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.
Blob Dylan – Download the video from the R&H website
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.