. If there's anything more in the world I would love to do, it'd be to star in a movie like the image above, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and had to have an animated character interact with me. That would be the dream for me. Until then, however, I'll just stick behind a desk and draw.

I was surprised to see how many movies had a mixture of live action and animation. The movie I posted was the only one I only thought of considering it was a large part of my childhood, but there are so many more! And not all of them have both animation and live action interacting with each other. The Pagemaster is only a fourth live action and the rest is animated. Mary Poppins has non animated people interacting with two dimensional characters as well as Space Jam. There's hundreds of movies that have CGI animation in it like movies that may have talking animals (Narnia series), but I'm just going to focus on those that have actual cartoon characters in them.

It's freaking amazing how much effort is put into making something like this...and so incredibly interesting. If you ever watch the documentary they did for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, then you'd have a pretty clear idea. The actors for the film are fed lines from people off screen (since the cartoon characters aren't really there) and they have to physically act out the scene as if there was someone there. If that character were physically interacting with the actor/actress, then that actor/actress has to pretend it's really happening to them. Talk about acting dedication. For real objects that were being handled from those cartoon figures, the crew would need to think of ways to get the object to move on its own as if it were really being used. They would use a mixture of puppeteers and mechanical robots to help get that movement.

I think Who Framed Roger Rabbit is my favorite live action/animated feature because of how real it looks and the story behind it. It's interesting to know that everything was hand drawn for this movie and the animators would pencil in the characters on top of each key frame of the movie one by one. My hand is already cramping from the sound of that. Then they'd send in the pencil work to the painters who would color in the characters and then they would go through lighting, shading, and shooting each frame with these elements. You can't really beat the spark that traditional animation has, and I'd like to know if there will be any future movies like Roger Rabbit that'll be demonstrating the beauty of that kind of animation.

I would love to work on something that deals with both animation and live action. I've only drawn cartoons in photographs and that's as close as I can get for now. Still, it's so magical to know that we can broaden our imagination to show that the real world and the cartoon world can coincide with one another. I'd live it every day, and I'm hoping to show everyone what it'd be like to live in the shoes of a cartoon character.

I'll talk about rigging next as well as a movie review for one of my favorite Disney movies! (It's a surprise).