Mitch's Animation Anxiety Attacks

WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS



I'm a little iffy all round about this movie.

The jokes were hilarious granted, but the visual look of the movie conflicted with my expectations of the film. A lot of the rigs looked like stereotyped charicatures of famous people, but unfortunately with them being fictional characters, the joke of the charicature style was lost. I found I was a little creaped out by the extreme amount of detail that had gone into skin textures of the humans, like dreamworks was trying to prove a point to the world.



As far as the characters go, without Bob, Dr. Cockroach Ph D, and the President, the movie would have been made up completely of very boring characters. Ontop of that, apart from Ginormica and The Missing Link, everyone else were complete 2 dimentional characters. Bob was "although hilarious" very stupid throughout the entire film, he was remained the same right till the very end, every other character was the same "unchanging". Link didn't even NEED to be interesting and yet they showed a rather sad and exposed side to his usual macho visage when he realises he's not as tough as he thought he was. Perhaps these character stereotypes are becoming THAT stereotyped that you don't even need to give them depth anymore. I noticed this with the antagonist, Gallaxhar, At the beggining he was evil for no reason and I was thinking "here we go, generic evil character no. 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999" but then dreamworks surprised me with his wonderful and perhas even deliberately vague and constantly interrupted monologue explaining why he was evil to make fun of the stereotype. I think Dreamworks took us for a ride with this movie, threw in a bunch of stereotypes, some big names to make the fans happy, put in some good laughs, AND some cheap ones "close encounters of the 3rd kind parody, merging with a stolen joke from Space Chimps", and make it a 3D experience.

The movie was hilarious, but the story had the emotion and depth of a rich 13 year old emo's song lyrics.


and now I've got that out of my system, I wanna talk about the animation.
Yeah, it was alright, but I don't think they thought about it enough. Susan is supposed to be HUGE. You'd think with your body becoming larger, the earth would seem ultimately smaller, thus giving you the illusion that there is less gravity. A scene with her being chased by a giant robot through the city, you watch her jump from roof top to roof top, and she seems to jump like a normal person. my understanding is that the bigger something is, the slower it "seems" to fall from a distance. Galileo was probably rolling over in his grave when they were animating this scene. The story has close to no depth but they have a perfect opportunity to make up for that with some well thought out animation and they put together what looks like a normal person running through a miniature city "which may have been deliberate but I doubt it".



Something that seems to be a pattern in dreamworks movies, animals and monsters etc always seem to be rigged and animated much more entertainingly that humans. They squash and stretch more, and they move more convincingly. "eg, mega-susan moved like a normal human being and yet Insectosaurus was moving like a snail, despite sharing the same trait of being massive characters"

All in all very hit and miss. BUT being a biased fan of comedy I'll still probably enjoy it over and over again despite its downfalls.

Or have I missed the point somewhere?

I know this does not fall under animation but once in a while I find its nice to shake things up a little bit. This originally started out as a 3D reference for Jess' end of year narrative, which I kindly put together for her, and then it turned into an experimental journey into the creative side of Maya.


Sky Pirate from Mitchell Druce on Vimeo.

It is SOOO FREAKING hard to make spheres look like bubbles. Thats right, Jess' sky pirate ships have a bubble exhaust system

Perhaps this developing skill will serve me well with my own end of year narrative ^_^

Infusing Jason Ryans Tutorial on easing in and easing out with Franks direction towards snowboarding, our beans battle it out to see who's the best snowboarder amongst the rest.


R Jeremy Snowboarder from Mitchell Druce on Vimeo.

I couldn't help but make R Jeremy jiggle at the end.

So. I was the opening piece to a 4-men-1-woman oral presentation. So I thought I'd give people a bit of a show. Sell my idea of great standards in animation to the fellow students of my class. And what better way of elaborating on that then a display of pictures of high standards and quality. But when I show them a whole bunch of slides which looked like they were drawn with my left testicle, I was applauded. Sure I'll take any compliment thrown at me. But I feel like after all the planning of sweet irony, the joke was on me. Should have my intentions been a little more clear? I feel its patronising to explain intellectual humour. I feel alot like Jim Carrey from 'Man on the Moon'

It's Red... It bounces... and it will tear your room a new one if you take it home. will you adopt him today?


Red by ~Ludichrist on deviantART

as I play around with different 3D rigs in maya I think to myself how I'm going to plan out my end of year narrative. I've decided to go with moom, he just looks right for my idea. I'm sure alot of hardcore animatiors will argue that it doesn't matter what the rig looks like so long as the animation is good, but I've been thinking and its not just an animation. It's a short story. And since my story has a fair bit of slap-stick humour involved I thought it would be appropriate to use a cartoony looking character.

Imagine if you will, a game of charades that goes out of control. you draw a card, it tells you to act out a scene, but as you begin to express to the others what your trying to act out, it becomes an invisable reality. You lose control of the situation but it most certainly puts the message across. whether that message is juggling chain-saws, stepping in the ring with a heavy weight boxer, or even tap-dancing through a mine field. But just like any looney-tunes-esque short cartoon, the characters will be a-ok by the end of the film no matter how many times they blow up.

but the story is still a work in progress.

Embrace The Machine by ~Ludichrist on deviantART

my latest illustrative piece.
done all on graphics tablet.