Project Description:

The aim of this personal project was to work on a few animation elements that I felt I needed to strengthen. The major points I wanted to touch upon was physical interaction between two characters, pushing and pulling, to expand upon adding more emotion and action to make a scene more believable, and to be a little more adventurous with camera angles outside of just setting shots plainly.

Girl and guy run in, looking to escape from something, and end up at a dead end. Guy thinks quickly and offers to give the girl a hand to climb over the wall. After girl goes over the wall, the guy keeps watch before the girl reappears again and offers a hand for the guy to come over the wall, as well.

Project Background:

This project has been worked on intermittently for the past year (nearly) and completed a few weeks ago, so bear with me as I recall my inspiration. The initial inspiration was an article I read online about a game company issuing a “test” where a character went from point A to point B in eight seconds. The examples featured included dynamic shots. It kinda nudged me into thinking about breaking my comfort zone in terms of more complex motions and try to use different camera shots in practice.

Project Process:

I filmed a bit of reference video. At least to the extent of one person can on their own and with no high walls that wouldn’t make me look like I was trying to scale a wall to commit burglary. At least I had some sort of gist to work with. If there was a question about balance of the body, I did my best trying to quasi-reenact the pose against the wall and try to figure out what is the most human reaction to the movement I wanted. Animation was done in Maya.

This project was also the first time I had experience using Maya Sun and Sky as lighting.

Project Postmortem:

This project took an amazing long amount of time to complete. It didn’t help that I tried to record reference material as one person, pretending to be two. Eventually, I figured out that a lot of my movements were wrong via reference (mainly balance of the body and timing for arms and legs) and there was a bit of rework done to correct these mistakes.

On the positive side, this really made me really think about how the action of one person affects another person interacting with them and with objects. For example, the girl puts her foot into the guy’s hands and as he lifts her up, she is exerting some force on the wall, as well, affecting the center of balance on the girl. This project really made me think about the big picture of the actions and even the tinier nuanced actions that would help make this animation be a bit more realistic and believable. At many points I found myself frustrated about posing and actions not looking right, but I am glad I stuck my guns and finished it to a point where I am happy with it.