HA!Fest Dancing Man - Matthew Lindfield
For this unit we were given the task of creating an animated ident for HA!Fest (Hastings Animation Festival). I initially came up with a few different ideas such as an animation focused around a water simulation, one about a rube goldberg machine made of several smaller parts that ultimately lead up to a big reveal of the logo, but my main idea was to use an animation of a figure dancing make them cartoony and abstract and incorporate the logo and information for the festival in the animation. I figured that an animation like this, unlike the other ideas, would fit the style of being humorous and be general fun to watch.
My main inspiration came from a music video for the band Major Lazer, the song being called "Light It Up". In this video it shows a range of figures dancing along to the music, each one being very abstract such as being made from strings, small grains of sand, balloons and more.
My main bit of influence for what my character would look like was inspired by the marshmallow figure on the right for a few reasons. Firstly one of the specifications for the animation was that we had to use a specific set of colours (blue, pink, white) which related to the colour scheme of HA!Fest, I knew that having a marshmallow like character meant I could segment different parts of the body off similar to how the marshmallow character is created from different coloured shapes.
The next reason for creating a character like this was because I feel like they capture the fun sense of what the character should be all about, whilst the other characters in the animation are fun to look at none of them really capture a sense of fun like the marshmallow does.
In the actual creation of my character I used a few different tools and methods to achieve my goal. The first thing I know I needed to get was an animation of a dance. I figured that creating an animation from scratch wouldn't be close enough to a real dance, considering the Major Lazer video uses motion captured dancers I decided that would be a good path to go down. After looking up several collections of royalty free motion capture data I rounded down my selection to one final animation of a person doing a dance, performing a backflip then coming to a stop. After getting this animation I applied it to a 3D model of a person so that the model would dance along with the dance,
The next step was to turn the model into the abstract version as the character itself was too human looking and didn't really capture what I was hoping for. To do this I put the animated character into a program called Houdini, a program used for creating VFX work and was the program used to create the Major Lazer video itself. After doing some work I managed to turn my boring human character into a bloated and round version, although it wasn't as segmented as the marshmallow character I liked the overall smooth look of them that resembled a person but still looked pretty abstract.
I then worked a texture onto them, with it being constructed out of the 3 colours of HA!Fest with these colours being made of large blobby chunks of colour that flowed around the character, rather than being static with only one part of the model only being one colour throughout the animation.
My main inspiration came from a music video for the band Major Lazer, the song being called "Light It Up". In this video it shows a range of figures dancing along to the music, each one being very abstract such as being made from strings, small grains of sand, balloons and more.
My main bit of influence for what my character would look like was inspired by the marshmallow figure on the right for a few reasons. Firstly one of the specifications for the animation was that we had to use a specific set of colours (blue, pink, white) which related to the colour scheme of HA!Fest, I knew that having a marshmallow like character meant I could segment different parts of the body off similar to how the marshmallow character is created from different coloured shapes.
The next reason for creating a character like this was because I feel like they capture the fun sense of what the character should be all about, whilst the other characters in the animation are fun to look at none of them really capture a sense of fun like the marshmallow does.
In the actual creation of my character I used a few different tools and methods to achieve my goal. The first thing I know I needed to get was an animation of a dance. I figured that creating an animation from scratch wouldn't be close enough to a real dance, considering the Major Lazer video uses motion captured dancers I decided that would be a good path to go down. After looking up several collections of royalty free motion capture data I rounded down my selection to one final animation of a person doing a dance, performing a backflip then coming to a stop. After getting this animation I applied it to a 3D model of a person so that the model would dance along with the dance,
The next step was to turn the model into the abstract version as the character itself was too human looking and didn't really capture what I was hoping for. To do this I put the animated character into a program called Houdini, a program used for creating VFX work and was the program used to create the Major Lazer video itself. After doing some work I managed to turn my boring human character into a bloated and round version, although it wasn't as segmented as the marshmallow character I liked the overall smooth look of them that resembled a person but still looked pretty abstract.
I then worked a texture onto them, with it being constructed out of the 3 colours of HA!Fest with these colours being made of large blobby chunks of colour that flowed around the character, rather than being static with only one part of the model only being one colour throughout the animation.
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