Senior Animation Studio

During the summer, I will be working on my showcase animation short. Its going to be about my ferret character, Johnny, falling asleep while watching a TV program about planes. He then starts dreaming about him flying a plane. The plane starts to go out of control and he spends the majority of the time trying to regain control. He wakes up and goes back to asleep on his chair. As the story ends, the plane program ends and another program comes on about the wildlife in the Sahara.

The short is going to be in 3D (Maya) and is going to be going along the style of the slapstick of classic cartoons. By the end of the summer session, I hope to have the rig of Johnny animation ready, have the model completed, and reach pass 2 of animation.

Here's an animatic I've done during pre-production.

Some of the challenges I'm going to face:
Rigging: With very little experience with rigging, this is going to be a huge learning experience. I am relying on tutorials on Digital Tutors and on one of my professors, Erik Westlund.

Skinning: This also goes along with rigging, because I've never had to rig anything, I've never had to skin anything.

Rendering: I haven't had too much experience in rendering, and to get the style that I'm looking for, might need some advance manipulating that I'm going to need to learn

2D-3D: The process of transferring hand-drawn storyboards into a 3D environment.

Planning: Since this is the first time I've had do this big of a project under a time constraint, this is going to a learning experience of how quickly I can get things done.

Keeping Hand Rotations Realistic: I have a tendency to reverse the hands, where the thumb and the fingers are on the wrong side. I ended up making this mistake on the Loft commercial, when animating the Dude character.

Staying Motivated: In the past when I tried to learn rigging, I ended up getting overwhelmed with information and I stopped for a while. So, I need to stay motivated and not get overwhelmed... going to be easier said than done.

When I presented my concept to the class, the feedback that I got:
-Change the name
-Have the plane go through the intro
-Change the music (keep at 2 songs (plane song and action song). - Post-prod
-Work on composition (Hierarchy, Focus, Depth)
-The door that Johnny comes out of is a bit confusing.
-Johnny should react first to the boxes before shooting into the escape hatch.
-Fix the hand when he presses the button
-Research 60s/70s/WWII cargo planes.
-Tail looks a little wierd
-Arms are too small