So i Finlay watched James Cameron’s Avatar In IMAX 3D over the weekend, It was hard to get tickets i was trying since opening week the line was about two hours to get in the theater but i broke throe and sat 3rd row center, one of the few really good seats. The movie Was visually stunning. The 3D was so well implemented and not over used in a ‘in your face’ kind of way like the amusement parks do just because they can. i am not a movie critique so I wont go into details i will simply say that the movie was amazing and Mr Cameron is a visionary. now that we got that out of the way the minute i steeped out of the cinema i was obsessed, i had to know how? and with what ? and by whom ? all of this marvel was created so after some VFX research i found a bit of info i figured if some one out there was as impressed about this movie as i was maybe they will appreciate this.

The VFX Show Podcast on AVATAR is a must [hear]

Avatar’s VFX Master: Weta Digital’s Joe Letteri interviews [here]

FXGuide Red Center : on the Cameron 3D camera [here]

For thous of you with much nerdiar tendencys like myself the movie was screened using RealD in Imax this wiki is very informative on the subject. Cinefex , the world leading print resource for anything VFX has a very in depth looks at this masterpiece you can pick up a copy (print or digital) [here]

that is all i got for now i will keep at it and will inform you when i come across new information

on a side note this probably wont ever happen but if Mr. Cameron ever reads this id like to say :

“Hello Sir, i wanted to tell you to keep making epic sagas that changes peoples lives and you have changed my life in siginficant way also if you happen to be hiring for the next bigest movie of all time i am your man. “

Hello,

First let me apologize for not posting in a while,

<usual excuses> work has been crazy, no time , moving , packing and my building got hit by a meteor</usual excuses>.

Now that’s done with here is what’s new. I just wrapped up an animation project that was quite long, no mere 30 seconds or 1 min but a full 3min:40sec of motion graphics. Now in our Mograph world that is a lot, (too much in fact) and i noticed something very interesting; my animation is all the same. I don’t mean the look of my animation, i mean the way small background things behave, like having clouds animate in the background and using “wiggle.expression” to animate them instead of using  keyframes. Or when i animate fractal noise to drive a texture i just go in quick and dirty with a “time*45.expression” and leave . Now don’t get me wrong, these ways of animating have their place but here is where i came across my problem: when you have 30 seconds of sky and you throw a wiggle.expression on there and move on it works, but when you are looking at 4 min of sky all of the sudden you see the impersonal machine behavior of expressions. I started seeing  noticeable patterns for all my animations. All the little things i stopped doing like animating evaluation values or complexity and substituting it by the exact same time*15.expression.

Now it may very well be that i don’t know any other expressions so all of them look the same but i figured a computer has a set number of rules it works by and no matter how you dress it up it will end up using the same set of rules to apply it. So i set out to modify my project from machine driven monotone animation to something with a bit of personality, and let me tell you it was hard going from  this :

expression from Motionscript.com

to this:

But it was well worth it. My animation took on character and a life of its own. Which made me feel more accomplished (and much cooler).

I did not go to traditional animation school however and the core principals of the art was something i needed to understand well before i could apply them to my animation. Here are some of the resources i found and used to make a learning curve a bit less curvy (?), than it could have been.

A great 3 part article from fuelyourmotionography.com about everything that i just discussed, only written by some one much more experienced than i am.

Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3

Then i came across a very  interesting video by Nick Campbell form Grayscale Gorilla about how not to let your computer animate you.

The Death of the Keyframe – How expressions are making everything look the same from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

And finally here is a beautiful sample of how manually key-framing your animation can give you 100 times better results

CRAZY ENOUGH – Title Sequence from Jr.canest on Vimeo.

Here are some of the keyframes on that video.

So the underlying point I’m trying to make is – sure you can go ahead and use the built in preset. We all can! But if you really want to stand out from the crowd it’s best to put in the effort to keyframe your animations. After all, nothing that looks awesome was easy to do

That’s all for this time folks. As always i hope that at least one person finds this useful in some way. If you like it, hate it or find it stupid please comment.

Cheers