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As
Time goes by... and the amount of international projects coming
into India increase, the skill sets of Indian animators are evolving
proportionately....
 The
need to share know how and work collaboratively has been stressed
on at every seminar, function and animation conference that have
been held in the past few months.
In
what is a welcome initiative, Rhythm & Hues India has offered
to share some case studies on its internal exercises with Animation
'xpress readers. The excercises are conducted simultaneously even
as the studio works on the FX, animation and CG for some of Hollywood's
best projects.
In
this issue R&H India talk about Blob Dylan. The following
feature is not the complete case study but is more of a basic outline
on how things were done. There are a lot of images to help readers
clearly understand the concept.
Readers
with any creative/technical questions are welcome to mail us at
anexcasestudies@indiantelevision.com
please mention Blob Dylan in the subject line....
The
questions would be answered by experts who have worked on this project
at Rhythm & Hues and the same questions and answers would be
published in subsequent issues of Animation 'xpress.
Project
'Blob Dylan'
Duration: 20 seconds
Medium: Video
Team : 6 Artists
Director : Vaibhav Kumresh
Project schedule: 7 weeks
The
Concept:
We first had a group discussion about what we wanted to do and everyone
on the team was involved in the brainstorming sessions and listening
to the idea pitches. Finally, we decided on an idea of the director
based on his simple drawing which he drew on the whiteboard. He
said, "We should just have this round clay blob charater that
sits in a box and sings classical Indian music. The fun part would
be that the character (Blob Dylan), takes his singing very seriously.
He is completely involved and absorbed by his music and in his mind
he considers his singing talents as God's gift to the audience.
The irony though is that to us, he looks ridiculous and quite funny
in a very lovable way".
From
this concept the team went through a detailed pre-production phase
that included the following stages.
Pre-Production:
- character design - various styles of the blob and details to be
added
- character personality study - detailed written descriptions about
him
- storyboarding key poses - study the extreme looks
- selection of music and recording with classical artist
- reference search and research - studied video of various classical
Indian singers
- look development - color schemes, types of lighting models
- model sheets - character and props
- 2d animatic
With
the pre-production completed, the character went through the following
production stages:
Production
stages:
- Modeling of character and props
- Modeling of blend shapes for character
- Rigging - character and props
- Rig testing - iterative process to test if the character rig can
withstand extreme poses.
- Prelighting - The character and prop was textured and lit individually
on a turntable to scrutinize the details
- 3d animatic - for camera choreography and rough timing
- Animation - the juice!
- FX - simulate spit coming out of Blob Dylan's mouth
- Lighting - Placing prelit objects in environment and integrating
with the environment. Identifying the different layers and light
passes necessary
- Rendering - remotely rendering all the different layers in our
LA office on over 2000 processors. Average rendertime per frame
is around 4 hours
- Compositing - combining the various layers and color balancing
- Post production - editing, dissolves, final sound
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The
team at R&H India has now started working on another internal
project and are currently in pre - production stage.
Rhythm
and Hues would like to share with Animation 'xpress readers real
time development of this project.
Here
is model sheet of Rotato, he is one of the characters in this project.
We
will keep you updated on this project in our forthcoming articles
!
Readers
with any creative/technical questions are welcome to mail us at
anexcasestudies@indiantelevision.com
please mention Blob Dylan in the subject line....
The questions would be answered by experts who have worked on
this project at Rhythm & Hues and the same questions
and answers would be published in subsequent issues of Animation
'xpress .
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