Storm Trooper: Where are you taking these prisoners?
Droid: These are prisoners.
Storm Trooper: Yes, where are you taking them?
Droid: I am... taking them, to imprison them... in, prison.
Obviously this meant i couldn't necessarily use lip sync and if I knew the movie it was from would it influence me? Nope, as I had not seen the scene or the movie before I wanted to create something completely unaffected by the original source.
To begin with i focused on listening to the sound of the characters voices and took notes on each one trying to define a personality from how they spoke.
While the trooper didn't have much personality to him being very much a solider following orders sort of character, the robots quavering voice offered a wide variety of personality and quirks to pick up on and use in the designing of the character.
I started by designing the robot character, and as i was doing it in 3D i focused on keeping the design simple and quick to model for Daniel Goodman to model and rig. From a design aspect i wanted to get across the passive nature and character of the robot so i focused on developing a rounded robot until i was satisfied with an base form. Rounder shapes are more appealing to us and we associate them with more tender and good characters. In also started to use heart shapes within the design to make him more innocent similar to how in a 'monster in paris' the monster was designed to have a heart shaped face because his name literally meant 'pure heart'.
After coming up with a design i liked the look of I refined it and considered how the character would interact and move, holding onto his prisoners.
With the design for the robot finished i moved onto the storm trooper. I wanted to lip sync some how and because his general personality that was being portrayed was very dry and quite lifeless I decided to put him inside of a robotic walker. this would mean i could put more character and movement into his responses and allowed me to do lip sync as he was talking behind a glass screen so his voice would be muffled. However i struggled with the overall design of the walker because i don't really draw things symmetrically so i found myself making rough concept sketches and handing them to Dan telling him to try and make something akin to it, with me suggesting alterations and modifications that i couldn't get across in the design.
When passing the robots designs over to Dan I went into detail on how he functions, what parts of him move and what expressions he should have access to. This was all so that Dan could fully understand what the robot should look like.
While Dan modelled I story boarded the characters interactions. I had decided to use moom for the stormtrooper and prisoner and chose to use only one prisoner as I was still wanting to keep the general animation and storyline simple and easy to animate as I hadn't tried animating multiple characters interacting within a space before.
The story would highlight on the robot ineptitude at keeping a hold of the prisoners and generally being aware of his captive letting go of him with out realising it.
Once the models were made i did a short test with them and found that the robots arm would move very irregularly and erratically, this meant that its movements were more restricted than intended. While animating the Robot was supposed to be holding on to moom and then letting go and this requires parenting and keying the parenting which as of now i don't really understand so while moving the characters arm i had to move mooms hands to where the robot had his until he let go.
I was really pleased with the final animation. Not because it was my best piece but because i could see it wasn't my best piece. Due to time i had to make snap decisions on factors such as camera angles, shot composition and character movements, but because of this I can clearly see how and where the changes and alterations need to happen I feel that this is an example in its own way of my growth as an animator .
No comments:
Post a Comment