Replicating Creature Stop-motion in Maya

8. References


Website Articles

1. Gross, . C., . WILLIS O'BRIEN STOP-MOTION PIONEER . [Online] Avaiable at: http://silentmoviemonsters.tripod.com/TheLostWorld/LWOBIE.html [Accessed ].
2. Kalt , R. K. & Hannotte, D., . Welcome to the World of Charles R. Knight . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.charlesrknight.com/ [Accessed ]. 
3.  CGSociety :: Production Focus., . Coraline - One Step at a Time for the Puppet of a Thousand Faces.. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.charlesrknight.com/ [Accessed ]. 
4. Whiteley, A., 2009. Coraline: Rapid Prototyping 3D Models. [Online] (Updated feb 20) Avaiable at: http://www.andywhiteley.com/blog/2009/02/20/coraline-rapid-prototyping-3d-models/ [Accessed ]. 
5. Reilly, D. O., 2007. Mixing stop motion Animation with Live Action Movies! From Early Days to Today!. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.stopmotioncentral.com/articles-1.html [Accessed ]. 
6. Gasek, T., . IMPERFECTION IN ANIMATION. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.stopmotionworks.com/articles/imperftanim.htm [Accessed ]. 
7. Stop Motion Works., 2005. Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection. [Online] (Updated January) Avaiable at: http://www.stopmotionworks.com/articles/rhearlyrs.htm [Accessed ]. 
8. Harryhausen , R., 2009. Ray Harryhausen | The Official Website. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.rayharryhausen.com/pre-dynamation.php [Accessed ]. 
9. Koban , C. J., . WALLACE AND GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.craigerscinemacorner.com/Reviews/wallace_and_gromit_the_curse_of_the_were_rabbit.htm [Accessed ]. 
10. eHow., . How to Calculate Stop Motion Animation Timing. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.ehow.com/how_5830552_calculate-stop-motion-animation-timing.html [Accessed ].

Videos

1. McClure, D., . Hollywood Dinosaur Chronicles. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNatGDTb0iY&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ]. 
2. rogerkify, . ., . DINOSAURS from "THE LOST WORLD" . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLVt6bMJ8Ds&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
3. nationalmediamuseum, . ., . John Landis & Ray Harryhausen in conversation . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRv5jqu8QMM&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
4. Universal Pictures., . Advanced Stop Motion test for Jurassic Park . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEK9mitagS8&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
5. ILM, . ., . ILM Development of CGI 1980s - 1990s . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miVlDKGa8F4&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ]. 
6. FocusFeatures, . ., . "Coraline" - The Biggest Smallest Movie . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cayVMHSRHZI&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
7. FocusFeatures, . ., . Coraline - Making Faces . [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oVF3-7zvP0&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
8. Morningside Productions and Columbia Pictures., . The Awakening of Talos - Jason & The Argonauts (1963). [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q17dl_aUNf4&feature=player_embedded [Accessed ].
    

Reports and Articles

1. CINEFX., 2004. CINEFX 97. : CINEFX. 
2. Huffman, B., 2002. Working with Ray. . Bournemouth: NCCA.  
3. Niman, J., . Stop-motion Simulation. . Bournemouth: NCCA. 

Images

1. Canemaker , J., 2005. Winsor McCay : His Life and Art . : Harry N Abrams Inc. 
2.  Judd, T., 2008. Spring Lake Heritage Festival to honor animation pioneer Winsor McCay. [Online] (Updated 2008) Avaiable at: http://blog.mlive.com/chronicle/2008/05
3. Bradford., 2010. Harryhausen Pledges Life's Work to National Media Museum . [Online] Avaiable at: http://visitbradford.blogspot.com/2010/06/harryhausen-pledges-lifes-work-to.html [Accessed ]. 
4. Brownlee, J., 2006. Table Of Malcontents Just another WordPress weblog The Complete Ray Harryhausen Creature List. [Online] Avaiable at: file:///home/g9075218/images%20references/The%20Complete%20Ray%20Harryhausen%20Creature%20List%20|%20Table%20Of%20Malcontents.html [Accessed ].
5. starwarsinterviews., 2010. Phil Tippett interview | Stop Motion Animator | Star Wars . [Online] Avaiable at: http://starwarsinterviews1.blogspot.com/search/label/Stop%20Motion%20Animator [Accessed ].  
6. RKO/Turner Broadcasting., . King Kong and Son of Kong, 1933. [Online] Avaiable at: http://www.sdnhm.org/exhibits/dinosrr/movie_posters.html [Accessed ].

Creating old-school Creature stop motion animation in Maya

7. Conclusion

I learned a lot from the errors and mistakes I made when animating the rig. Fortunately I was able to rectify these mistakes by following certain guidelines as well reinventing my own which I believe helped me produce animations which bore the visual feel and movement normally found on traditional stop-motion animations. I yearn to further increase this aspect and style of animation by integrating real actors being chased by a stop-motion dinosaur on a live action background to depict the scenes and movies constructed by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, or even incorporating my sequence of animations to the clips generated by the great man Harryhausen himself. Another pathway would be to incorporate two characters of which one is animated using the style and strategies illustrated above while the other is animated using traditional stop-motion and integrate them onto a live action background where the viewer would not be able to differentiate between the computer generated animation and the stop-motion sequence.

Replicating Creature Stop-motion in Maya

7. Conclusion

I learned a lot from the errors and mistakes I made when animating the rig. Fortunately I was able to rectify these mistakes by following certain guidelines as well reinventing my own which I believe helped me produce animations which bore the visual feel and movement normally found on traditional stop-motion animations. I yearn to further increase this aspect and style of animation by integrating real actors being chased by a stop-motion dinosaur on a live action background to depict the scenes and movies constructed by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, or even incorporating my sequence of animations to the clips generated by the great man Harryhausen himself. Another pathway would be to incorporate two characters of which one is animated using the style and strategies illustrated above while the other is animated using traditional stop-motion and integrate them onto a live action background where the viewer would not be able to differentiate between the computer generated animation and the stop-motion sequence.

Replicating Creature Stop-motion in Maya

6. The Stop-Motion Animation Process

6.6 Render passes, Compositing and other additional procedures

For my damsel in distress animation piece I rendered the dinosaur and the woman model on Maya Physical Sun & Sky background to produce even lighting around both characters. I then extracted the silhouettes of both characters with the pre-multiply node from Nuke and blended them in accordance to the background image.

For my second animation I took a still live background image to be used for the composition. The dinosaur underwent several passes such as Diffuse, Ambient occlusion, Reflection, Specular, Rim-light and Shadow. Finally the composition was tweaked to blend it with the background.

Original image is pre-multiplied and color corrected to extract the characters

Painted the ground on the original background---->The original background image and the altered image containing the painted ground

Render passes (from left to right) - diffuse, ambient, reflection, specular, rim-light, shadow.

Replicating Creature Stop-motion in Maya

6. The Stop-Motion Animation Process

6.5. Integrating the Stop-Motion sequence from Maya onto a live background image

Since I finally found the understanding to replicate traditional stop-motion in Maya, I wanted to try another go at it using the exact strategies and scenarios used for the damsel in distress animation piece. For this new scene I animated the dinosaur attempting to munch off a carcass. But this time I wanted to composite the dinosaur onto a live background. I portrayed it to appear similar to that of a stop-motion animated dinosaur toy on a live action background. After the animation was complete, I did some different render passes, took it to Nuke and composited it over the live background.

                                                 Finally blending the animation on live background image---> Blending the animation onto a live background image.

Replicating Creature Stop-motion in Maya

6. The Stop-Motion Animation Process

6.4. Successful production of Stop-Motion animation in Maya

On my second attempt I approached the animation in accordance to traditional stop-motion where for instance each part of the figure is moved, the whole pose made and then finally the image frame is taken. The only complication with this procedure is that in traditional stop-motion animation the artist tends to see everything according to the eye perspective which is wide and freely operated but when using an animation software such as Maya our eyes tend to be restricted on accordance to the view-port through which the operator is using to view an object.

For this attempt I decided to scrub the dinosaur-robot slapstick comedy scene away and attempted to construct a damsel in distress scenario influenced by the early landmark stop-motion sequence found in Kingkong (1930). To achieve this I downloaded a woman rig (from creative crash) and animated her (not stop-motion) being chased by the carnivorous Dinosaur. The woman rig is called “Alice” and is created by “Joel Anderson”, I added the camouflage cap and the top for the woman to suite her for the jungle scenario . 

The camera had to be moved around to identify which part of the Dinosaur model the control rig was moving. But due to these restrains if I had started posing all of the controls and keying it each frame it would have ended up being a very vigorous process. To overcome this I had to focus away from the Animation graph editor (because in traditional stop-motion it's about the poses along with "on the go" type animation) and concentrate on how each and every pose coincided properly with the next frame pose.

I then set about adding some key-frames for the foot controls of the Dinosaur. For example the right foot is at the rear on frame two, and then moves to the front at frame sixteen giving fourteen frames offset (accordance to traditional computer animation). Because this eases out the position where each foot is going to move, and as a result, becomes more manageable on where the whole body is going to end up for that end key-frame. Next I started keying each foot position in twos. Now the feet started to move. Since these controls are not parented to the torso control, the whole body (except the feet along with the knees) does not move. To counter this I started moving the torso control (which is the parent control for all the other controls except the global and feet controls) along the Z-axis and keying it along every “two” frames so that I end up at a position which relates according to the position of the feet.

Now that the whole body moves along with the feet, I started to animate the other controls. For example the head on every two, but still not tweaking the other attributes of the torso control (apart from z-axis movement). I found out it was best to animate this control (torso control) later, because when tweaked it contributed to the movement of the whole body (since it’s the parent control) thus becoming more excessive and confusing on animating the other controls.

It was better to animate the tail after the torso was done, as the torso contributed to the direction in which the tail rotated and swayed. Once the second attempt was done it gave a much better result and was looking akin to stop motion. At this point the animation was retaining the trademark jerky movement associated with traditional stop-motion. Therefore I wanted to add some fluid continuity (for, e.g. the head control) as it was showing more jerky characteristics. I also wanted to produce two versions of this animation, one showing a bit more smooth aesthetic while the other showing more jerky movements. 

Even-though when I was done with the second attempt I still had some problems with certain controls. For instance, the head and tail were not showing the desired movement in certain frames. To overcome this I fixed some keyed frames to match up with the previous and later keyed frames.

         After producing a better result in the movement to appear akin to stop-motion I then attempted to figure out how to incorporate more strobing (jerky) movements and feel to the animation. This was relatively simple as I randomly deleted some keyed frames of different controls in different places of the timeline as well as increased and decreased some of the attribute values of the controls to show some exceeded limit (this brought up the weird “popness” on certain parts of the body during the movement). 

Later I rendered the models with Maya “physical sun and sky”, downloaded a jungle background concept art (as there wasn’t enough time to create one), added the ground onto the concept art image using Photo-shop and finally compositing it all along with the modified background using Nuke.

Now it's looking much better than the previous attempt (still not jerky enough), thou I think it's wrong to show a smooth tracking shot for the animation ( it doesn't feel stop-motion)---> The near successful attempt (still not enough jerky movements to the animation). Thought I believe it appears rather ungainly due to the addition of a smooth tracking shot for the animation as it is not normally associated with the look and feel of traditional Stop-Motion.

                                                             The same animation from previous footage, but composited on a painted background. 

                                                                                       This is the more jerky version of the previous animation.-> This version incorporates more of the jittery movements when compared to the previous animation.

Graph showing more offset on amplitude thus giving more jerkiness.

 

Replicating Creature Stop-motion in Maya

6. The Stop-Motion Animation Process

6.3. Taking note on what makes an animation appear Stop-Motion

           

          Stop-motion or "model" animation, which includes clay animation, strikes a cord in the human psyche with strong physical identification. Here is a form of animation that has the ability of all other forms of animation. It can tell stories through character, conflict and resolve, and visual interest satisfying the audience's psychological identification needs. Yet it relies on photography to reveal physical reality. The added benefit is that there is something very fundamental about the physical reality of actual models, puppets, lighting and imperfection that we can identify and understand as humans. This imperfection is in fabrication and animated movement. Successful stop-motion films celebrate their imperfections. For example, there is a joy in seeing the fingerprints of the artist in a clay animated film. When computer animation incorporates the imperfections of movement and physical flaws that are inherent in model animation, then it can successfully touch its audience. This imperfection is what we are as human beings. We are made of infinite textures. We understand that there is no perfect symmetry in our lives. We all have "flaws" and we struggle to work with what we have as humans. Animation can take us away from these imperfections of our world. It can allow us to escape our reality and inspire us but we can never ultimately deny our human nature. This is the strength and advantage of physical stop-motion animation. Through new technology such as advance fabrication materials like silicone, "frame grabbers", digital cameras and composite layering , stop motion has the ability to strive for more perfect movement and fabrication but it can never ultimately deny its real physical qualities and limitations. It is very much like us as humans. We strive for higher goals and fantasy often reaching quite high but we are always working in this real and physical world. 

           Traditional Stop-motion easily portrays to a viewer that it is Stop-motion due to the fact it shows that imperfection feel to the animation. As I mentioned before, Ray Harryhausen's addition of jerky stop-motion on Talos (Jason and the Argonauts (1963)) made it look more bizarre and in some instances unique. Through Talos, Ray showed that quintessential feeling of stop-motion on bringing lifeless objects to life and showing more of a fantasy essence.

                                              From 3:00 you can see the awakening of "Talos", which clearly demonstrates "Jerky Stop-motion".