BEN & VANYA

I chose to animate a scene between Ben and Vanya from TUA (The Umbrella Academy). The scene involves Ben comforting a despaired Vanya. I want to capture Vanya's distress, Ben's kindness and in the end, Vanya's relieved smile after hearing Ben's comforting words.

Context of the show is below but beware of spoilers!

*POTENTIAL SPOILERS*

The scene I have chosen is from the TV show, The Umbrella Academy. The premise of the story revolves around the dysfunctional Hargreeves family. Sir Reginald Hargreeves had adopted 7 children born with supernatural powers. In Season 2, there is an exchange between two of the adopted siblings, Ben and Vanya. Ben has actually been dead for about 16 years but has attached to one of the other siblings, Klaus, whose powers are similar to that of a medium.

Vanya, for all her life, had been led to believe that she was powerless and just an ordinary person by their father. It turns out though, that she holds the strongest power out of all the siblings and their father had been drugging her since childhood because he didn't know how to control it. Emotional conflict and turmoil happen in Season One at the same time as Vanya discovers her powers that had led her to lose control and cause an apocalypse that wipes out the entire planet.

Unfortunately, the other siblings fail to prevent this, so at the end of Season One, Five, another sibling who can jump through space and time, took all of them and went back in time. But in that new timeline in Season Two that they ended up in, Vanya turns out to be the cause of another apocalypse yet again. The siblings, again, try to stop her but her powers were too strong that none of them can physically reach her. So Ben, as a spirit, entered Vanya's consciousness and that's the scene I chose.

Ben finds the rattled Vanya somewhere deep within her subconscious. She's having a breakdown because she can't control her powers and keeps hurting people. Ben comforts Vanya and has nothing but kindness in his eyes.

Before starting any animation you always need to gather video reference of the performance you're wanting to animate. You can source it from the internet but the best way is to film yourself. So that's what I did with this animation. I did my best to act (I'm not good at it at all) so I can have a deeper understanding of body movements and mannerisms when certain words and emotions are said.

Dialogue:

Vanya: I'm a monster

Ben: ... Dad treated you like a bomb before you ever were one.

He was so scared of your power he never let you use it. Drugged you up, kept you numb for years.

That's messed up Vanya.

No wonder you couldn't control it.

Dad couldn't handle your anger. That doesn't mean you can't. And maybe you have the right to be pissed off and sad and messed up.

But ... (sighs) it's a shitty world full of shitty people sometimes.

You aren't a monster you're my sister. And right now, our siblings are risking everything out there trying to save you.

You aren't alone at the table anymore, Vanya,

You can do this.

Wk 5 Playblasts

Then the animation begins!

My general process is to start with the body movement and then work my way to the more finer controls and leave the facial expressions and lip-sync to last.

Wk 5 Timelapse

A lot of the time spent this first week of working on the animation was just setting up the scene and the references.

Wk 5 Sync sketch feedback

Wk 6 Playblasts

Using the pose library in Unreal, I did phonemes of the mouth to speed up the process of animating the lip sync. These shapes are very generic, of course, so I just used them as a place holder before I refined the proper mouth shape. Each phoneme/mouth shape is influenced depending on what the last syllable is connecting to the next syllable.

Wk 6 Timelapse

Wk 6 Sync sketch feedback

Wk 7 Playblasts

I started addressing Luke's feedback at the start of the week but then I realised that I was already supposed to start blocking out the body for the rest of my sequence based on the timeline that I set out for myself. So I stopped halfway through addressing the feedback and started blocking the body again. I also decided to cut my sequence down to around 45seconds instead of the full minute. This is so that I can address and refine as much as I can from any feedback I get from Luke. If I do finish and polish the 45 seconds then I will animate more on top of that. But for now, 45secs is my baseline.

Wk 7 Timelapse

I have finished Ben's body block out. I will then move on to his lip sync then get feedback from peers and Luke after this. Then while Luke is looking over the work I will continue animating Vanya's character.

Wk 8 Playblasts

Wk 8 Sync sketch feedback

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/b9f7fa773288/#/11629217/12368486

Wk 8 Timelapse

Wk 9 Playblasts

I continued refining of Ben's movements and finished off the rest of Vanya's animation. At that moment I was pretty happy with how I was tracking along. I was on track with my Gantt chart even though there was a bit of slippage during the splining stage when I first received feedback from Luke. But I caught up which is awesome and a weird feeling. I felt like I should be doing more since I was almost finished with my scene and I wasn't not cramming like the last couple of trimesters, but I guess that's what it feels like when I'm on time?

Wk 9 Timelapse

Wk 10 Playblast

I finally got Luke's feedback but it was just on the most glaring problems. One of which is Vanya's sitting position. This was the first time I've shown Vanya's perspective properly (which was probably a bad thing) but I wanted to finish her animation reacting to what he's saying so that the perspective of her camera isn't just static for majority of the playblast.

I tweaked her posture to the below. I don't have anything for Vanya to lean back against like in the reference so I posed her as best as I can.

Another feedback was about the hands:

I was pretty happy with the hand animation so I'm really glad that he liked it as well :')

I tried adding offset in the fingers and knuckles but I think I was doing it too generally by selecting the entire curve and moving it. But that made the timing of Ben's fingers completely off when reacting to Vanya's movements. So for now I just selected two front finger joints and offset them very slightly from the knuckles and it seems a bit better?

Wk 10 Timelapse

Wk 11 Playblast

I tried moving Ben's wrist a bit from what Luke's feedback was before but if I move Ben's hand, I would have to separately eyeball the translation of Vanya's hand too. Unlike in Maya where the controls for all the characters are selectable on scene, in Unreal, to be able to select a control I would first have to select the BP for the character for the controls to even show up. And I can only select one BP at a time so naturally I can't select Ben's wrist and Vanya's wrist to move them together... I guess that's a con to Unreal.

I also realised how subtle Ben's throat movement was until I showed other people. Quan actually didn't notice it (which he said is probably a good thing because it's supposed to be a subtle movement) but Tim said that compared to how much my neck muscles tensed in the video that I shot, I should emphasise it more. He said that the neck muscle movements for Vanya it was perfect. I said that I only moved a certain set of neck controls for Ben (since for Vanya she was emoting more and I thought that having more controls emphasised more movement) but Tim said if one part of the neck is moving then other parts next to it are certainly going to get influenced. I should try and move the other controls even just a little bit to get that realism in the muscle movement - at the moment it's too subtle.

I also adjusted Vanya's reaction as Tim suggested regarding the last bit where Vanya smiles. He said to delay it until after Ben says "You're not a monster" because that validation would really coerce that reaction rather than the "it's a shitty world full of shitty people sometimes" line.

His point about validation really makes sense!

Wk 11 Timelapse

Wk 12 Playblast

I finished setting up the camera after making a few more tweaks on the animation - I just enhanced Ben's neck muscles and added animation to more controls which Tim also said made it look so much better. Also he LOVED Ben's swallow before he says "You're not a monster". I only added it because I needed him to do something at that specific time because it was such a long pause between what he said before that and his next line. I wanted to show him almost like looking for what to say next.

I had to re-render this version because the hair was repositioning itself everytime the shot changed.. it looks super obvious to me :/

I also changed the camera shot where it's just focusing on the hands. It just felt very flat so instead I did the shot where both of them are visible. This way the attention will still be first on the hand holding but then immediately to Ben or Vanya's expressions.

After I finished the first render with these specs (2.5hrs later) I realised that Ben's head and body locks in the last 2 seconds but I forgot to extend his body (although I extended his facial expressions already). So I tweaked the animation again. This time I also pushed forward the part where Vanya reacts to Ben's line: "It's a shitty world full of shitty people sometimes". I felt that her reaction was a bit too delayed especially because Ben had already paused for a second. I also added a slight head tilt when she does react and another, more visible, head tilt at the end when she has been validated.

Wk 12 Timelapse

I enlisted the help of an audio student, Charles Warner, to provide his version of the soundtrack present in the original clip.