Animation Mentor Assignment Ten and Eleven!

Wow! Time has sure flown by! I can't believe that I'm already done with my first class at AM! For our final assignment, we had to do another walk cycle, except this time we got to add some personality to our walk! One thing I've always wanted to Animate was a Moonwalk! I thought it would be a fun animation, plus I knew it would be a bit of a challenge. When animating a walk you don't want your character to slide, however, with a moonwalk, your character HAS to slide. I needed to find a happy medium where it looked like my character Ballie (Jean) was sliding with some weight! Like every other assignment at AM, the first step was to do some planning sketches.

Luckily for me I can actually Moonwalk, so I already knew this walk inside and out! I ended up watching a ton of videos of Michael Jackson doing the walk, so I could figure out some sort of spin I could add to the end of my walk. Unfortunately I'm not talented enough to do any crazy dance moves outside of the Moonwalk, so watching all of these old clips of MJ performing was more than just me getting to listen to some awesome music. After I had my idea planned out, I jumped into blocking. Again like I said in my last post I'll make sure to go more into the blocking step in future blog posts. After I got that approved by my mentor, I spent a ton of time working with the always amazing Lorenzo to get this walk to look as good as possible. Finally I ended up with this!

Well I hope you enjoyed this animation as much as I did! My next post will be my Demo Reel for the class and will have all of the finished animations. Thanks for reading!

~Josh

Animation Mentor Assignment Eight and Nine!

Wow it has been a long time since I've updated you guys with my work from AM. Sorry about that! Honestly I've been so busy getting my work done, that I haven't had much time to update my blog! I'll make sure that next semester I do a better job of doing that!

Our second to last assignment was to do a vanilla walk cycle. Now I've done walk cycles in the past, however a vanilla walk cycle is a completely different beast. A vanilla walk is a walk that has no personality. It is a walk in its most basic form. Like always the first step was the sketch out what the walk would look like.

The next step was to block out the animation. Blocking is where you only animate the key poses. If an animation can read well when it's in its blocking pass, then 99% of the time it will read well when you put in all of the poses. I'll go more into the blocking process in future AM assignments.

After the blocking stage is finished, the next step is to go back into the animation and add the poses in between the key poses and clean up any mistakes. That should leave you with this, the finished animation

And there ya go! That was my finished walk cycle! I thought it would be fun though to see how far I've come and include the first two walk cycles I ever did. Keep in mind that these two animations were NOT vanilla walks, as they have a lot of personality.

Well that's it for now! I'll be posting the remainder of my assignments at AM along with my final demo reel soon!

Thanks for reading and as always enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Mentor!

If you've read any of my past posts, like this one or this one, you'll know that I've been preparing for Animation Mentor. Well I'm super excited to announce, that along with my friend and fellow Celestial Animation Lead, Lindsey Jones will be starting Animation Mentor in January! That means prepare yourself for a TON of blogposts covering my various animation assignments!

My mentor this semester is Ray Ross, a senior Animator at Blue Sky! If you click his name you can check out his IMDB and if you scroll below you can see his demo reel!

RayRossReel from Raymond Ross on Vimeo.

As you can tell I'm SUPER excited for classes to begin!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Tutorial!

Recently I've been playing around with a new rig from meryproject.com

I was asked by a friend to do a tutorial on how I approach prop interaction and thought Mery would be a fun rig to use for that tutorial!

Animation Tutorial - Prop Interaction from Josh Janousky on Vimeo.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Traditional Animation - Attempt #1

Lately I've been on a bit of a traditional animation kick. I've been watching tons of documentaries on the subject and several animated films I've either never seen before or haven't seen in quite a while. The last time I did any 2D animation was back in December of 2012, so I decided I wanted to try my hand at a quick 2D animation. As some of you might be aware I'm a magician, and the trick that got me into magic was when I asked this magician for his business card and he pulled it out of thin air. I thought it would be cool to animate that trick. I shot myself doing the trick and began to animate! This was done with 14 different drawings, with the majority of them being on 2s. What that basically means is that each image was held for 2 frames, with a few exceptions. Anyways, enough talking, heres the animation!

This was a lot of fun to do, and I'm happy with how it turned out. I  plan on going back and cleaning up the animation since it is pretty rough. Who knows maybe I'll start doing some more 2D animations in the future!

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Mentor's Fútbol Contest!

This coming Fall, I should be attending Animation Mentor, which is this incredible online animation school. At Animation mentor you are taught animation by professionals working in the industry. There are mentors from Pixar, Dreamworks, Bluesky, Disney, ILM, Nick, etc. I'm super excited to attend, especially seeing my friends Chelsea and Nick post all of their awesome assignments this past year. Recently on the Animation Mentor facebook page, they posted a contest inspired by the World Cup. The contest was to take any rig and put it into some sort of Soccer pose (if you remember in this post I previously did some pose work inspired by AM). I've always been fascinated by some of the jumping kicks you'll see Soccer players do, so I thought it would be fun to go with a pose like that. I ended up doing a little bit of compositing to make the piece look like it was a still frame from an animation, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Tutorial - Lip Syncs!

A few months ago, I made a tutorial for the Junior Class on how to do a lip sync. Lip syncs are something I really enjoy doing, and since while in the Character Animation program we didn't really go that much in depth into how to do them, I decided to make a tutorial. This is my personal process for doing a lip sync, along with some cool tips and tricks I've learned along the way!

Lip Sync Tutorial from Josh Janousky on Vimeo.

By the way, if you want some more awesome Animation tutorials, head on over to my friend Nick Arbeiter's Vimeo channel and show him some love!

Hopefully this helped you out a bit and as always enjoy!

~Josh

2014 Animation Demo Reel

Well now that the film is over, I'm allowed to post some of my Animations! This is a placeholder for my actual Animation demo reel as I plan on doing a few more this summer. If you came to the premiere I hope you remember some of these shots and enjoyed yourself!


Josh Janousky Animation Demo Reel - 2014 from Josh Janousky on Vimeo.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Celestial Animation Preview

Hey guys! So I've posted a lot of Celestial things lately, but I haven't posted any of my animations. Now I don't want to give too much of the film away, so I'm just going to show you one shot I worked on. One thing that I've found while working on the film, is that I'm quite good at animating facial reactions. Several of the key reaction shots in the film were ones I animated, or asked to touch up. I thought it would be cool to show one of those shots now!

Hopefully you liked this shot! I can't wait til the movie is finally finished. You can be sure I will keep you all up to date.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Celestial Style Guide - Gan's Planet Formation

So this past week we finally finished the first pass Animation for Celestial. As one of the Animation leads, it was my job to help develop the style of how Gan moved. Specifically how his wings move and how he forms planets. As you might remember from this post I had the idea to combine aspects of Tai Chi to come up with how Gan would create a planet. Below is the animation from the style guide illustrating that. I'm pretty proud with how this turned out considering this was my first time animating wings.

And just for fun, I thought it would be cool to include the reference video I shot for this animation. As you can tell I slowed the animation down a lot, but the movements are the same.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Station!

So this week our very first animation of the year was due! As one of the lead animators on our team, I was really excited to get to work on this assignment. The point of this assignment was to test out our rigs. Right now we are using Proxy Rigs, which are basically super low poly rigs, without facial controls. We were allowed to do anything we wanted for the animation, the only requirement was that our character had to transverse across the plane in some form or another. I decided that I wanted to test out how our character, Gan, would create a planet. Since our character Gan is supposed to be slow and elegant, I decided to take some inspiration from Tai Chi.

Fun Fact: Tai Chi inspired water bending in Avatar the Last Airbender.

Despite a lot of the issues with the rig, I think I successfully achieved the look I was going for. I hope that this animation test can serve as a possible animation style later on in the film. Once we have the final rig, I plan on redoing this animation to fix some of the issues that I encountered.

Here's the animation! Click the link to see the full resolution video (Blogger compresses it way too much below)

Recently, my friends Chelsea and Nick started Animation Mentor. Their first assignment was to take different poses and then pose a character so that it was doing the same pose. As I hope to do Animation Mentor next year, I decided to get a head start and work on the assignment on my own. Thanks to Nick for the first two poses!

I'm really happy with how these turned out! I definitely could push a few of the poses further, but for a first attempt, I'm quite happy with it!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Pacific Rim Inspired Speed Painting

Hey guys! So this time I decided to do something completely new and record myself painting! Two nights ago I saw Pacific Rim with a few people from Celestial (cough cough check out the blog I run for that as well) and the director of Yours, Mime, and Ours. I LOVED the movie (Gipsy Danger!) and was really fascinated by a lot of the designs in the film. I decided that since my last creature concept went over so well, I'd do another. I also decided lately that I wanted to start a visual development reel, so I figured it would be better to have more than just elements from our film in it.

For this piece I didn't really have a concept in mind, just certain elements I wanted. I knew I wanted it to have big curved horns, sort of like the Balrog from LOTR, and I knew I wanted it to walk on its Knuckles with it's shoulder raised. I also liked the idea of giving the creature back ridges. Other than that, I had no clear picture so I decided to just get to painting.

I quickly assembled some reference pictures to inspire me and began to sketch. I won't go into too much detail as to what I did next because you can actually see what I did below!

So I really am happy with how this turned out. As you can see I decided to line this piece, and surprisingly I managed to do it without resorting to the pen tool... go figure! After watching the video a few times, I did go back and make one more change, I decided to add some rain. Pacific Rim seemed to always take place during a rain storm, so I thought it was fitting. Here is the final, full resolution piece

I had a lot of fun painting this piece, and I hope you guys enjoyed looking into my process for painting. I decided to keep all of the mistakes in the video, rather than cutting them out,  so you could kind of get an idea as to what I was thinking. Leave a comment below if you'd like to see more speed paintings from me in the future. By the way for those interested in how long this took, it took 2 hours and 23 minutes.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Breakdown - Darth Vader Lip Sync!

So the first week of classes have come to an end and I thought it would be appropriate to post one of the animations I did this summer! Now this animation was a little different than what I normally do. Normally I film reference from the start. However for this one, I had a clear idea in mind and decided to just jump into it. Now I wouldn't recommend that, but this was an idea I had for so long, and had acted out enough times that I knew what I wanted to do. The second thing that makes this animation strange is the fact that I did the whole thing in a day. Since class was starting soon, I set aside an entire day just to animate, and I'm pretty happy with the result!

I found this really cool rig called the RC Rig and I just knew I had to do something with it. I was trying to come up with a cool animation when suddenly it hit me. I've been doing so much Star Wars art lately, why not do a Star Wars animation! I decided that I wanted to do something where a really geeky voice transformed into James Earl Jones' voice. I later decided that after RC became Darth Vader, I wanted him to force choke the "cameraman." Now that I had my concept, it was time to animate!

The first thing I did was get some of the basic movements where I wanted them and to begin messing with the camera.

I then began to refine some of those movements, add some blinks, and start messing with the lip sync. I also changed the hand gesture from an open palm, to a more choke-like pose.

The next step was to add some eye movement. I needed RC to look at the camera as he did his force choke. Also I needed the eyes to move slightly around while he was holding to make them seem more natural.

After that, I touched up some other movements and began to slightly refine the camera some more.

All that was left was to touch up any final movements, get the camera exactly where I wanted it, and to add sound! Once that was done I ended up with this!

Well I hope you enjoyed this quick breakdown! Next time I'll go into more detail, showing you all the stages of the animation from start to finish. This was just to give you a quick insight into how I work!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Tales of a Concept Artist

One problem I've had for the longest time was coming up with something original when it came to my art. I could think of cool ideas, but they were always based off of something else. I just didn't seem to be able to think up original concepts on my own. All that changed recently thanks to this program. Since we had to come up with our own stories, characters, and locations, we had to draw to provide concepts in order to get our stories pushed through. Since I was forced to start coming up with original ideas, I began to find it easier to think up things as time went on. At one point, when our team was still trying to get selected, I was providing the bulk of the concept art for character designs. While I would by no means say I'm a fantastic concept artist, I do think that over this past year I have slowly started to get the hang of it.

Recently we had to come up with some concepts addressing two major issues in our film: what type of wings our main character had and how did he go about creating planets. Using the character concept my friend Jackie Malvin came up with, I started to get to work. In my mind I had always had a very clear image as to how our main character, Gan, created planets. I saw his hands swirling around bits of rock, cloud, and crystal as they began to form a planet (think Avatar: the Last Airbender). I did a few sketches to try and figure out how best to convey that. The wings, on the other hand, was something I didn't know how to approach at first. Originally Gan had these huge angelic wings, which I had always been against as I felt that they created several issues in our film. However the faculty loved the idea of wings, so we had to find a way to incorporate them into our film. One day while meeting, a few of us came up with the idea of making his wings out of energy, rather than traditional wings. I really liked that idea a lot, as I had hated the traditional wing design. While trying to concept what these wings looked like, I came up with the idea of incorporating his wings into the planet making process. After sketching out a few different poses, I finally came up with the one I liked.

While I don't know if my idea will ultimately be selected, I am very happy with is, as it's one of the first pieces of concept art that I feel truly conveys what I was going for. I know that I still have a lot of art if I ever want to seriously consider doing concept art, but I feel that for the first time ever I'm finally on the right track. One thing I'm incredibly grateful for, that has resulted from this program, is that I'm finding a lot more things about this field that intrest me.

Enjoy!

~Josh

Animating Myself - Part 1

So I've decided that as a summer project, I was going to attempt to model, texture, and rig an animated version of myself. For those of you who don't know me in real life, my drawing style is "Disney-esque" . When I first saw Disney's Tangled, I knew that if I were to apply my style to 3D, it would be similar to that (this being said, I still feel like I have a far way to go with my drawing style, but I'll save that for a future blog post). I thought it would be fun to have my very own Josh Rig, so that I could use it for my demo reel, and my own personal animation projects. The very first step, and the reason behind this blog post, was to make a Model Sheet of my cartoon self, so I could use it as reference for the modeling stage. For those of you who don't know what a Model Sheet it, its typically a front view and side view of a person, object, or creature that the modeler will use in order to create the 3D model. Now that you know what a Model Sheet is, here's mine!

Enjoy!

~Josh

My Intermediate Animation Demo Reel

So as I mentioned in my previous blog post, I recently just completed my first year in the Character Animation program at UCF. One thing I was a bit nervous about when I got into the program, was what it would be like to actually animate in 3D. I had never used any 3D programs before, or did any type of animation, so honestly I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to pick it up. Much to my surprise, and my pleasure, I turned out to be a natural! There wasn't a single animation class where you didn't hear someone calling my name to help them out with an animation, which is something I'm honestly quite proud of. For our final animation assignment we had to make up a demo reel containing all of the work we had done in our Intermediate Animation class. I went back and redid all four assignments, in addition to rendering them out in HD. I also decided to do one more animation, just to show everyone, and more importantly the professor, how much I care about animation. With that being said here is my final Intermediate Animation demo reel!

Enjoy!

Allow me to Introduce Myself!

So I decided to start this blog after talking with my good friend Chelsea. She suggested that I make a blog to show off my art, since I'm always posting it on facebook.

I'll start off this blog with a little bit of an introduction. Hi! I'm Josh, nice to meet you! I'm an aspiring 3D animator currently enrolled in the Character Animation program at UCF. I've wanted to be an animator since I was five years old and the more I learn about the field, the more excited I get to work in it.

While I've always wanted to be an animator, I wasn't really sure if I wanted to pursue traditional 2D animation, or work towards becoming a 3D Animator. That all changed my senior year of high school when I read the book The Pixar Touch. This book legitimately changed my life, because from that moment on I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life .

The Character Animation program at UCF is quite an experience. I was lucky enough to be selected to join the program, after a grueling application process, along with 24 amazing artists. This past year has been eye opening as we've gotten to experience what it would be like to work in a real studio setting.

During the time we've been in the program, we went through the process of coming up with stories for us to animate, before finally narrowing it down to two films; Celestial and Yours, Mime, and Ours. I had been a part of Celestial since midterms, so I was quite excited when we found out we were selected as one of the two films.

We just finished up our first year of pre-production, and over the course of the next year we will go through the process of modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting, animating, and rendering our short film. From time to time I will update this blog on the progress of our film.

On this blog I plan to post any drawings, paintings, or Animations I've done. Occasionally I might do a breakdown of a certain piece.

~Josh