Private animated short movie ``Miss X's Birthday``
I can’t show the whole movie so I thought just to make a funny short “Secret Agents” music video version of it as the original movie is longer and has many dialogues and jokes in it. The original short is an animated movie dedicated to a real person’s Birthday Celebration, and it also features other real-life characters presented in a funny, cartoony and stylized way.
I did all the sketches of characters, modeled those characters (on the basis of my sketches), textured, rigged, skinned & created all needed morph targets and finally rendered the whole movie which was then presented on a private anniversary party dedicated to that person.
Client: NDA
Role: 3D Artist and Animator
Software Used: Maya, AfterEffects
Date: August 2012
What were my responsibilities in this project?
Briefly, my responsibilities for this project included:
- Creating detailed 2D storyboard based on the script given to me by the client
- Creating 2D sketches of stylized cartoony characters based on the photographs of those real people along with the main character
- Creating all needed 3D scenes and environments in Maya
- Creating 3D character models based on my sketches
- Rigging those characters in Maya
- Creating dynamic cloth for majority of characters
- Creating textures and shaders for characters as well as for the whole scenes in Maya
- Creating Morph targets for lipsyncing
- Animating characters and lipsyncing them according to the pre-recorded voice-overs given by the client
- Lighting and Look Dev major scenes according to client’s needs
- Rendering the whole movie, compositing and adding Post FX
- Adding sounds and doing final editing
- Adding titles and preparing the movie in various video formats
Drawing stylized characters based on real people
One of the main goals was to make a series of stylized characters based on real people that should have looked funny yet still remained their very recognizable body and most importantly face features. All sketches were done in Photoshop using Wacom tablet.
Modeling stylized characters and rigging them in Maya
After all sketches were done and approved, I proceeded with modeling those characters directly in 3D and rigging them in Autodesk Maya.
My Very SPECIAL thanks!
I want to thank Tair Imanov personally and his studio “KVN Planet – Guys from Baku” for giving the opportunity to work on such a big project. It wasn’t easy at all, but the result was definitely worth it.
