It‘s been rough, being a 2D animator at HSLU during the summers. All your cool 3D animator friends are having fun and are levelling up their skills at LuMAA, meeting industry professionals and likeminded folks from abroad. Unless you’re ready to give up your sanity and soul for some intense CGI learning, the average 2D cartoon lover is excluded from all the fun… however, it seems the heavens (our lovely department heads) have finally heard our cries of agony. 

After many many years of longing, begging, bargaining and hoping, we‘ve been granted the first ever 2D LuMAA and from what we‘ve heard it‘s here to stay! 

Unlike the 3D LuMAA, instead of six weeks we were given only four weeks to pour our hearts and souls into making sure our drawings would come alive — but hey, beggars can’t be choosers and in the end, most of us found that this was the perfect length anyway!

A big portion of our class consisted of a bunch of HSLU animation alumni who have been waiting for the long promised 2D LuMAA since the dawn of time. As always we were joined by the lovely people from our partner schools abroad, namely Melanie from Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, Demir from Filmuniversität Babelsberg and Josephine from TAW. And of course — the usual suspects — us BA animation students, though this year fewer in numbers as we were only four people who were currently attending or had just graduated from HSLU.

Week 1 – Walk cycles with Jeremie Becquer

To start off the 2D fun, the first week was spent working intensely on walk cycles with Jeremie who is a seasoned animator and vis dev artist who had previously worked on Klaus and Space Jam: A new Legacy!

Every day he‘d give a short informative input to get everyone ready to walk those cycles!

(Unfortunately, I had fallen victim to the plague — the flu — in this very first week, so the recounts here are reconstructed from the daily updates I received from my lovely classmate Aurelia.)

The first day was spent working on a vanilla walk, a good way to get back into animation for those who joined the class to take up some good old cartooning again and a nice introductory exercise for the four weeks to come.

The next two days were spent on a character walk, upping the stakes and getting the animator brains working again. This lead up to the final big exercise the remaining days were spent on: perspective character walk! 

Jeremie was a great teacher, finding a perfect balance between inputs, feedback sessions and time to work on the exercises. 

Compared to the other teachers he was closest to our age so striking up conversations was a lot of fun and everyone had a great time chatting and bonding with him.

He also always took his time to join the whole class for the lunches and even decided to accompany everyone to the spontaneous hangout at the park on Friday!

On Monday our wonderful chef cooks and freshly graduated animation students Irina and Emanuel prepared a wonderful feast to celebrate the beginning of many exciting days of animating to come.

Irina and Emanuel kindly took up the big task to cook for the whole class and teachers every Friday from then on out and I think everyone started to look forward to this delicious closing ceremony for each week!

Week 2 –  Lip sync with Boris Hiestand

The second week revolved around lip sync and having Boris Hiestand as our teacher for this topic felt like a perfect match.

Boris started out as a 2D animator, he showed us a lot of his early work which included a ton of those very fun and whimsical — and maybe slightly morally questionable — animated advertisements for sugary cereals and snacks back in the early 2000s catered towards children. So if you were a fan (me) of those commercials featuring Tony the Tiger or that Cookie Crisps wolf (mmmhh Cookie Crisps my beloved), you now knew one of the people responsible for those. These days Boris is mostly directing on TV shows and working as a voice actor, you might know him as Sigma in Overwatch or as Alex Taylor in Captain Laserhawk.

On Monday Boris showed us many examples of lip sync animations and explained to us what we should look out for. What is the intention, which words or sounds are highlighted, which sounds have the mouth barely moving at all and advised us to check the mouth movements by holding our hand below our chin, speak the voice lines and pay attention to how far our mouths would open.

As a start he gave us an audio file and a silly little frog character he designed many years ago and tasked us to come up with a fun sequence for it. We worked on this task for the first two days, on Tuesday afternoon we looked at the results in class and it was very inspiring to see how everyone came up with something different and unique for the same voice line. 

Some of us might have been a bit too ambitious for this task, the idea was to focus on the lip sync, though many got carried away and also included some full body acting which made the whole task extremely stressful as we barely had two days time to work on it. 

The second exercise was a longer audio file where we could choose a segment from to animate, we were also given the film it was originally from so we could pay attention to the facial movements.

Boris gave us plenty of feedback whenever we asked him to look over our shots, him also being a voice actor gave him additional insight on what to look out for. He encouraged us to act out our lines because often times we would realised that we were making the characters do way too much in too little time.

For me personally lip sync has always been a struggle and one of my least favourite things to animate, it also didn’t help that I hadn’t really done much proper lip sync beforehand. I felt very frustrated when doing the first exercise because it really showed me where my skills were still lacking but thankfully, with Boris‘ and my fellow classmates‘ inputs I turned this frustration into a valuable learning experience. Even though in the end I gave up on saving the first exercise, I was able to start fresh and with a new perspective on the second exercise which in the end turned out very nicely and made me more confident in tackling lip sync shots in the future.

On Friday Irina and Emanuel cooked up an absolute feast once again for us to end the week.

This time they served us various dishes from different regions of Africa. Both Irina and Emanuel could be seen working hard in the kitchen since lunchtime, pouring heart and soul into the upcoming dinner. All that hard work paid off because not only did Boris bring along his wife and daughter to enjoy dinner with us as well, additionally to that some fellow HSLU animation students who happened to be around the school at the same time decided to join us too!

Week 3 – Full Body Animation with Len Simon

Thought we were done with lip sync? Absolutely not! And this time with emphasis on body movements. We were given one single exercise for the whole week to work on. We were once again given a longer audio file and tasked to come up with a fitting animation that included lip sync and full body acting.

Starting the week, I‘m sure most of us had never heard of Len Simon but that certainly changed after spending this first morning with him. Len Simon‘s animation career is impressive to say the least, dropping out of Sheridan after only one year because he got hired to work for Don Bluth at age 19 surely isn’t something many people can say about themselves. He quickly got promoted to directing animator and worked as such on productions like Anastasia, Prince of Egypt and Titan A.E., if anyone can pull off the art styles that became so iconic during the 90’s/2000’s 2D renaissance era it certainly is Len.

He came with a ToonBoom animation file he prepared for us but it seemed like the odds were stacked against us that morning because the school computer just refused to start the program and poor Tim had to try his best to fix the issue all morning.

In the meanwhile Len had to improvise without any means to show us stuff on the computer. What followed were some of the most interesting stories and insights into animation and the animation industry we‘ve ever heard. Len is an impressive teacher, not only by the sheer drawing and animation skills he possesses but also by his ability to effortlessly tell us about various life experiences in the most engaging ways possible. Most of us even forgot at some point that this was all an improvised segment to bridge the time it took to fix the ToonBoom issue.

We spent the whole morning listening and asking questions which is what most of Len‘s inputs were for the rest of the week. Len’s inputs mostly consisted of him opening up ToonBoom or Photoshop and starting to animate or draw to show us how he does things, why he does it and how we can do them as well. He would keep the initial input short to then turn to us, asking if we had any questions — and oh my, did we have plenty of those! Most inputs were spent by just us asking him to show us how to draw and animate certain things, how he drew folds, how he animated hair, how he tackled characters in perspective and so on and so forth. We were all amazed by how effortlessly he explained all these things to us, it seemed like for every possible question you had he had a thought out answer prepared.

Most of us decided not to multitask animating and listening to him simultaneously. 

I felt like I had spent such little time actually animating because it felt wasteful not to have my full attention on whatever he was explaining to us but at the same time I learned so much by just listening and watching him that it compensated for the time I didn’t spend animating myself. 

Besides that, Len would be walking around, giving each of us individual feedback and would draw suggestions onto our animations which was all extremely helpful.

Len also wanted us to emphasise the movements and arcs, advising us to avoid adding any details until we have the animation fully down. He wanted us to make the dialogue work using only body movements before adding any lip sync.

Even the animators got to take a little break to celebrate the national holiday together 😉

Len brought us some copies of his sketchbooks as a gift, though he only had eleven copies left and proposed to draw sketches for the people who didn’t get a copy on the last day. In the end he managed to make everyone a sketch who wanted one, even the ones that also got a sketchbook — if that isn’t a fantastic souvenir to remember this week with him by!

And once again we got to conclude the week with yet another delicious meal made by Irina and Emanuel. This time we were served various Brazilian dishes, courtesy of Emanuel who has Brazilian roots himself and wanted to introduce us to the tasty dishes he‘s familiar with.

Week 4 – Action Shot with Diego Porral

The last week was spent working on an action shot. After doing lip sync related work the previous two weeks, this was a welcome change. Our teacher for this week was Diego Porral, who has worked as a director on Love, Death + Robots and Scavengers Reign and had graduated from Gobelins a few years ago. Our week was pretty much structured the way he was used to when studying at Gobelins. There wouldn’t be any big theory segments, it would mostly be us doing practical work while he would go through each of us and offering advice and feedback. Having these frequent feedback sessions was very helpful but also intimidating, especially when you felt like you haven’t gotten much work done since the last time Diego came to check on you but thankfully he always had understanding and encouraging words for you despite that, motivating you to keep pushing on.

He gave us one assignment to work on for the whole week which was to animate a character doing some kind of action with a skateboard or a similar object. He advised us to work with well known characters other than our own and to try to stay on model to showcase potential studios our ability to adapt to different styles. In between our working times, Diego would show us a bunch of amazing animators and their works to take inspiration from. He also showed us his old demo reel that got him his first job and gave us valuable insight into what to look out for when applying for animation jobs. 

On Friday we looked at everyone’s work in class and once again it was so inspiring to see what everyone got to create during these past five days!

Afterwards Diego very kindly took his time to look at people’s reels, giving feedback on what to keep, what to remove and what to add on to it.

And since it was Friday, we got to enjoy one last scrumptious dinner to celebrate the last four weeks. This time we were able to enjoy an assortment of amazing Greek dishes, courtesy of Irina this time who told us that if we were to visit her and her family, this is what we would find at their family gatherings!

It was a perfect way to end these eventful four weeks, coming together one last time to  enjoy good food together and reminisce about all the work we had accomplished. The evening was filled with laughter and bittersweet goodbyes and lots of promises to keep in touch and hopefully seeing each other again at latest in Annecy next year.

I think I speak for everyone when I say that we were eternally grateful to Jeremie, Boris, Len and Diego for teaching us, to Irina and Emanuel for ensuring we‘re all well fed and — most importantly of course — want to say a big thank you to all of the Animation Lucerne staff for even making this first 2D LuMAA possible in the first place! 

May there be many more in the future and that we all get to see each other again!

Hi. I’m Sven. I freshly graduated from the Animation BA at HSLU just this summer.

Up until the LuMAA, I’ve been a 2D Animator. I have opened Blender and I’ve set a keyframe before, but I never seriously approached 3D animation, let alone worked with a proper rig.

However, I have always had a fascination with the medium. Why not combine that interest with my love for character animation?

So when LuMAA came up this year, I decided to take the opportunity to finally take a proper stab at 3D. Follow along as I discover the world of CG animation!

And heyo! I’m Emanuel. I am in my second year and have been animating in 3D for some time now, but I want to grow and learn a lot more about 3D character animation. LuMAA is one of the best courses for growing as an animator, so why not take the plunge again?

Block 1A: Human Walk Cycle

Time and time again I’m amazed by how much I can learn from doing default walks!

Erica Palmerini showed us a blocking approach to 3D animation, where you pose the Character from keyframes to breakdowns to in-betweens, quite similar to the classic 2D approach. Because of this, I felt at home quite quickly. I was expecting my 2D experience to help, but I was surprised about just how well my skills translated to CG.

As for getting used to Maya: We had a small introduction prior to the workshop, which helped a lot to find my way around the program. Naturally, it still felt quite clunky in the beginning, but luckily Erica and the students from abroad were very happy to help. By day three Maya posed no more issues. (The Autodesk gods must have been on my side though, because the program crashed a whopping 0 times in my first week! I learned only later how blessed I was…) 

One thing that I soon learned to love about 3D animation is how easily you can experiment without being destructive. It’s crazy how much the attitude of a walk can change just by slightly offsetting or scaling keyframes. And it’s super fast to iterate!

As the week came to an end, we went down to the REX, the small Cinema of the HSLU, to look at our work on the big screen. Discussing our Animations this way was a great way to end the week, so the REX reviews became a weekly thing.

Block 2: Creature Animation

In week 2 we animated a quadruped walk cycle with Lukas Niklaus. Not only did we have double the legs to take care of, but we also approached it quite differently than in week one: This time around, Lukas advised us to work directly with curves, achieving our poses by changing the interpolation between as few keyframes as possible. 

This was more abstract to me since it was a different way of thinking. Rather than coming up with poses, you would think about the speeds and offsets at which limbs move. 

Once I got the hang of it, approaching animation this way helped a lot with understanding how muscles work.

Working with fewer keys made it slightly harder for me to achieve organic movement. However, once I did, it was even easier to iterate than with the Blocking approach. Another bonus of working this way is that once you’re happy with your movement, you don’t have to smoothen it.

In the second week of the Creature animation Block, we tackled an acting shot. Together with Michael Aerni, we studied animals’ behavior in depth. We combined the previously learned techniques to bring our animals alive. For this exercise, I chose a little Bulbul bird. With its snappy movement it was quite the contrast to the tiger I animated the previous week. It’s really interesting to see how much body size influences movement.

Throughout the week, Michael also gave us interesting insights into previs and cameras inside and outside of animation software.

Block 1B: Lip sync 

By week 4 I started feeling quite confident in 3D animation, as I was slowly finding a workflow that felt natural to me: I would usually block out the most important body parts pose by pose, while tackling more simple movements and adding some follow through directly in the spline.

For Lip-sync week, Ramon Arango and Noah Demirci taught us a lot about how mouths produce sounds and showed us interesting observations about acting beats and subtle eye darts.

Conveniently, Ramon is also the creator of the Apollo and Artemis rigs that a lot of us had been using for the workshop. So not only did we benefit from feedback and lectures, but Ramon could also occasionally perform some Rig surgery.

Going from stepped animation into spline is always a hard step, but I found that for lip syncing, the smooth motion can feel especially jarring. When we talk, the mouth snaps from pose to pose quite quickly. So when we started splining the mouth, the focus was on getting the energy from the blocking back. Applying this I quickly achieved a satisfying, snappy animation. 

That week we also had a little screening where everyone could show each other projects they had worked on. I was absolutely blown away by everyone’s creativity, skill, and stories. We saw everything from psychedelic journeys through compost bins to silly 80s action movies with bugs and even played a little intergalactic rhythm game. The lovely evening ended with a heated round of Mario Kart in the cinema.

As every Friday, we ended the week with a cozy and delicious barbeque. This time it was also a little farewell for Matze and me, who left the workshop that evening.

The rest of the class was getting ready for their last big task: over the last two weeks of LuMAA, they would tackle more complex, full-body acting shots.

Block 3: Full Body Acting Shot

With the end rapidly approaching for LuMAA we poured all of our emotions into the acting shot. It’s the combination of all that we have learned with more SPECIFICITY. If there is something that our teachers from Pixar want us to remember, it’s this one concept. María Bjarnadóttir (and her partner Alyssa) and Kristen Willsher were focused on this concept and beat it into our heads as it had been drilled into them during their time at Pixar. This “specificity“ is the magic that really makes us see a person within a bunch of moving geometry. It’s the art of holding a look, an involuntary movement, or making specific choices that the character would naturally make, all while achieving the illusion that there is no puppeteer behind the scenes. But to learn more about this, consider joining LuMAA yourself.

Maria and Alyssa were there to help us come up with what exactly we wanted to animate for the following week, block it, and get it to IP (in progress – the stage between blocking and polishing). We listened to dialogue, learned about characters and how people move, and then blocked our ideas out. Meanwhile, they walked around and made sure we pushed our shots as far as we could. “It’s always easier to pull back an extreme idea rather than push a weak idea further“, and so we started with as wild-ass ideas as we could conceive, and pulled back some strings after. 

We had a lot of fun watching Luca together with Maria and Alyssa, a movie that both of them and Kristen worked on. It had become a little bit of a tradition to watch a movie that our teachers worked on during the weeks, sometimes with the teachers present. We also had another delicious Friday BBQ and a tour of the school so that everyone could see the vast number of departments in HLSU DFK.

Kristen was our teacher for the final week, which was all about Polish, her favorite step of the animation process. We also got introduced to splocking, which is a layered workflow, but this time we used it for character acting. With Kirsten’s clear feedback, we all made amazing progress on our shot and pushed it even further – sometimes, it was at the cost of finishing the shot, but on the other hand, we gained a lot of knowledge, experience, and clarity of our ideas.

In the final week, we tried to cram in whatever last activities were still not done yet, so besides a last weekend hike, we managed to go bowling and have a fun afternoon with the game of werewolf. Over the weeks we have done so many fun things together as a group, that helped us bond and connect with each other.

Bundling up whatever leftover energy and emotion within us and pouring it into our animation, we finished our shots. And trust me, the emotions were running high since we all knew that this wonderful time was coming to an end and we would have to say goodbye to each other by the end of the week. The last BBQ had plenty of food and a lot of heartwarming last hugs were given – then it was over. It was a great time and one that I will certainly not forget for a long time.

Once again thank you to Simon Otto, for supervising the course. Michael Aerni, Lukas Niklaus, María Bjarnadóttir, Erica Palmerini, Ramon Arango, Noah Demirci, Kristen Willsher, and Alyssa Ragni for teaching us so much. To the staff at Animation Lucerne for the support and for putting it all together and, of course, our classmates.
See you next year at the next LuMAA.

Another year, another LuMAA!

This time around with air-conditioning. The course and its structure stayed the same, but on hot days, the air-conditioning was a blessing – since PC-stuffed rooms aren’t known for their inherent coolness, temperature-wise. As per usual, we opened the doors of the course to fellow students from partner schools, namely Jirio and Harry from Filmakademie Baden Württemberg, Violette and Robin from MOPA, and Astrid, Sofie, and Liva from TAW. Oh, and us, of course, a rambunctious bunch from HSLU, with first years in the majority.

The location, the PC room of our dear animation department. The students, a wild bunch from all over, eager to learn. The software, Maya, a difficult beast to master. The teachers, a great many with years of experience under their belt, ready to guide us to new heights of animation. So here’s how that went down.

Week 1 – Walk cycles with Yves Ruprecht

Beginnings are difficult. Especially if you have never touched Maya before. Luckily, Yves was there to help us newcomers start off on the right foot, so to speak. He recommended a return to the basics–so we all hopped on a treadmill and shot references of each other. Later, we analyzed our walks as preparation for animating our walk cycles. This task was a familiar one—but this time around, we were able to push them further with Yves’ feedback, be it a vanilla walk or one with more personality.

Yves is not only a kind and motivating person, but also a great informant on everything regarding the animation industry and what to expect as we enter the field. One especially important piece of advice: you need patience to find the right job in this industry. But in the end, that patience pays off.

Week 2 – Lip-sync with Ramon Arango and Noah Demirci

In week two, Ramon and Noah returned to LuMAA–not as students, but as the teachers up front. They told us they were nervous–but seeing how passionately they spoke about the subtleties of facial animation, we would never have known if they hadn’t said so. Two pieces of advice stood out in particular. Firstly, blinks can be wonderfully diverse, and very effective in showing the inner world of a character. Secondly, not every sound has to have its own mouth movement in order to feel believable—a hint is often enough.

“No matter how many years of experience you have in this industry, each new shot is a new challenge … and to realize that was eye-opening. “  – Noah Demirci

Week 3 – Creature Anim: Walk cycles with Lukas Niklaus

Due to a scheduling mistake, Ramon was kind enough to teach for the first two days of the week before Lukas took over. Armed with experience working on creature animation at Weta, the studio behind the VFX of Avatar and LOTR, he was the perfect teacher to help us tackle the quadruped’s walk cycle. Most of us animated a tiger, so he was able to concentrate on teaching us in-depth detail and knowledge about how this marvelous creature moves. Thanks to him, we all managed to incorporate even the smallest details, down to the subtle rotation of the core and the squish of the paws. Alongside teaching, he showed us examples of the impressive professional projects he has taken part in–including work from the studio “floating rocks”, which he is co-leading.

Week 4 – Creature Anim: Body mechanics with Michael Aerni

We all know it to be true–everything in animation is a bouncing ball. Armed with this golden nugget of knowledge and guidance from Michael, we made simple shapes move around. Since Michael animates mainly in a layered fashion, we took it upon ourselves to try it out, with great success. Many liked this layered approach so much, they continued to use it in the following weeks. For the uninitiated, layered animation is a method where you focus first on the movement of the character’s core, and then “layer in” the limbs and other secondary elements. Instead of making one full pose after the other, you slowly build the animation from the core. This has the advantage of making the weight of the character look and feel more believable in less time than a pose-to-pose approach. It is a process that takes a bit to get used to, but is certainly worth learning.

Week 5 – Acting shot with Nicole Ridgewell

The week with Nicole started even before the week began, as we were tasked with finding good dialogue–a quest much more difficult than initially presumed. All recognizable samples (those which are already overused in acting shots) were immediately struck out, and we were sent on a search for our own characters and their stories.  That involved daily observational drawing, looking both into ourselves and at the people around us. Adding all of that together, we pitched our shot and got started. Our goal? To reach IP by the end of the week. IP (short for “in progress”) is the stage of production where, although many things are still rough and need to be polished, the central idea of the shot is already clearly communicated and can be built upon with more work. By Friday, we were fully invested in the characters we had built up over the course of the week, and were looking forward to Week 6—when we would finally flesh out the animation in more detail.

Week 6 – Acting shot with Dan Nguyen

Not only did Dan bring his vast understanding of character acting, but also a calmness that perfectly complemented Nicole’s energy from the week before. With his wise words and insightful feedback, we started to polish our acting shot. It takes a lot of time and a good eye to spot which small subtleties require correction, but with Dan’s help, we made great strides in this vital skill. With that we were learning the last lesson of LuMAA, true patience. It takes a lot of time to go from the initial idea to polish. Every curve is cleaned out, all arcs are accounted for, the small deformations of hands are added, cheeks are squished into appealing shapes … all the small details are refined truly bring the performance to life.

“If you don’t have that connection to people who are actually doing the job, it can seem kind of abstract and distant.” – Dan Nguyen

Ping pong and other worthwhile activities

Unbelievably, we did not just animate for six weeks straight, but also lived our lives to the fullest. With such an amazing cast of characters, how could we not have fun? (Besides when we were screaming at our computers.) We cooked together, had weekly barbeque parties, and screened each other’s graduation movies as well as inspiring films and series in the REX (the school’s mini movie theater). Some of us got so good at ping pong that they graduated to playing with dustpans instead of paddles. We learned drinking games and had chocolate and beer tastings.

The weather was wild, from very cold rainy weather, where the aircon was our doom (we could not set the temperature, so it got rather chilly at times), to scorching heat, where the only escape was the river. We went swimming often, floating along with the current, and even enjoying a boat ride.

With all these experiences behind us, Maya almost trauma-bonding us together, and just being around each other for six weeks, it was hard to say goodbye. But time marched onward, and the experience ended. For some, school would commence again soon, while others had to start searching for a job, and yet others were beginning internships. Before we all went our separate ways, we promised we would see each other again soon, be it at festivals, in the industry, or—perhaps—even at next year’s LuMAA.

Thanks to Nicole, Dan, Michael, Lukas, Roman, Noah, and Yves, we now understand that a fulfilling life working in film is not only possible, but likely. Great opportunities await us in the entertainment sector, and we are lucky to be a part of it in these exciting times! One thing all our teachers agreed on: they are happy with their decision to enter the film industry. Even after 20 intense years of working on big movies to independent productions, they couldn’t imagine doing something different. We cannot imagine anything else either.

Schon hat die vierte Woche der LuMAA angefangen, und die Konzentration ist nach wie vor hoch.

Woche 3: Creature Animation

Dozent in der dritten Woche war Michael Aerni, der ebenfalls bei Weta Digital in Neuseeland arbeitet.

Zieht euch mal sein Showreel rein, da werde ich ganz kribbelig und will das auch mal machen (:

https://vimeo.com/145841969

Mit Respekt näherten wir uns dem Creature Animation Shot an, denn auch wenn wir auf 150 Frames beschränkt wurden, der Workload war riesig… Ich hatte zwei Tiger, die miteinander kämpften, und schaffte gerade mal, 50 Frames auf einen relativ sauberen Stand zu bringen. Aber ich bin trotzdem sehr zufrieden mit dem Ergebnis, da ich zuvor noch nie eine Interaktion zwischen zwei Kreaturen animiert hatte.

Die verschiedenen Farben dienen der einfacheren Auseinanderhaltung der beiden Tiger bei dieser komplexen Interaktion.

Wie schon in den ersten beiden Wochen hatten wir die fantastische Möglichkeit, uns direkt zu unseren Shots Rückmeldung zu holen; Michael war sehr hilfsbereit und hilfreich!

Woche 4: Lip Sync

Zur Zeit läuft die vierte Woche mit Stefan Schumacher, der uns von Pixar besucht.

Lip Sync und ein kleiner Acting Shot stehen auf dem Plan. Ich habe mir eine wahrscheinlich viel zu subtile Szene ausgewählt, denn ich habe so meine liebe Mühe mit animieren diese Woche. Vielleicht merke ich mittlerweile einfach auch, dass ich schon vier Wochen jeden Tag zwischen sieben und acht Stunden am animieren bin, etwas, was ich noch nie zuvor gemacht habe. Es ist also nicht nur ein Vergnügen, auch wenn es Spass macht! Doch wir beissen uns natürlich durch, denn das Lernen steht im Vordergrund.

Wie schon die Dozenten vor ihm hat Stefan uns sehr viele nützliche Tipps gegeben, zum Beispiel in welcher Reihenfolge man am besten die grosse Aufgabe des Lipsyncs angeht. Auch in einem eher simplen Rig eines Gesichts hat es viele Controller, von denen man sich nicht einschüchtern lassen darf!

Stefan nahm sich sehr viel Zeit für unsere einzelnen Anliegen, was sehr angenehm war und uns wahnsinnig weiterhalf.

Wir gingen auf viele Details ein, zum Beispiel welche Teile des Gesichts sich bei einer Änderung von Emotionen zuerst bewegen oder wie man Denkprozesse eines Charakters rüberbringen kann. Faszinierend, was man alles mit kleinsten Bewegungen universal lesbar ausdrücken kann!

 

Text: Rhoda Berger
Fotos: Leoni Dietrich

Seit zwei Wochen ist nun die LuMAA am laufen, und ich sage euch, die Geschwindigkeit und die Ansprüche sind hoch: Ich lerne so viel animieren wie nie zuvor! Lasst uns doch kurz rekapitulieren, wie die beiden Wochen waren.

Woche 1: Walk cycles

In der ersten Woche kamen K.C. Roeyer und Simon Christen den weiten Weg von den Pixar Animation Studios in Kalifornien nach Luzern, um mit uns an den Grundlagen des Walk cycles zu feilen.

Als Modell diente uns Norman, ein etwa 10 Jahre alter Charakter mit viel appeal. Mit grossem Detailgrad wurde uns der Aufbau eines Walk cycles, also dem auf-der-Stelle-Gehen eines Charakters, nähergebracht.

Es war äusserst hilfreich, diese Grundlagen nochmal aufgefrischt zu kriegen, auch weil Simon und K.C. die Sicht von Pixar vermittelten und wir so einen anderen Ansatz gezeigt kriegten als im Studium. Auch Tricks und kleine Geheimnisse, wie mit einem (nicht permanenten!) Marker direkt auf den Bildschirm zu zeichnen, um Abstände und Arcs sichtbar zu machen, wurden preisgegeben.

Es wurde diese Woche die pose to pose Herangehensweise bevorzugt, in der, wie der Name schon verrät, die Schlüsselposen mit allen Controllern gemacht werden. Danach fügt man die in betweens, die Zwischenposen, ein und arbeitet sich so voran.

Natürlich kam bei all der Arbeit auch der Spass und das Kaffeetrinken nicht zu kurz (;

Woche 2: Creature Walk cycle

Die zweite Woche verbrachten wir mit Lukas Niklaus, welcher gerade von Weta Digital zu Industrial Light & Magic gewechselt hat (Glückwunsch!).

Mit ihm schauten wir uns die eher realistische Seite der Walk cycles an, nämlich einen Tiger für VFX. Wir studierten viel Referenzmaterial und lernten einen anderen Ansatz als in der ersten Woche kennen: den layered approach, die “geschichtete Herangehensweise”.

Dabei geht es darum, mit dem root controller zu beginnen, und das Modell wie eine Actionfigur im Raum zu platzieren. Langsam fügt man dann eins nach dem anderen die Füsse, Hüften, Brust und Kopf dazu, bevor man schliesslich in die Details geht, wie zum Beispiel wie die Zehen auseinander gleiten, wenn der Tiger auftritt. Entsprechend waren unsere Diskussionen auch angeregt:

Vielleicht noch mehr als letze Woche war das Vermitteln vom Gewicht der Kreatur unglaublich wichtig, da ein Realitätsgrad angestrebt wird. Wenn die Pfoten des Tigers durch die Luft schweben, ist die ganze Illusion dahin. Mist.

Kurz:

Die Zeit rennt, wir animieren uns die Hände ab, haben dank Ventilatoren nicht ganz so heiss und kriegen die seltene Chance auf Feedback von äusserst grossartigen Animatoren, welche so ganz nebenbei auch noch wahnsinnig sympathisch sind. Nicht die schlechteste Art, den Sommer zu verbringen!

 

Text: Rhoda Berger
Fotos: Leoni Dietrich