Malvina Hedenberg: Animation Blog

Here are some of my animated shots for the VFX film project “Draw”. 

Final concept designs made for the short project film named "Draw". The white king ended up being our main design for both characters.

Final Render of Shot 1C

This is the other shot rendered for our documentary project called Bear Growls: Born Survivor. Again, link to full video will be posted soon.

Final Render of Shot 3C

Here’s the end result of my animation for shot 3C! Animation was all done in Maya and rendered in Unreal Engine. I will post the link to the full documentary video soon :)

I made some last finishing touches with few more bits offset and smoothed out curves in the graph editor. The end result was satisfactory with the little time I had to work on the shot but was nonetheless a good challenge to see how much I could get done in a shorter period of time.

Splining this shot required a lot of readjusting the cricket and the hand movements of the bear. It was a bit difficult coming up with an action that looked interesting with the few seconds in the shot.

In the meantime though, I thought offsetting things would be most important. If I could at least get the technical issues out of the way first, doing the rest would be easier. I played around a lot with where the cricket would fall into the bear's mouth, and wanted to make sure the last pose would show him about to crunch on it.

I was eventually given feedback from the director, suggesting that the bear needed to look more hunched over by giving him a more rounded belly. Since he's a bear, he shouldn't seem anorexic after all. I was also suggested to change the pose a bit where one of the arms would be positioned differently. As of now, it seemed that that arm's action didn't appear to make much sense and was simply moving for sake of moving. 

While I had shot 3C to work on as my main shot, it turned out I needed to help out a fellow team member in the group by completing one of his shots as well. Although it was only a 2-3 seconds of animation, I still had to make sure that the shot appeared interesting. For this shot, I simply had to make the bear throw a cricket into his mouth as he was about to eat it. I started with very basic poses but didn't have much of a direction on how I was going to go about it yet.

I worked a bit more on adding some breakdown poses and also changing the bear's expression to look more serious. For this shot in general, I definitely wanted to put a lot of focus on the bear's claws as a way of further expressing his animalistic nature.

However, just before I thought I was finally finished, I was given one final critique from the tutor about the bear's fall. The issue was that it was happening far too quickly, and I couldn't help but admit the same. In order to correct this, I had to add an extra pose and a few more frames to slow down the bear's fall and also made sure to stretch all parts of the bear's body as to create smoother smear frames.

For my first splining on this shot, I was surprised how smooth a lot of bits looked. This may have been thanks to adding a lot of breakdown shots while blocking, but of course there was still much work needed to refine the animation.

The first glaring issue I noticed straight off the bat was the bear's leg twisting. For some reason, both the leg and shoulder had curves that caused them to twist. This wound up to be quite difficult to fix, as I had to go frame by frame to keep the leg from twisting. While I tried deleting certain frames, this only ended up extending the leg's twist which only made it worse.

Once I got that major issue resolved, I began fixing minor details but also coming across new problems along the way. One of them was making sure the bear's head didn't phase through the tree branch. I tried having the bear move the head up as much as possible in order to avoid this but it only caused the bear's head to snap in a jarring way. Another issue I faced was making sure one of the back legs didn't move too drastically as the bear was reaching for the beehive.

As requested by the director, we decided to shorten the beginning bit of the animation and also move the ladder as to make the transition between this shot and the previous shot flow more easily.

After that, I began moving on to offsetting as many parts of the bear as possible. Due to this, I had to go back and re-position certain parts of the bear. The neck snapping had also been resolved at this point. Lip syncing had also been done, and didn't take very long due to the short dialogue.

At this point, there were a lot more breakdown poses added and it was starting to become more clear how the bear was going to climb. I had also begun experimenting how the ladder was going to be kicked down but at this stage it didn't seem to look quite right yet.

The director suggested that the ladder should fall at a more curved angle as to create negative space. This automatically made the shot look more appealing and interesting. I also received feedback from the director that the smear frame I had made when the bear falls needed to fall in a way that it would stay aligned with the line of action.

Shortly after, I was finally getting to the refined bits of blocking where I could add expressions to the bear's face. While it's not too noticeable, I made sure to have the bear's tongue stick out as to emphasise his struggle to reach for the beehive. The beehive itself had also been animated as well at this point. Before I moved on to splining, I was suggested by the director to add one additional detail to the ladder where it would sway back and forth before falling. This would help make the ladder's fall look slightly more realistic.

When I began my shot for this, I decided to create a rough layout to see how I would time the bear's movement as it was climbing the tree. What I found was that the audio I had been given was far too short to give the bear any time to climb the tree and fall off the branch in a realistic manner.

This became much more noticeable when I began making basic block poses and could see that the bear would have to move rather quickly to get to the tree branch before falling off.

I then began looking for references of bears climbing up trees and other similar objects to get a more accurate depiction of how this scene would look. The director agreed with me that there needed to be more time for the bear to move so I increased the frames for the shot. I was also suggested by the director to add a ladder in the scene as he felt that would make the shot more comedic and further suggest that the bear was not as skilled as he appeared to be.

I then began adding breakdown shots and received help from the director in rigging the tree branch in order to make it move as the bear was clinging on to it. I really wanted to emphasise on the bits where the bear would struggle to get up so that it was more clear that he wasn't professional at climbing trees. The beehive was eventually added as well, although that too needed to be rigged as it needed to sway along with the tree branch.

Storyboards for BEAR GROWLS: BORN SURVIVOR documentary

These are the storyboards I have made for a parody documentary of Bear Grylls but as an actual bear. I am currently working with a team on this, and certain panels have been needed to be cut out due to time constraints.

I was asked to draw more panels for sake of adding more ideas for the beginning montage shot as well.

The panel of the bear eating the cockroach was the only one we ended up keeping out of the extra four panels.

Along with that, I drew a technical issue panel for when the bear knocks down the camera after being stung by the bees.

My last assignment for this group project was to create a one sheet poster for this trailer. There were a few good ideas we all had in mind. Two of them had a more comedic mood to them where Alan was more interactive with his mop. However, the one we ended up going with was a Star Trek inspired poster. I decided to use the poster from Star Trek: The Final Frontier as my reference to make our own. I must admit I was rather nervous at first, as I don't consider myself to be the most knowledgeable of photo manipulation. With the little I knew, however, I did my best to match the look of this poster to my reference and with the help of Daniel's feedback, we pushed it even further to look more appealing.

Here is the final result of my animation! It sure came a long way from what it used to be. This couldn't have been done without the help of teammates and those who gave me feedback on how to improve it. There are of course still issues in this animation I would like to tend back to as it is not perfect. I also found Alan's eyes and teeth to be a bit too glossy in this render and perhaps even hid some of his micro expressions because of that. That being all said, I still am quite proud of how it all turned out, including the rest of the shots my teammates made.

I honestly couldn't have asked for a more talented and awesome team. 

If you want to see the full trailer, you can view it here. Also, please keep in mind this is a FAKE trailer and is in no way actually associated with Netflix. 

My first spline version was very rough and float-y, as you can see. Everything seems stiff, slow, and inexpressive. Getting things to be timed correctly came as a bit of a challenge for me. Not to mention, the way I had animated Alan so far seemed very robotic. His expression at the end had also been changed to being more scared as we felt that that would flow better with the tone of the scene. 

So I decided to work more on getting certain poses to transition much more smoothly and quickly. Getting Alan to take off his headphones in a believable way would come to be one of the biggest challenges in this shot. Considering that these headphones couldn't be physically bent as they were being brought down, I had to move Alan's shoulder, neck, arm, and torso to a point where it had o be exaggerated even. 

I was given the suggestion by a classmate to keep Alan's eyes more still and focused on the ships, this way making his expressions more subtle. It was a difficult situation considering there wasn't much movement coming from Alan during this shot and there needed to be enough movement to keep it interesting.

More subtle movements were added at this point but there were still a lot of issues with the lack of exaggeration in Alan's movements. I was also still having a big issue with Alan taking off his headphones where the hand with jolt and click the minute it was unparented.

Since I was having trouble figuring out how to make Alan's movements less robotic, I reached out for help from other animators at Escape. I ended up receiving great feedback from a third year on what I could change in the animation to make it a lot more interesting. With those changes I had made, I could already see the immediate improvement.

The only major issue I had left to fix before it was time to render the shot was the clicking on the headphones. Essentially, I had to redo that bit a little by re-parenting the hand and headphone. Sometimes the ParentMaster simply doesn't work as it should all the time... Of course there were small last minute fixes I had made on top of that thanks to the help of our producer Daniel.

As expected, there had to be changes made to my shot. A lot of it involved the camera panning out at a different time. However, it was still a bit unclear whether Alan was meant to react to the spaceships outside. Was he meant to be scared or determined? This became evident in my animation, where I added extra poses unsure what I wanted to do with Alan myself. 

In the next version, I had fewer poses towards the end and wanted to give Alan a more determined look. I also really wanted to exaggerate his jump scare reaction when searching for something to use as a weapon. This ended up becoming an issue however, as the rest of my team hadn't used the squash control on his face and wanted the animation style to stay consistent. We were also still deciding where the spaceships from outside were going to be placed, which is why they appear to be idle and float-y here. 

Animation always starts off with a rough blocking stage. It was important at this stage to not add too many key poses as we needed to make sure the shot would flow well together with the rest of the trailer.