Week: 11 – 17 October

I didn’t do much for my FMP this week as I’m busy focusing on the thesis to balance the progress on both works. However, I managed to find some time to do a minor update to the crab character model and did some sketches for the second character.

I planned to make the second character to have totally different anatomy, and contrast to the first crab character. The crab character was based on the insect anatomy with exoskeleton (external bone) and segmented body parts. So for the second character, I want the character to have seamless body parts or skin, and probably to have hair like a quadruped animal.

I quickly referred to the creatures from the Avatar (2009) film by James Cameron, which I also refer as a case study for my thesis. The film featured many six-legged creatures which were designed based on a real quadruped animals such as Direhorse (based on a horse), Thanator (based on tiger or panther) and Hammerhead Titanothere (based on a rhinoceros).

Although I’m referring to the creatures from Avatar, I wanted my characters to have more cartoony or stylised look than the realistic appearance of the film. I’m interested with the animal character designs from several Disney films. I think a horse named Maximus from Tangle (2010) and a dog named Bolt from Bolt (2008) are really suitable for my animation. So I made several sketches based on those characters but with six legs.

I showed the crab model update and the final character sketches to Alan when I came to the class this week to get his opinion. He was okay with the designs but a bit concerned because they are very similar to the references even though they have six legs. I explained that it was my intention to make a parody of those characters, but I want people can still recognise where the characters came from. So Alan suggested me to make small adjustments to the design and to have something that become identical for the character, like the Bolt character that has a lightning symbol on his body or Maximus that has a star symbol on his neck.

Regarding the story idea, I told Alan after thinking several days about the idea he gave last week, I planned to abandon the idea of lip-sync for my animation as I think it will consume too much time before the final deadline to design the dialogues, recording voice and making detail facial rigging and animation, where I should actually focus on the body animation as it is more in-line with my research. My new idea is to make a commercial-like animation titled ‘Six-legged Olympic’ that focus on body animation only with different characters doing practices like walking, running and jumping as preparation for the upcoming sport events. The animation will still featuring the original idea to have 3d characters on a real footage. I was thinking to have the characters practicing at several landmarks around London such as the Tower Bridge, Hyde Park and Oxford Street.