The Adorable Man in the Mirror

2007 / 2008 - 3D CG Character Animation

A man takes a long hard look at himself in the mirror to confer with his inner child and gets a harsh reality check.

I decided to have a go at the newly re-furbished ‘11 Second Club’ Animation Competition, where you are given one month to animate a character to a sound sample. Everyone helps each other out by critiquing each other’s work in progress, so I posted clips on the forum to get feedback. Here is a brief diary of my progress with all the chit chat taken out and a few other notes.

3rd November 2007- Reference Footage

After voting on last month’s 131 entries (that took a while!), I downloaded the November sound sample. I had been hoping for something subtle and restrained, but it turned out to be quite a ‘big’ performance. Fortunately it was loaded with pent up energy which I decided to focus on, since my last stab at this competition was a broad performance and I was looking for something a little different.

I had an idea about an over the shoulder shot looking into the reflection of a mirror. The dialogue had a second character in it but I didn’t want to spend a month split between two characters so I decided it would be one of the two mirrored figures going out of sync with the other, which also meant that the over the top reaction at the end would be justified. I setup a mirror in my living room and had someone hold a camera as I performed a variety of ‘takes’ to the sound of the looping sound clip. I tried everything I’d planned for and plenty of alternatives to ensure that there wasn’t something broader I wanted to try. I then took the footage and edited together the best parts into a reference video, which you can play here.

6th November - Early Blocking

The idea for this piece is that he’s talking to someone off camera (screen left) while looking at himself in the mirror. The (screen right) foreground figure will break out of sync with the mirror when the second person speaks and the (centre screen) mirror figure will react independently.

I have selected an excellent free rig by John Doublestein to begin setting up the shot with. So far I’ve still got a few more poses to add and I’ve not spent any time on the timing of these poses yet. I’ll probably leave the out of sync foreground figure until later. So this is a rough pass before the final blocking pass.

8th November - Further Blocking

Here's another version with a lot more of the blocking in place. One of my intensions for this piece is to avoid broad, confident poses so I'm trying to make tight, tense poses which unfortunately aren't as easy to make clear simple silhouettes with, but I'll do my best.
I have been thinking about dropping a few poses here and there, it's probably a bit busy. I'm in the process of shifting out of blocking to spline-based curves at the moment, which means I'm unwinding gimble locks galore at the moment. I don't know why the Euler filter has decided to stop working. Anyway when I've done all of that I'll be able to see where it's too busy and I'll pull a few keys out to calm things down.

I'm not too worried about the appearance of the foreground character (although I'm trying to get both silhouettes to work) because I'm probably going to blur him out in the final version to keep the focus on the mirror figure. I may, however, try pulling the focus to draw attention back to the foreground character just as he breaks out of sync.

10th November

I am thinking about changing the last pose on the foreground figure. I may also avoid having the same figure actually get as far as putting his hands on his face... he'd just stop short of it as he questions (in his mind) if he made himself ‘short’.

18th November - Starting the First Pass

Still lots to do but I thought I’d post an updated video for further feedback. The performance of the centre figure (in the mirror) after 140 hasn’t really been reworked much at all beyond switching the blocking into splined keys (and a load of manual gimble lock fixes). I have removed all the big poses originally relating to the words “Short"  and “Fat"  since they were just making things too busy and I decided it would be better for the character to internalise his thoughts rather than try to show them (but I haven’t refined the replacement performance yet, this is just a rough stand in). The performance of the foreground character (screen right) has been worked on though, after 280. The lip sync is only roughly dropped in and the face and hands haven’t been animated much at all yet.

19th November

I considered making the mirror talk back and having the foreground character react (the obvious choice) but then you wouldn't get to see the great reaction since it would all happen off camera to the right, with the character's back to us. I thought it would be more thought provoking this way and I didn't have to cut away.

25th November - Refining the Animation

Probably my last chance to post my progress up before it's all over so here's what I have so far. Don't worry about the fingers too much, I haven't gone over them yet for most of the piece. There's a little bit of polish to do on the sync switch which is proving to be very tricky and I want to add some shivering to the end pose.

27th November 2007 - Rendering and Compositing

After lots of tweaks I decided to abandon the shivering in several parts of the animation as it just wasn’t needed. I didn’t find satisfactory hand poses for the short-fat section so I turned to the mirror myself and found that even with my eyes closed and a minimum of movement I was using my hands to gesture the lines out, so although I kept it small, I put that action in there. It might seem repetitive but if I added a variety of actions it just distracted from the bigger moments I actually wanted to draw attention to.

As the animation was nearing completion I had been tinkering with lighting and rendering some tests. As I’d gone along I was also compositing the layers in order to test pulling focus. This helped me understand what was going to be visible in the foreground performance. So when it came time to render it the methods where all in place and there was nothing to gamble on… in theory. However I did my first test render and wasn’t too shocked to find that the motion blur was all over the place when the hands switch parenting modes as they connect and disconnect from the face. I switched the curves in those areas to clamped (or stepped) curves and the problem was solved.

I went for the final render with three layers; the reflection, the frame and the foreground character. I added a refraction effect to the reflection layer along with a little shine and some careful masking. The foreground character looked good blurred and I did a few other tricks along the way to draw attention to him (lighting, animation timing, layout, animated effects on the glass, etc…).

It had been my intension to distort the mirror like a circus mirror to make the ‘short’ and ‘fat’ lines meaningful, but I ended up making it so subtle (to avoid confusing the main performance) that it wasn’t worth using.

End of the month.

Finally it’s all done, and now there’s nothing to do but sit back and see what everyone else has done. I’d like to thank the 11 Second Club community for their feedback and support. This project didn't take as many hours as I thought it would but it has incurred a few late nights (not because I had to, but because occasionally I’m obsessed!), it’s required an upgrade to my computer (along with the un-installation of half my software), and my back is killing me. I’ve been animating at work as well with a similar deadline so it was, as usual, an interesting challenge to juggle several performances in my head at once. Thankfully my clients at the ‘11 Second Club’ have all the right priorities in place, so the results are far more satisfying. Anyway,  I can finally switch messenger back on… hello again friends and family!

17th July 2008 - Refinement Pass

I took the opportunity to spend some time polishing the piece, and responding to some of the notes people have left me.