Business cards

Part of professional presence, without a doubt, is business card.Also, it was  quit importantly, for the design of business card to sit nicely together with blog template, CV and self branding . After to and fro development and discussions with printing company I believe I’m settled with these ones. 500 copies on their way.

The Art of The Wolves Within Characters

Recently I have revisited the document for Wolves characters and am posting here a test template before going to order printed copies. I hope the new cover works, also the content itself.. I'm publishing the work I've done solely on characters in ‘The Wolves Within’ Project.
Rereading it lead to correcting some errors in the text. Hope you'll find it neat and engaging

The Art of the Wolves Within by J.J. *Jolanta Jasiulionyte*

Last Touches before the Submission of Major Project

Some final design works on publishing before the hand in , which is tomorrow.

I am expecting a book to arrive, however it seems it will miss the official time of the  hand in just by couple of hours, acording to the package tracking information. It is slightly unfortunate, for I have planed to present the cd in the book instead of DVD case. Well, it only seems we can't control every aspect of project work. Still, this one seems to be a promissing submission and I am well happy to be finishing my bachelors degree with the kind of hand in of  tomorrow. :]

High-Rez Stills of the Baltic Pixie Animation

 These stills are already in the Art of book, but I think it was worth to uplod them as self-standing images on blog too.

  

 

 

 

I believe this should be the last publication on The Baltic Pixie project for a while, as I won't be embedding the finished animation for a while. I have submitted it to a student animation festival organized by Cartoon Brew and in their rules have specified, that the animated short can’t have an online presence for a while.

Major’s submission deadline is only couple of days away and there are still bits to be resolved.

Character Demoreel 2012

This demoreel focuses only on design, modeling and texturing sides of character pipeline. Animation specific reel will come later.

The Art of The Baltic Pixie

The Art of the Baltic Pixie by JJ Jolanta Jasiulionyte

The Baltic Pixie Render Tests

I am slowly moving into rendering, with animation waiting to be polished and secondary animation to be set up. These are some examples I consider as final looks of the shot. Im am happy with the evident range of emotions and moods. Put the right two images next to each other, and she looks like two different characters. I see the intense facial rigging was worth while.

I have also revisited her texture maps and shaders.

Again, Having analised Jenny Dunbar's, my voiceover actresses recording, I can say there is not a single syllable with out amazing depth to it ! Wow, she is amazing!

This is at least.... FOR NOW !

Untill ! Your Nails!

Alone ! Remain...

    

  

We Gather By the Riverside

  

 

Self Branding Development

 To develop professional presence we were asked to work on our personal branding , including logos, business cards and indents.

 I have decided to push the brand identity I have created already, 'JJ' logo works as a symbol and as a signature perfectly.

However the presentation needed some revisiting. I have decided to really sell the textured quality of my logo and created background, resembling the original logos and also a felt that dusty and smoky addition would further emphasize it. It all seems to be working in a match with the tonality of soundtrack.

This one is what I had before:

I am happy with how professional and modest the business card looks:

I see it as quite important, for when going out there, it seems to be proving you've went the extra mile.

BP Animating Progress and Process

It is the end of second week of animating the Queen of Baltic Pixies. I have roughly 53 seconds animated. This week was generous giving me 6 seconds a day.

 In the process of animating Vaiva, I start with blocking key poses which tell the story within the shot. After that I make sure to create some equally strongly posed in-betweens. Third phase is adding some delayed animation poses for separate parts of the body. All of this done in stepped mode of animation (non-smooth flow of action) . Having done that I hope I have mapped out something decent and with my fingers crossed spline the animation curves.

 Still not good. Splined animation gives dirty anchors and brings out mistakes naked to the surface. At this point I work on ‘cushioning’, as Richad Williams terms it. It is essentially making sure that there are not a single hard stop within animation curves, meaning every action would start or end incrementally and organically, unless otherwise intended. Lastly, refining and tweaking anything to hit the right timing is what I end up with.

Also, when thinking about the quality of animation I almost never consider film, for, as I mentioned a while ago, one animator has the whole year for 2 min of animation. Instead I always have in mind a commercial quality type of animation, for a typical commercial project has roughly the time I have to animate the character, which is – from 3 to 5 weeks ( 3 for me).

 I am reaching the ending scenes at the moment and am hoping to move to some secondary animation ( rainbow, riverside, ‘Laumikas’ and so on. )

Vaiva's Animating Progress

First week of animating has finished, so far I have 18 seconds of animation. Here I add a short glimpse to Vaivas introduction animation. To see clean shape deformation it is rendered out as AO pass (ambient Occlussion)

The rest of planned animating time ( 2 weeks) have the rest of 70 seconds…. However it is far from bad news. Usually getting into animating and solving those last rigging problems, which appear only when controls are used intensively, do eat some time.

Also, I thought this is an interesting fact: A standard length of completed animation per animator, in studios such as Pixar, is 1,5 min maybe 2 min …per year (!) … I suppose therefore everyone in CG Arts who’s in this task of bringing their characters to life during the relatively short time we have left , should take this fact into consideration and in a way have realistic expectations.

Lastly, I feel fully in the mindset for animating and thinking with the character ( Vaiva now appears in my dreams too ) And it seems that couple of scenes are asking for slight modification to work out audience’s distancing to and from the character better.

Acting Reference

It was clear very soon, that acting reference was key for creating Vaiva’s performance. So many expression nuances were hard to capture solely in storyboards or pre-vizes. The images represent stills of the reference footage.

 

With the help of time code and the grid over the footage, I’m comfortable to attempt constructing accurately timed and well spaced performance.

Vaiva's Controls Test Animation

This is an exercise of Vaiva’s body animation controls. The animated sequence has only some indication of her character, however I was more concerned with learning the workings of her rig and warming up.

 

 After this test I see that some controls work very closely together, so it means when using a particular handle it would only work correctly if couple of others go with it, for example: her feet controls work together with the middle ring of the spine, which is responsible for the skirt and the avoiding of leg/skirt geometry clashes.
  Also, great consideration should be taken to create organic and feminine animation instead of something closer to Ivan the Bird – clunky robotic animation :D However I have great belief in acting reference I am filming at the moment (with some struggle taken to borrow a camera from Universities resources for photography students). Lets see how it will work :]

Wrap up and Result of D Commission

3 weeks ago I have been asked by Iceage Musics Limited company to create ident animation.  It was a kind of one-man-band type of commitment s o I was responsible to coming up with the presentation idea after they gave me guidelines what they want to see in it ( re characters and environment) , designing, producing, animating and making a soundtrack.

The time was also quite short, only 4 days for everything. So it was least 14 hours a day.. But was worth it! :]

 The project was enjoyable and the pay  too . I totally enjoyed being the director designer and animator of a professional assignment and I could totally see myself doing something similar in the future :]

Vaiva's First Expressions

These are Vaiva’s first expressions , having just finished rigging. :]

 

To create suitable rig for Vaiva it was essential to think about her performance a lot. This guided me through rigging process. It was very clear what type of expressions she’d need most for example, snarly lips, squinty eyes. On the other hand, a very gentle and motherly smile too.

 

 It has been nearly 3 weeks of rigging Vaiva. Most of the time spent preparing the character for lip-synch and facial animation. 

I am in currently researching animation techniques (Animator’s survival Kit of course) , and references for animation . Also, filming action for animation reference. Soon to come will be a test walk cycle animation.

"D" Comission : Set design and shot Set-ups

During the second day of the production for 'D' Event's Ident I've worked out set design and staging.

 

  

  

and today, started animating some of the characters, here is a snipet of clown scene:

In theory tomorrow should be the last day and by the end of it I should have a rendered and edited roughly 10 second long sequence . Hope that will happen :]