January 29, 2012

[MAJOR PROJECT PROPOSAL]

Major Project Proposal

By Andriana Laskari and Dayle Sanders

The type of Project and the Aim

Our task as a group for this semester is to focus on character performance. We will spend more time on making the characters look more believable, not through their appearance and style this time but through their movement, acting and behaviour. In other words, the aim of the Major Project will be to give the characters personality. Since most of the attention will be mainly on the characters performance, the environment, as mentioned, will be kept simple with the use of 2.5 D planes. This will enable us to control the layout of the CG space in a much easier way with the use of moving the props around, the characters and making them stand out.

Tackling the project

Refining any Minor Project work Before moving into any complicated animation it is necessary to revisit any Minor Project work in preparation for the animation and the rendering. This means revisiting any skinning issues on the characters with the use of Maya muscles and pose deformers. Also, adding more body controls and work on the facial controls with clusters and blend shapes. In addition, the environment props will be revisited and be placed in a CG space to see how they work against matte paintings or in front of a blank space, on a flat or a lifted up ground. Apart from that, a Pre-Viz will be developed from the initial animatic to serve the purpose of calculating the framing and timing of the shots. Moving onto Major territories With the characters fully prepared we will move onto animating with possible acting out. We will approach different animation methods and animation levels. That means deciding on what sort of level of complexity we might want to go for, like starting with South Parkstyle, basic animation (which uses no in-between poses but relies on twitchy animating) and moving to more realistic, fluid Pixar-like animation. Animating a dance performance and a quadruped creature will require a lot of practice which is why we will make sure we spend as much time on it as possible. After production, post production will follow with editing, colour correction, sounds effects and music.