Animation

My character has been given his personality and has been fitted with the ‘Bi-Ped’ system and so he is now ready for animating.

The animation is based upon my earlier storyboard sketches. The character will appear from a doorway with the lights behind him casting him in shadow for a dramatic entrance. Mickey will retrieve a lightsaber from his pocket but will struggle in actually turning it on and so will become angry and impatient. Once he has managed to switch it on, after fiddling with it, the lightsaber illuminates Mickey’s face in a red glow as he bears a manic grin of happiness.

Mickey then encounters a foe that he is none too pleased to see. He glares furiously at his opponent and they both draw their light saber’s ready for battle. Mickey points at the nameless adversary and insults him by depicting a cutting throat motion.

Mickey is revealed to be a bit of a misfit in his biography, although he looks like a dangerous maniac that you wouldn’t like to meet in a dark alley, he would much rather be writing hit songs for his debut album. His physical ability has been described as a “crushing disappointment”, and so now preparing to engage in a fight with a person who is undoubtedly going to win, Mickey decides to launch his lightsaber through the air and kill his enemy in a desperate and unfair victory.

Mickey is now free to continue his journey. He leaves his thrown lightsaber on the floor as he walks away swearing an oath never to use force again.

The animations took some time to finish so they were at a standard I was happy with. Rather than concentrating purely on facial expression or just on the body movements to express his emotions I felt it would be better to try both. Using the head model I made from my previous semester I changed the face map and went back to making the model pull horrible faces. I came up with a fierce glare and an evil grin for my character. The body movements took more time because there was more to think about with how bodies move when they perform different poses. Working with the animation and key frames became quite tedious but in the end I managed to create the poses I needed.

I used the recent Tim Burton film ‘Sweeny Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ as my main inspiration for my character within the animation. The general style and feel of the film is macabre and grim. I found the characters facial expressions and body movements to be similar in how I wanted to portray my character. The lead character Sweeny Todd himself is shown almost permanently with a scowl and never really looks happy. It was difficult trying to replicate the same appearance for my character. However I successfully managed to create a rather nasty stare and grin.

I wanted to create a dark gritty environment where my character exists. I used some metallic panel textures for the floor and walls which I thought would suit the ‘space station’ aesthetic of the animation. The props and the environment were fairly unimportant during this process as they were only needed to support the character. With more time I would create a more believable environment with perhaps some windows which look out into space showing planets and light beaming through from the sun. I used some key placed Omni lights to create an atmosphere for my scenes, which I thought worked very well on the high specular metallic surfaces.

The main prop for the story is the characters Lightsaber weapon. This item was created simply, using a cylinder with enough height, length and width segments so I could manipulate the vertices’ into a handle shape then applying some bevelling at either end. A turbo smooth modifier is added for the smooth finish. The blade part itself is just another cylinder with a lens, glow effect added. To finish the handle I added a ‘Raytrace’ map on the reflection map to create a realistic metallic finish.

I also added an Omni light to the lightsaber so that it gives off a red glow wherever it is moved to which works very well in the animation. I had to change the near and far attenuation so the light didn’t travel far and only effected what was close.

For rendering the scenes I decided to use the ‘Quicktime’ MOV format because I have always had good results than compared to the AVI format. I used a resolution of 1200x800 for a good quality wide screen render at 25 frames a second.

Using ‘Adobe Premier Pro' I edited my animation and added some suitable sound effects before rendering out the final animation. Premier Pro scaled down my animation to a lower resolution.