One of my first projects of my third year of university was to create an ident or advert for a brand. Me and a friend of mine who happens who be an artist decided to go as crazy as we could with the brief. We chose to make an advert/ident for the tv channel E4. We wanted to take the opportunity to pretty much turn it into our own version of a Looney Tunes cartoon. We had two dinosaurs trying to escape a meteorite. They would trip over each other as they would frantically try to outrun both each other and the firey inferno hurtling through the sky towards them. Eventually the meteorite hits them revealing the E4 logo. I was responsible for the storyboarding, choreographing, rigging, skinning and animation of the ident.
We began the process by brainstorming out as many crazy ideas for how they could trip over each other. These were then put into an animatic and cut down until we were happy with the length. I then planned out the transitions between the ideas.
Something we really wanted to go for was a real sense of squash and stretch with the use of smear frames. In order to do this, the animation was done without any stretching. After that blendshapes were added to stretch the characters and blur them between extreme poses. This was at its most extreme when one of the characters gets stuck to the others foot. The whole mesh had to be resculpted to get it to look like it was peeling of the floor like bubblegum off a shoe.
Below you can see a progression from animatic to the initial blocking.
And here are a few of the animation passes that lead to the final render.
Finally here is the final rendered version.
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