Samba Joy

2013 11 Samba Joy from Stanley Watt on Vimeo.

A "joy" theme dance sequence I've been working on.

Dog Walk study

2013 09 dog walk v013 01 loop x8 from Stanley Watt on Vimeo.

A dog walk loop I did as a study recently. "Sloan" rig from Animation Mentor.

Demo reel updated

I've completed final rendering on Best Friend and Tennis Camp, and have just updated my demo reel. The results can be seen at:
StanleyWatt.com 

StanleyWatt.com updated

I've just finished updating my website: StanleyWatt.com
Please feel free to visit!

Best Friend shot 03, body mechanics + facial acting

Best Friend, v160   

Best Friend, v199

Best Friend: I've been doing fine polish on this shot, got feedback along the way, and worked through all notes. It's finally in a good place mechanically, dramatically, and in terms of general quality.
v160: with body mechanics generally solved, but the emotive aspects are still mostly a blank canvas.  
v199: facial animation has been included, and overall detailed polishing. What an incredible difference. (The video quality for uploads is really rough here. I'll make a better version available when I update my reel.)
The woman in this shot goes through about nine distinct emotional beats. Here's a look at some planning for four of these, to give an idea. These translated fairly well into final form. The drawings are rather rough, they're really just about defining brows, eyes, and mouth shapes:   

 

Best Friend shot 02, current progress

I last commented on this shot in August. 

Version 95, from around mid-summer. I overhauled the shot, placing the male character more center stage now. Formerly he was screen R; but it seemed a bit of a viewing strain to be passing the conversation back and forth over such a screen distance, and he had too far to travel for the grab.

Here's some overdraw I did to resolve the grabbing motion. Ref video I have for this is far too uninteresting. However, this still doesn't "land" it; the shot's fairly realistic, and this motion still needs to be toned down further for the guy. Also, his motion needs to be sudden and unexpected, so that actually calls for very little anticipation. This anticipation is way too big.

Version 130. The female character's body is now well polished, and I'm re-blocking the male character with more carefully studied details and subtleties. He's going to be fidgeting a fair bit, I've been needing to better convey a sense of nervousness with him and that will help. I filmed completely new ref video for his frames 1-245. The male character's anticipation is now more toned down.

This shot is proving to be quite complex - which isn't unexpected, of course: this is intended, as I want this to be my graduating demo's opening shot, and want to be able to demonstrate a broad scope. So there's a whole lot going on on different levels. I still haven't gotten into the facial emotive content, but it's coming along bit by bit.

Spacing analysis: Don Knotts, The Shakiest Gun in the West

Another arc-tracking study. This example of shaky motion comes from "The Shakiest Gun in the West", with actor Don Knotts.
(A longer segment from this scene can be seen on youtube here)
I tracked the tip of the gun. As an instrument, it magnifies a motion that is complex primarily in rotation; the translation would be fairly smooth. Incidentally, if this were animated it would make sense to animate this with a constraint, and it would be important to locate the COG somewhere around the middle of the gun rather than his wrist.
I think a key think to notice from this is that the shaky motion is fairly random. It does hold for about 2 frames and jump in about 1 frame, so there's a slight clustering of points. But it's more "white noise" than "pure tone" vibration.