Here are several shots I have animated within the last 6 months. I am currently available for work.

One intense year of study has come to a close as I have graduated Vancouver Film School and completed my animated short film ‘Growing Up!’

I hope the message of the short film is clear and that it resonates with some people.

I could not have completed this project without the help of my classmates, instructors, and support from friends and family. Thank you!

I’m responsible for all the visual elements of the film. I’m an animation student so that was my main focus in this short, but I also created the story, modeled, textured, rigged, lit, and composited everything myself as well.

I used Maya, Zbrush, Nuke, After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.

When I started this project the end seemed so far away. When I wasn’t satisfied with the initial images I was creating, I remember thinking that I knew what the potential for this project could be and that pushed me to work harder and make dramatic changes by completely remodeling the character and environment. I believe that within my capacity, I took this work as far as I could in the time that I had.

Within the last six months of the program, except for two days of break, I worked every day for the entire six months, that’s 7 days a week and typically a minimum of 12 hour work days, every day, and I don’t regret it. Despite many challenges along the way, both technical and creative, I enjoyed the entire process.

Yesterday was our official graduation and it’s definitely bitter-sweet. It was overwhelming to see my classmate’s work in rapid succession on the ‘big screen.’ I am very fortunate to have been able to work with so many great people this year and have the opportunity to pursue what I love. Thanks for watching!

See more ‘making-of’ things about ‘Growing Up’ in an earlier post here.

Graduation in a movie theatre, it doesn't get better than that.

[Update: I placed 18th out of 202 entries]
Fresh out of VFS and I was anxious to keep working! It’s like an addiction! I was talking to my classmates that we should start a support group for recent graduates, ha! You get so accustomed to going to school every day and working, it’s tough to get out of that routine.

So, I stayed in that routine and decided to finish my first entry into the coveted 11 second club animation competition.

Shooting reference, one of my favorite parts of the process.

The competition is held once a month, hosted by Animation Mentor, they give you 11 seconds of audio, and it’s up to you to create a compelling animation. Then people vote for it over at the 11 second Club website, and they crown a winner with the award of a professional critique.

Those critiques are so awesome. I spent a weekend and watched all of them! You can learn a lot just from hearing someone else’s critique.

I spent 4 days on my animation: shoot reference one day, block in the golden poses and model the set, then spent two full days finishing the animation.

For this animation I was anxious to use Animschool‘s new free rig, Malcolm. And I have to say I really enjoy the controls provided. There are a few little quarks here and there, but for a free rig, it’s the best one out there by far!

So I hope you enjoy my entry for this month and stay tuned for more animation from me as I hope to be posting more on YouTube in the near future.

Oh, and my Dorito’s entry was featured in the top 25 over at Video Contest News, but I’m not holding my breath on making the final 5 of the real judges cut – there’s some stiff competition this year.

Why?

Because 1 million dollars and Super Bowl-level exposure is at stake!

In addition, this year they are adding the opportunity to create a commercial with The Lonely Island! So you can imagine how competitive this contest is, and this year is no exception. Browse the gallery to get an idea of what’s out there, but you might have to do a lot of hunting to find the gems, but there are some really good ones. You can see all the finalists from the past here.

Here’s how the contest works:

• Judges will select the top 5 entries and announce them the beginning of January

• These 5 will receive $25k and a trip to the Super Bowl

• A public vote will determine one winner from these 5

• This one winner will be run as an advertisement for Doritos during this year’s Super Bowl

• If that winner’s commercial is chosen by USA Today (newspaper) as the best Super Bowl commercial, either on USA Today’s facebook page or using their AdMeter system, Dorito’s will give that winner 1 million dollars. If they are second then $600k, and third is $400k.

So 1 million dollars seems like a long shot, right?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Out of the 5 years they have operated this contest they have awarded the million dollar prize twice!

I have entered this contest two years ago, you can see that unsuccessful entry here. This year I didn’t want to hold back so after a mild brain aneurysm I thought of a decent idea, ran it by my friend Eric, who made it even better, then I started storyboarding it.

Let me apologize in case you're incredibly intimidated by the unmitigated talent I display at drawing stick figures, I can't help it. Also, it's pricey, but not a bad app for your iPhone, this cinemek thingy.

Then I began designing my dinosaur! I wanted a velociraptor so I did a litte research and rewatched Jurassic Park 1 and 2 for design, as well as reference for the animation. After creating the base mesh in Maya, I used Zbrush to finish off the model:

I am concurrently trying to finish up my student short film, so I didn’t have a ton of time for this project. For example, after I got the base mesh for the dinosaur done, I spent one day and completely finished modeling, texturing, and rigging this character. It was the fastest I’ve been able to work on anything, I think, just because of the time constraint I placed on myself. For that same reason, I feel I could have done better with some more time.

Also, to be efficient with my time, both dinosaurs are the exact same rig and model. Therefore, my one constraint, besides simplicity, was to make the rig scalable.

For animation, I tackled the hardest shot first, the bench ejector one, and I’m glad I did, because it made the other shots seem much easier. I also got the help of a classmate for the compositing of this commercial, thanks Marco!

I shot this commercial with my trusty Canon 7D. If you have any other questions, just make a comment below – thanks for watching!

You can watch it below or go to Dorito’s website and watch it there, so then you can see my competition afterwards:

For comparison, here’s last years contest winner, who won one-million dollars:

I still have 4 months to go and the task before me is to finish my student film and I thought I’d give a taste of what it may look like and introduce the characters I’ve been working on for the past two months.

These are just a few of the drawings to explore character design.

I’ve explored character design to find the most appealing designs for my story, yet still allow the characters to be animatable. I went through dozens of drawings, doodles, and conversations with classmates and mentors and if I had more time I would continue to explore these ideas. But, the production must continue if I’m to finish so I have to get the work to a point that’s good enough and move on.

For character design I really leaned on my mentors Mike, Casey, Craig, Magic, and Caroline and ended up using designs from Mike and Craig for my characters – thanks guys!

For the smaller character I modeled and rigged a character that I ended up hating. I couldn’t imagine enjoying animating this guy and him being my ‘calling card’ on my demo reel. So after a month or so of working on him, I completely scraped his design and revisited the earliest designs I had made with Mike, and with the help of Craig I got a new design.

This was going to be my character, until I started to loathe him.

What does that really mean ‘with the help of Craig?’

Well, here’s what a quick session with him in photoshop looks like during one of our creative development classes. It may seem like a bunch of scribbles, but it made total sense to me as we discussed what would be best for this character. Can you spot the Chicken Little reference?

Once I decided to scrap his design, Craig sat down with me and we took screenshots from Zbrush into photoshop so we could draw right on top of them to quickly get ideas down on how to rebuild him. This is kind of the progression that happened.

Once we had the idea down, from the previous image, then I had to remodel the character and I gave him more human like topology so he could bend at his waste with better deformations. I also made him fairly heavy geometry so his torso could deform without tearing the geometry. Left, is the original design. Middle, was a slight variation of him, I decided to put his eyes in his head on this one instead of shit outside like in the Left image. Right was the new design, but still exploring some ideas like how big his forehead should be relative to his glasses to leave room for eyebrows.

This is the newer model and the one that I'll be animating.

Obstacles encountered are things like: eyes apart of his head or outside it, eyebrows, glasses, refraction index of lenses, mouth size, position of shoulders, body proportions relative to arms and legs, and as always there’s a huge challenge of taking a flat, 2D drawing and sculpting a 3-dimensional character out of it. I tried to make the glasses be the eyebrows in the first character, that looked weird, then how big should the glasses be so that it wouldn’t block reading the characters emotion, or where should his mouth be placed to not look weird but stay out of the way of the glasses as much as possible? The shoulders carry a lot of emotion, but should they be place above or below where the mouth sits?

Since this a stylized character it created freedom in design as well as obstacles. And each obstacle has to be met with a decision. So there are a lot of decisions and second guessing those decisions, and wishing you had more time to spend on it.

I almost immediately began to envy my classmates who created a story with one character, as everything I have described so far I had to do twice: Does the bully character have eyes at all? Should he have a neck? How big can his jaw be? There will be a lot of low angle shots of him so a big jaw would block seeing the rest of his head, so how big can the jaw be but not obstruct seeing the top of his head from a low camera angle?

Early version of the bully character that had a neck and more realistic features that didn't mesh well with the other character, so had to go back to the drawing board again . . .

Based off of Craig's drawing I tried to recreate that character in 3D. The hands I modeled were too realistic though so back to modeling.

Now, I'm getting somewhere with this guy. I also decided to cut off his feet, because I thought having feet would be too delicate for his personality as I imagined him stomping around, not rolling from heel to toe as he walked.

Then there’s rigging and re-rigging, which was a bear. Rigging is essentially creating the bone structure of the character so it takes this statue-like model and turns it into an action figure you can pose for animation.

Rigging is definitely one of those that is an art and a science. I won’t go into it in too much detail, but one good example to understand rigging would be the forearm. When you twist the wrist it can look like a balloon animal being twisted. It doesn’t maintain it’s volume and collapses on itself. So to correct this, you make three influences on the forearm that will follow the rotation of the wrist at 75%, 50%, and 25% (from the wrist to the elbow). That way the forearm will also rotate with the rotation of the wrist. But then there’s gimbal lock to worry about and that’s why I’ll just end there with the rigging stuff.

My point with all this is just to help expose some of what goes into a project like this, as I didn’t really know until I started this one. It’s one thing to see all the credits at the end of a movie, but it’s another thing, for me now, to completely appreciate why each name is up there and how important it is what they contribute to a film.

Early sketch from storyboard.

I think it was on the Wall-E special features that they said if one person were to try and create that film, it would have taken them over 400 years and I believe it.

There have also been a lot of story struggles.

The challenge is to create something with story, yet have it be tailored as an animation piece for the recruiters. Because, truth be told, they don’t really care about story at all as long as it’s not really creepy and violent or something that makes you look like a psychopath. They look for the mechanics and fundamentals of animation because that’s what they are, hopefully, going to be hiring you to do.

They’re also looking for quality, not quantity. A Disney supervising animator told us they don’t watch anything longer than 2 minutes. Ideally you want something done in about 40 seconds.

So in 40 seconds you have to accomplish quite a lot if you also want a story. With these restrictions it’s incredibly important to have everything be staged clearly. Because of this, I’ve had to bail on my original idea to a degree and tailor my short more for animation and less for story.

Here's an idea I spent days on how to make this pamphlet read clearly by drawing different iterations, only to completely cut it from the film because the story was too much for the short amount of time.

All of this was done at the same time as taking an acting class, as well as, an advanced animation class where I made this. The same will be true for the next two months as I begin to animate my short film, I’ll also be in an acting class and creating another animation for advanced animation class.

As I mentioned I would have enjoyed to have spent another year, just developing these characters and the environment and making the rigs better, but if I’m to get this thing done, I have to move on and begin animating which I’m really looking forward to it.

This is from an animation test I did to see if all this stuff I had been working on actually did work.

From the Acorn's animation test, with a little photoshop to explore the look a bit.

Thanks for visiting. Hopefully you will be able to watch the full film this January. It will probably be about a minute in length with a twist at the end. The tentative title is: Growing Up.

Here are the fellas together.

This is what the image above this one looks like in Maya. The colored things are the control rig and joints (why I spared you from talking too much about it in this blog post).

Here’s a 360-view I took from the top: http://360.io/AWAa2Y

The joby gorillapod was ideal for this situation, that I could hike in with a lightweight tripod and set it up where I needed it.

I wasn’t really planning on shooting this, but once I got up there and saw the logging operation with the water I had to shoot it. I just wish I had more time to spend up there to get some more footage.

Maybe some time soon, if I get back in climbing shape, I can climb up the front instead of hike up the back. Here’s a really old climbing video I made.

I also tried to get the miniature, tilt-shift look in post with the help of Magic Bullet Looks.

I recommend watching it in HD so you can see all the little detail. I didn’t even notice there were men walking around the logs until I put the photos into a timelapse.

My dog enjoyed the view while I tended to the camera.

My take on it was a guy trying to catch a lightning bug, or as everyone else I’ve talked to that’s not from Kentucky, knows it as a fire fly.

First, we shot reference of each other and did multiple takes to see what was working and what was not. It helped to have my classmates there, thanks guys, to give me feedback and even try to act out my scene for me the way they would do it.

Next, I thumbnailed out the basic poses very rough to see lines of action and see my keys. Then I exaggerated those thumbnails in some more rough sketches.

Then I took it into Maya, using my reference to get my key poses blocked in, and timed out roughly. Then another pass to get the ‘extremes,’ and then yet another pass to get the breakdowns, which is more about timing. Then the final couple of passes were for polishing.

My reference footage cut next to my keys.

I added an entire section at the beginning when I was adding the breakdowns where he misses the bug and gets angry. It was fun to diverge from the reference and make the animation work better than what I shot of myself doing in the reference.

For next term I’ll begin animating my short film, which has undergone countless changes. I think I’m working on animatic number 7 or 8 this week, I’ve lost count. We’ll also be doing a lip sync assignment as well.

Some of the talks I attended included watching Pixar’s new short La Luna with a talk from the director, Story Telling with Color featuring Dreamworks, Cinematography, Character Rigging, a talk by animator Carlos Baena, The Spirit of “Rango,” Kung Fu Panda 2 final battle talk, and special vfs student-only talks by ILM and Lino DiSalvo.

For me, Siggraph started off great, talking with the lead R & D Engineer at ILM and the lead animator for Rango, Kevin Martel, after their talk. Everyone I had the chance to speak with at Siggraph was very nice and accommodating to my questions. Kevin even watched my push assignment and said all the mechanics were there and had an overall positive reaction to it!

I also talked to recruiters from several studios: Framestore, Double Negative, ILM, Sony, Method Studios, Animal Logic, Rainmaker, Pixomondo, The Mill, and Mirada. There was also a lot of talk about student demo reels during the week.

I think Lino DiSalvo brought the reality home when he was visiting our campus with two other Disney recruiters and said, “It’s all one pile, you’re reel could be right next to a guy from Pixar who’s been doing this for 15 years.” So despite there being a lot of work in this industry it is still highly competitive and makes one want to work that much harder.

Lino also said that everyone starting out has about 200 bad shots in them and must get them out before they can really start improving. Lino was a  graduate of VFS 3D11 – I’m in class 3D90. He’s the voice of the main pigeon in Bolt and was Supervising Animator on a little film called Tangled.

During his vfs student-only talk, he showed us the progression of his animation for some of his shots on Tangled, as well as, never-before-seen footage of a Disney production coming to ABC this Christmas. It was interesting how close the process we’re learning here at VFS is the same Lino uses at Disney, like shooting reference of himself. Lino also mentioned his wife, who’s an actress and actually performed as reference for Rapunzel in Tangled, helps him make acting decisions for his animation.

Overall, Siggraph was a great experience and had made me even more excited about entering into this industry after graduating from VFS this December.

I’ll begin animating on my short film in the next week. I’ve spent the last two months modeling, remodeling, rigging, and re-rigging my characters. Stay tuned to my YouTube channel as I will post assignments as I complete them: http://www.youtube.com/user/LucasRidley

Also check out Vancouver Film School’s blog: http://blog.vfs.com/

You can vote by going to the contest’s YouTube page HERE. Then click the “Vote” tab, and look for my video in the “Vote for these Videos” window to the right of the current video that’s playing.

I created this short mainly between the hours of midnight and 3am for about a week and a half since I am a full time student at Vancouver Film School. I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity with the skills I’m learning here.

I always find it interesting to see how far I can push myself and see what quality I can produce in a short amount of time, especially when others are given the same task and I can compare what I’ve done with what is possible. Maybe it’s me living out some subconscious desire to be like MacGyver, but in a film contest: okay, you have 30 seconds to create something with the theme of escape, go.

I chose this story because I could get the animation done in the amount of time given. They are simple shapes, easy to model, rig and animate, relatively, but the relationships implied create a deeper story. So even though they’re simple, the story doesn’t have to be sacrificed.

There are three rounds to the competition, with only one winner that gets flown to Sydney for their short to be screened at a festival and also awarded $20,000. The top 10 winners for the first round will be announced July 25th.

I also just cranked out a short hang gliding video from a recent flight. I was going to hold onto the footage to use later, but decided it might get lost in the shuffle of school work so I just needed to cut it together and get it out. Hope you enjoy, that day was a great flight, although I’m a little rusty on the wingovers they’re always fun:

The assignment was to do a run cycle with a jump in the middle. I wanted to make it more interesting so I took a wing rig from Digital Tutors and attached it to the Norman rig to help him jump: