Animation Reel 2011
polycounter lvl 6
I've finished compiling my animation reel.
I'm currently looking for full time employment as an Animator or Lead Artist.
Animation Reel on vimeo
Feedback is welcome.
Thanks for watching.
I'm currently looking for full time employment as an Animator or Lead Artist.
Animation Reel on vimeo
Feedback is welcome.
Thanks for watching.
Replies
My main critique is that it's too long and there are a few things that you'd probably be better off cutting out.
The first two scenes are good, but the quality seems to go down quite a bit with the green horned monster. A few of its animations are good, but the walk and run cycles need to be reworked or removed. The walk cycle of the man in the second last scene should be cut as well, as it's also quite weak (it looks choppy/stiff). The run cycle on the creature in the second scene is quite nice though.
I'd also suggest cutting out the entire wormy bug animations. They don't take away so much, but they don't really add either, so for the sake of keeping it short and sweet for the potential hirer watching it, I'd just say cut it.
Good luck on the job hunt!
I think some of your animations lack holds, the last acting one atleast. The best in your reel is, hands off, your Dominance War Piece but even there, after the roar there's little or no anticipation that shows that he's gonna go. He just goes.
The first clip isn't that bad but the staging is pretty boring and his staggering has a linear pacing. If you make it a little more snappy you'll have a really great action packed scene!
The second one, the Shredok has a nice little idle but the other animations kinda brings it down. For example, the walk doesn't have any offets. Seems lite it's been loop with plateu in the start and end. The attack is linear. There you can make it wind up and motivate it with "The player have to see that the monster is about to attack so he winds up his attack before launching". And well. the last one makes him really toony and doesn't go will with the presumed appeal the character has from his idle.
And the green quadraped is a bit choppy at times.
Tl;dr: Kill your darlings. Remove some of those animations and make the reel more solid, the dominance war piece might even be a great one to end/start with.
some specifics...
Opening fight scene- seems really rushed (the pacing). Give yourself enough time to fully explore the animation you're doing before moving between actions.
Shredok animations- The idle anim has some weird wrist rotations going on at the loop, it also seems very stop-start and not a continuous movement. Same problem in the walk cycle as well, the loop is really visible. The run is lacking a lot of speed and energy and his hands are flailing all over the place, it looks like he's doing some funny walk rather than running. Usually when you're running you're focussed on moving quickly so his arms wouldn't be flopping around, you could also do with adding some bounce to his step (so he leaves the ground) and maybe speed the movement a little.
Domwar piece - Starts good, maybe moving a little too quick for such a big guy. As he steps on the guy its almost like he didn't realise until the last second, it'd look better if it was planned and had some anticipation leading up to the stomp. The ending fly away is WAY too fast.
Green guy - pretty much all of this lacks weight, same problem with the stop-start motions in the run cycle as in the other monster's loop
Gun - Seems very linear and forced, not a natural kind of movement. the reload is way too slow and continuous, work on your timings here. it looks like he pushes the clip up and keeps pushing slowly moving the gun up, as opposed to the gun moving back quickly as a result of slapping the clip in.
As for the guy at the end, i'd personally shy away from using a clip from an animated feature film for a lipsync piece. By doing that you're automatically drawing a comparison between yourself and industry pros, that's some stiff competition.
I agree with most of the critiques.
On the Dominance War piece, we had 20 seconds total to complete the animation from beginning to end and a lot of the anticipation and holds I had worked into the scene had to be reduced to stay within the 20 second limit. I even tried to shorten the other scenes to allow for more time for this scene but it didn't flow very good. I agree the flying sequence ended up way too fast.
I agree with all critiques on the opening fight scene. The reason for the rushed pacing is because I wanted the scene to feel like the guy was being swarmed on and his reactions are more spontaneous than planned. I think though the main reason the pacing was rushed is because this was the last piece I worked on before putting the reel together and I rushed it too much.
I do plan to address the pacing as well as the staging. As I was working on this fight scene I thought the staging and pacing could be greatly improved with some cinematic camera angles (Gears of War like), as well as adjusting the curves to have less linear pacing.
The last walk cycle with the UT character is the same frame rate as the original animations used for the game, hence the choppy/stiff look. I thought about rendering the original animation cycle and show it side by side, to show the improvement but I thought that may be seen as a little negative. I wanted to show diversity in my ability to work with lower end systems that have reduced animation key limitations, but if it's not coming across I really should cut it out.
I can see the Niarog (green quadruped) is the weakest piece in the entire reel. And I concur with everything mentioned.
Again thanks for the feedback. It really helps to get respectful and constructive criticism.