Responsive - Loop de Loop Cute

For my second competition i chose to do Loop de Loops January competition which worked off of the theme cute.

Loop de loop is a contest that has a monthly (some times bimonthly) theme where are prompt word or theme is established and from there an animation, preferably looping, is to be created. I had mixed feelings on this theme as it was both a very easy and simple theme but quite difficult because of the wide breadth of what could be deemed cute as its something that is quite subjective.

I knew i wanted to make it using after effects to get some much needed practice in the area.

I started by searching the words 'cute' and 'kawaii' on pinterest to create a mood board (kawaii is the japanese word for cute and some how brings up very different results (?)) Cute gave me mostly baby animals and kawaii gave me more illustrative images. Its easy to just have a stereotypical cute animal to do something e.g. kitten puppy, so i kept looking for something i thought of as cute but a bit different.

I was able to find a photo of a baby snub nosed monkey. which was essentially a fluff ball. It was a bit different and had a cute appeal to it that really drew my attention, so i started designing characters based on this monkey. I also included features of the sloth as i find a sort of dumb cuteness to them.

I focused to keeping to round edges as they are what are commonly attributed to cute characters so i rounded out the monkey/sloth to make him appealing and squishy looking. 

While following a random chain of photos e.g. Cute monkey nature plants bugs ants, I found this photo of ants trying to climb onto a spiral plant. I found the imagery of multiples attempting to succeed something made me consider the monkey in a group or holding the spiral plant so i did a small sketch and it looked like a flag bearer in a parade which i really liked so i started coming up with multiple variants of the creature so that they could belong in the same scene as performers or paraders.

I chose to make them really small as well so that their itrems are made out of twigs leaves and small objects because it offers a hand craft feel to them and also accentuates their size and vunerability.

the original story plan i had was to cause the parade to crash into oneanother and caiuse a pile up, scramble to get back in place and repeat all because the baton holder fell over. The baton holders design was more scruffier at first which was nice but left his fur to be too unpredictable and uncontrollable so i took it further and cleaned up trying a few variants on the style.

I used watercolours as they were softer colours which are more cute and less harsh than stronger colours.

After sketching some action poses i began sketching the other characters including a flute player flag bearer and a king being carried.

With the flute bearer it became really easy to design the character because i had a set style and look to the monkeys.

I put the radish characters in so that their brighter colours would break up the amount of white in the scene. With the poses i used them as an oppertunity to try out a few different colours, i went with purple as they are the complimentuary colour to the gold yellow of the other monkeys.

With each character I wanted to make them have a unique walk cycle but i started to see how my time was running out sadly. so i quickly sketched out the side profiles of of my characters in sections so that they could be rigged in after effects, i chose to leave out the outline as it was to harsh and overwhelmed the lighter colours.

 
 
 


Once i had all my assets painted i moved onto my background, i decided to make sure that the background was full or else the monkeys would get lost in the whites of the background because of their fur colour.

The paper was stretched and then i painted on in water colours making the flowers and plants much bigger than the monkey due to the idea of smaller being cuter. I kept the majority of it green with only a few accents of colour to make it jump a little other wise i would of done it purely green but this makes it a lot more interesting.

Then came rigging the characters but by this time i only had a weekend left and so had to make the snap decision to make a walk cycle with one monkey which i was really disappointed about as i wanted to show the characters interacting with each other.

I became quickly reminded of my ineptitude at rigging when i tried to rig my monkey because of his shape he doesn't have a clear bending spine or neck attaching his head to his body so the DUIK software was struggling to make sense of what it was trying to rig i thankfully got help from Alex so my monkey was eventually rigged and ready to walk.

https://vimeo.com/201490965

This is the link to my video