Dory's Story
Company and Market Research
One of the major projects in my showreel is a game concept I created in response to a brief set by Disney Interactive Studios. Before i could start any of the design work at all I needed to heavily research the Studio itself and use my findings to shape the end product. In this section of the Blog I will be showcasing some selections of my research to show how my end game concept was conceived.
The next step after my market research was to begin collating visual research and starting to craft an idea of my art style and gather inspiration from other sources that would help push my work in the direction I wanted it to go. Below are some selections of the visual research I collected.
Environment Design
Before I could begin designing any characters I had to first realise the world they would swim in. I needed to come up with a few nice places that could feature in my game and help to create the immersive underwater beauty I wanted.
I had decided that I liked this Octopus layout best and it would be the one I was going to go ahead and complete to its fullest potential for the brief and the showreel. I chose it as not only did it give me a chance to show off a Dory design but it allowed me to create a whole new character of the Octopus which would be completely my own original design. This next section goes into more detail as to how I designed the characters.
Character Design
As mentioned above, the main characters i needed to design would be the Octopus and Dory herself. There were a couple of other characters I attempted to design however because i wanted to really polish this one scene I was'nt able to take them further than they appear here. Here's a detailed look at all of my character design work.
I now have all the character designs I need for the scene. I next needed to go in and begin creating my layout digitally using photoshop.
Digital Environment
As I was going to use after effects to eventually put everything together and animate in, I needed to make sure I created my layout in a program that was easy to use in conjunction with it. Photoshop was the obvious choice. Below you can see my workflow and eventual output of the digital environment.
Now the layouts were finished and ready for the characters to be added.
Character Animation
The next step was to begin by drawing my character animation. I liked to do this by hand first and then scanning them in digitally so all the easy changes could be made, I like to have the best of both worlds. Below is a showcase of my character animation starting with Dory.
Here is my looped swim cycle
Here is my dory squeezed animation
Once Dory was complete, it was time to start the Octopus.
Here is my angry Octopus Animation
Here is my Octopus Animation
Here is my Tentacle Animation
After the octopus was complete it just left the extra animation parts.
My piece was finally complete.
Mock Lomography Advert
As part of a joint project I was given the role of an animator and co - director on this mock advert to promote a non digital form of photography. In this section are a collection of storyboards and images that show my involvement in this project.
My lomography piece was then all filmed in stop motion and put together on after effects.
NSS Poster
After the success of my NSS sting I was approached by the marketing department of Lincoln University and commisioned to create a poster campaign that could accompany my Sting. Shown below is the progress of one of my first paid professional jobs.
Material World
As another piece of animation I did for my showreel, this film was my chance to experiment in backgrounds. I had done some maya work previously and by far my favourite part of the process was adding the textures. I had decided to put some real focus into using real textures and putting them into a nice 2.5D background. Below is a selection of images that show the pieces that were used to put the final film together.
Here is my finished Material World Animation
Dinosaur Character Concepts
Before I had conceived the Dory's Story idea I had originally wanted to do a piece about dinosaurs. I set about creating some dinosaur character concepts. Below is my design work from its beginnings to its extinction.
After finishing these concepts i actually switched to the Dory's Story idea and abandoned these. I felt I could do more with the Dorys Story idea and it actually served a dual purposes as an internship submission however I included these as I felt they were strong character designs.
Driving App
As part of another joint project I have been drafted on as an animator and layout artist. My responsibility was to create the backgrounds for the app and then animate all of the elements. This would be almost entirely an after effects job. Below are the finished layouts and how I created them.
Here is my original Green screen footage that was then keyed over the finished movie shown underneath
This is the finished film with various green screen elements added in
Sense of Place
One of the first pieces of animation I did away from uni work. It was a project taken on to experiment with live action, stop motion and fully digital animation. I wanted to learn how to composite these together. I did not have after effects at this point however and all of it was done using Flash. How this was achieved was remarkable and it took a lot of work to achieve. Below is a selection of shots from the film.
Here is the finished movie.
My Show reel was now complete.
