Finally I'm able to share with you the bit of experimental animation I've been working on (in between work, other projects and the general craziness that is life.) As I've mentioned before, I wanted to try and find a middle ground between stop motion animation and my newfound love of After Effects. That led me to create this short, called "Scotty" as it involves a sound clip of Scotty from Star Trek.
Scotty from Nicole Van Luvender on Vimeo.
This short was a lot of fun to make. Let me take you on a little tour of my creative process:
I started out by crocheting the head. I stuffed it lightly to give it shape, but never fully closed the bottom. Then I started on a hand (I only made one) which I sculpted out of wire and then crocheted the skin.
I tried and tried to get proper lighting in my room, but it just wasn't going to happen. And so, since it was an absolutely lovely day, I MacGyvered my own little studio outside.
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| Working on the head rotations |
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| Working on hand movements |
I then proceeded back inside to Photoshop the body pieces out of their environment.
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| Head floating in space |
I uploaded my various head images and created a custom rig in After Effects so that I could freely animate it within the program. The head had two rigs -- one to move between the different images, and the other (a simple Null) to move the head along the screen. I repeated this process for the hands (though I only had to upload the images once). I made a series of mouth images in Flash and proceeded to make a rig for that as well. The body was constructed in Photoshop and manipulated using the Pin Tool. Throw in a bit of lighting and here's my workspace:
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| My animation workspace. The top box is the mouth rig, the blue boxes are for the hands, and the bottom red box is for the head. Each element also had a null layer for movement. |
There you have it: the making of "Scotty." This was definitely a learning experience and I look forward to pushing myself even further in the future.
