In 2009 we were able to produce a follow up with the character Leon and zazar.
This time the target audience was television : a billboard aired before and after the weather forecast.
The main constraint with this kind of movie is its shortness : roughly 5 seconds worth of content, barely enough time to announce what comes next.
Our client, owner of bowling playhouse housing a restaurant and dancing room , was open to all kind of idea : it was logical for us this time to picture 4 characters dancing on an extravagant dance floor . ( entirely different than the real one )
Jennifer , the meanest and most detestable character dances on tektonik
Leon executes an aerial classical jazz dance steps
Julie breaks a sweat on a ragga tune.
Zazar dances on pop_music
Films credit: ( 4 * 14 seconds movie )
JL Patriat:
– Film and artistic director
– character design
– shot supervision with dance performer
e. Lepinay:
– texturing
– lightning
– rendering
– compositing
– environment modeling
C. Bazillou:
– character and expression modeling
– character setup
– skinning
– cloth and soft body simulation
-motion capture:
. data acquisition
. cleaning
. secondary animation
. view dependent surface deformation correction
For this project where the character assets were already built the main cost was the animation part :
This was a personal project and we were free to explore other style of animation because the client doesn’t specifically ask for cartoon animation .
The use of motion capture was justified because with our limited resources ( two 3d artists ) we didn’t feel comfortable to try and keyframe 1 minute worth of content in less than 10 days.
Our purpose was not to work faster or cheaper : we wanted to tweak the original performance of several dancer and in the end with the preliminary work involved it was actually slightly more expensive to use this technique .
Funnily enough , It was our first time working with actors : the previous project involving motion capture were simpler and we were doing the performance ourselves .
There were 4 types of dance : I made my estimation based on 2 actors and accordingly prepare 2 Velcro suit of different size .
This was my first mistake : I made the assumption that my colleague was aware of my requirement .
This was a paying position and we were in touch with a dancing school near us ,with our budget and deadline constraint we were only able to hire 3 high school girls and one boy .
This was not the end of the world but it ends up taking more time shooting the motion of each dancer as we need to dress them with the only suit that fit their size, lay out the reflective marker , create a skeleton template and then procede to the motion capture.
