Rammus: The Armordillo

I've been up to a bit since last time. Here's another League of Legends character reimagining. This one's Rammus. Click for full size plz.

Like the Annie one my aim was to take aspects of the lore and gameplay of the character and better represent them visually. Rammus is basically an armadillo that lived in a desert, then randomly wandered into a jungle, found a thing, and that thing made him an ARMORDILLO (read his original lore here). I originally wanted to represent this chance transformation by making him look really horrid and deformed, as if his mutation was completely random, and it's only by sheer luck that his body is even functional. However, I found it hard because I'm not a very good designer.

So instead I focused on two other things. First, the fact that his original design doesn't actually look like an armadillo, just a generic cartoon armoured thing. So I looked at lots of reference of different kinds of armadillo, including screaming hairy armadillos, pink fairy armadillos, and three-banded armadillos (the only kind that can actually curl into a ball). My second focus was the armour aspect. His lore says that he has crafted a suit of armour for himself. In-game, his innate passive ability gives him bonus attack damage based on his armour, and his Defensive Ball Curl ability, which increases his defenses, also causes him to reflect damage against those who attack him, again based on his armour. Essentially, as you buy more armour items, he does more damage. However, his actual design represents all of this with nothing more than a crappy little spiked plate on his belly. I tried putting armour in the places that aren't already covered by his shell, which makes sense, but it just didn't work for what I wanted visually. Thus, I went with sticking spikes all over his shell to make him really look like something you wouldn't want to punch. I felt showing a progression like this was the best way to get the idea across, and I'm actually reasonably pleased with it. I had some serious issues during the design process, as I got that thing where I fall in love with the first crappy sketch I did, but when I try to replicate it I at first fail, then succeed, but it only makes me realise how bland it actually is. Many thanks to Joe, Blanca, and Ben for encouragement and advice, mostly on colours. I may not have made use of all of your suggestions, but they were all given proper consideration.

Here are some sketches. You can probably pick out the one that I basically just used for the final image.

There were also some much earlier doodles on the Germany sketchbook pages I posted. I don't actually know if I'm going to do any more of these since I don't play League of Legends anymore. I might just do some straight-up fanart for Dota 2 though. The designs in that game are overall pretty good and I wouldn't want to outright change any of them, but it might be fun to illustrate them in a more cartoony way.

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Other than that, here's the video I said I probably couldn't talk about last time, again directed by David Wilson.



Tame Impala - Mind Mischief from Blink on Vimeo.

I was lead animator, doing key animation on many shots, as well as in-between animation on a couple of others (chiefly the bit where he walks up her body), and effects animation on others (the comets mostly). It was a grueling nightmare but was also sort of fun (?), and it's nice to be able to put LEAD ANIMATOR on a job for once. David Wilson is also a really ambitious director, so it's always demanding and fun to work with him.

I've got some other projects lined up in the near future which will hopefully be cool when they come to fruition, but I can't say what they are either (I signed an actual NDA for one of them!)

I had my 27th birthday and we went to see Wreck-It Ralph. This image sums up the experience for me.

Everything I suspected from the trailer was true (essentially, that the videogame references would be pretty hollow, that they only had a small pool of licenses to pull from, and it would basically all just be a vehicle for a standard Disney plot, rather than actually making an interesting use of the real characters). However, I actually ended up enjoying that plot and the characters more than I wanted to admit. Unlike Pixar's last two offerings (sequels don't count), it actually became more rather than less interesting once the plot started, and it made me care about the characters enough that I genuinely wanted them to win.

That or I'm just a sucker for cute little girls. Hey guess what, I watched the whole fourth season of Hidamari Sketch recently and I enjoyed it all and I didn't even feel a little bit bad that I enjoyed it.

I have been enjoying playing Pathfinder (an offshoot of Dungeons and Dragons) with Joe and Blanca for the past year or so. Recently our campaign has escalated with the dramatic death of a much-loved player character (though this isn't the first time, just the first since I joined). Right now our party is considering abandoning the current dungeon (as it turns out we're underleveled for it) and attempting to take out the big bad in a non-standard fashion, which might result in hilarious disaster. I might try to do some drawings of our characters in the next week before I have to start my next job.

Oh yeah, the leak in my room seems to have actually been fixed (after one unsuccessful attempt), the mould in the bathroom has been scrubbed off, painted over, and doesn't appear to be returning, and I haven't seen any signs of bedbugs in months. So my life is looking up right now! I've also booked tickets to see The Book of Mormon in June, which promises to be tons of fun (birthday thanks to dad and Myra).

I can't think of anything else to write so I'm just going to end this post awkwardly.

I'm realising that I rarely bother to go to the cinema these days unless it's the Imax.

I saw Inception at the Imax last night. It was unbelievably intense and extremely enjoyable. What made is really good, for me, was that it didn't spend all its time trying to make the viewer question whether what they were seeing was real or not (as was done well by, say, Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue, and badly by the Matrix trilogy starting with the end of Reloaded ), but focused largely on making it a believable problem for the principle characters. I felt it was an actual character-driven sci-fi action movie.

Worth seeing in the Imax, though I actually kind of wish I'd been even further forward for MOAR IMMERSHUN. The sound-design actually benefitted alot from this, too, it'd be totally wasted if you just watched it at home on your telly (unless you have an AMAZING sound system, or at least very good headphones).

I also liked that the VFX were kept to a minimum (apparently only about 500 shots, compared to the 620 of Batman Begins and the 1,500+ shots of many VFX-heavy films). The fight scene in the corridor with shifting, and eventually zero, gravity had me going WAT the whole time. The way that the third level was a pure-white snowy wasteland really got across the sheer intensity of the experience, as well.

I have an actual post planned. If you're lucky I'll write it later today (assuming I don't just end up playing Starcraft 2 all evening).

Rock and Rule - Mock, the coolest animated character ever.

 
A while ago, back when I first discovered John Kricfalusi's blog and was reading through a whole bunch of his old posts, I happened across this one, about a 1980s Canadian animated feature called Rock and Rule, which was mostly pretty dodgy but had one character, Mok, who really stood out. I was pretty impressed by what few images and Youtube clips there were (at the time: it seems there are more now), but I wanted to see more so I rented the DVD, and eventually ended up buying it.

Here's a few of my favourite Mok bits, edited together in a dodgy fashion (though I've not included everything by any means).

His introduction is the BEST. It's like the intensity and the tension and the solidity are all at 110% the entire time. I don't feel his animation is quite as consistently amazing throughout the rest of the film but it's still incredibly impressive. If I could ever animate something so complicated so well I'd die a happy man.

His lip-sync blows my goddamn mind. His muzzle has this amazing sinewy, muscular taughtness to it, really like some super-chiselled, rugged, middle-aged rock god straight out of the 80s. His lips look like they've been carved out of stone. Only they roll around and chew up syllables in this fabulously decadent, organic fashion

 I feel really, really dirty for enjoying the way he introduces himself.

"I'm Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmok!"
Over-animation, maybe, but with Mok it's justified since he's meant to be a really decadent, self-indulgent personality anyway.

His features are constantly packed with this tense energy that gets built up and released in a really satisfying way.

But it's always animating around a consistent default position, which is part of what gives it such a taught feel. As if it's been forced and moulded into that shape by years of arrogantly pursed lips and puffed up haughtiness. That maw really feels like a cavernous space filled with rows of immaculate teeth. Even when it's closed! And not just that, but you even get a sense of the thickness of the flesh surrounding that space. Mok's mouth is a phenomenal achievement of drawing... and it's not even still drawings! It works no matter what position it's drawn in.

There's some great acting in parts, too. This bit where he reacts to Omar's little quip just kills me every time. That first held expression is great just by itself,

 but then he starts screwing his face up and unscrewing it, with subtle little touches like the tongue coming out for about two frames,

 

 and then those incredible lips flare out, exposing the teeth as he bursts into full laughter,

and all the while his whole head's slowly turning side-to-side, without a hint of unintended deformation. No cheating here, just really, really good drawing.

Of course, this is also dependant on Don Francks's brilliant voice-acting. It's all very well doing amazing animation but it won't work if it's unrelated to the dialogue, and all the above was clearly done by listening to the voice-track over-and-over, and emphasising all the subtle inflections the voice-actor put into it.

The animators pushed for some good acting with the other characters, too, but it's kind of hard to get over how generic (in the case of Stretch and the fat, glasses-wearing guy and many others) or awkward (in the case of Omar) the designs ended up looking (probably as a result of too many executive decisions). The fact that Omar spends much of the film being really unlikeable doesn't help his case much either.
I kind of enjoy the bits where he's being all intense and manly, though.

Just in case you're wondering why Angel has such big eyes, it's because this woman was in charge of animating her.

 I think it's kind of cool that she ended up drawing the character looking like herself, though. Deborah Harry, who provided Angel's singing voice, says in the making-of that the song-writers were told to imagine that they were making the music for themselves, not for "a little character". I guess this also carried over to the animators. Angel suffers less than some of the other characters from the whole dog-nose thing so Bardwell was doing something right.

This is the insane genius who animated Mok, by the way.

I said that if I could successfully animate a character like Mok I'd die happy, but if I could do it while looking this chilled I think I might just attain Nirvana. That's probably where he is now. If not I'd love to see what he's worked on since.

Apparently Mok's design was inspired a bit by the Devil character in Nelvana's earlier short, The Devil and Daniel Mouse, which is helpfully included in the DVD extras.

He's not as solid as Mok (I don't know if Budd animated him, though he definitely worked on the short) but he's still pretty entertaining, and the resemblance is clear. The carved-out lips are a dead giveaway.

It's kind of annoying that the PAL transfer to DVD was so bad. I've hidden it with my screenshot selection, but it's hard-telecined from 24fps to 25, rather than just sped up with a 1:1 frame equivalency (a much preferable method), so almost every other frame is blended together, and it's especially bad in parts with motion on ones. Add to this tons of artefacting, and the fact that it's from a VHS copy as the original prints were lost in a fire, and I start to get really annoyed that such incredible animation has to be so damaged. For all the film has a laughable plot and some highly questionable design decisions, watching the making-of featurette it's kind of impossible not to have respect for how much the artists who worked on it really wanted to make something great. Everybody who worked on it was really into it. I've spent all this time talking about one character, but even the special effects people pushed pretty hard to innovate, using real cow-brains for the texture of the demon at the end of the film, employing lasers for the flashy lights in the club scene, and really going all out with some incredibly ambitious multi-plane camera effects. Which had to be programmed by hand. None of this After Effects compositing bullshit, actual PEOPLE made this film. It's very easy to take for granted how easy it is to do some things these days, especially when you're a young thing like me who's had these things available his entire life.

Looking through the clips on Youtube, it looks like the NTSC (30fps) transfer was much better, at least in terms of frame-blending. Maybe I should've bought that instead.

I've got a few ideas for the next post, but that probably won't come within the next couple of weeks due to Christmas and lounging around at home (and doing volunteer work, oddly...). So, Christmas Wishes to both my readers. Hope you're enjoying the snow.