An Oldie

This particular piece has been sitting around a while and I just never got around to posting it for various reasons.  It was part of the AetherEdge project, so I was waiting on renders and the possibility of it fully premiering, unfortunately, it seems things have gotten a little derailed in the project so I decided now was as good a time as ever to go ahead show my work.

The shot itself shows The Gardner just after he busts through a wall, and begins to show itself to Floyd.  When I got the shot,  some of the first things I thought about were intimidation and cockiness.  I wanted this to serve as a short break in action to serve the anticipation of the fight about to ensue.  When setting up the staging of the camera and the shot as a whole, I was pretty much just given that it was a long wide shot.  With this in mind, I decided that this animation was going to have the feel of an old western, quick-draw duel.  I really liked the long shots accomplished in the final duel of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and tried to establish a shot that would evoke the tension and feel that that movie gave off.

With the Gardner,  I realized I had to approach this character quite differently than I would with most other characters I have in the past.  For starters,  there are not really any real world references I could go off of.  The Animation lead, Andy Pace, had already given out a style guide and a few references for walking, however this was particularly a static shot just showing his immense size.  So I decided to go and look up what the character reminded me most of, a Sumo Wrestler.  I really go the idea that the leg lift/stomp would be able to sell the anticipation I was looking for and would fit the character design quite well.  Once I had initial reference, I then went and shot my own reference, which quite frankly looks a little ridiculous but served wonderfully.

At first, Andy wasn't real sure how it would look and was quite skeptical, but once I showed him my first pass, he was excited to see how it would finish out and gave me the go ahead to proceed.  The Gardner to this date is one of the more fun characters I've had to animate.

When I began work with Floyd, I started with the same general approach.  Because he was a biped, I knew he would be much more "normal" so to speak.  So I wanted to give him a fighting stance and one that would complement the magnitude of the Gardner.  The animation went quite well, with Floyd coming off as confident, cautious, and tense.

This was the shot as it appeared for the purposes of AetherEdge, however when I decided to post this for my own reel, the Director for AetherEdge suggested that I build my own camera set up to better show off my animation, so I decided to change it up and try and sell the intimidation factor even further by putting the camera below Floyd with a strong upshot and panning the camera across the action of the animation.