THE GOAL
THE TRANSMISSION is a short 3D animated film that talks about the wars between the legion of Transformer-inspired Robots and Decepticons. The film was used for a campaign for a global pharmaceutical company, so the characters metaphorically represent specific types of medicines, and the unique abilities and skills of the characters cleverly depict how the medicine works as well.
THE CHALLENGE
My role in the project was to handle the rigging for 3 main characters and do the animation and texturing for the final scenes of the film (the sequence where 2 main characters enter the temple).
The sketches and colored character designs were done by the Mighty Stone team. I handled the modeling and texturing of the character OPTIMIZE (based on Optimus Prime), and then handled the rigging for all 3 characters as well.
After the rigging was finished, the Mighty Stone team could use the finalized models to do all the animations (especially the transformation sequence).
The storyboard was developed and finished by the Mighty Stone team. After the storyboard was validated, I started building the environment and posing the action for the characters for the final scene I was assigned to.
One of the difficulties I faced when doing this scene was to set up the lighting to be ominous but somewhat surreal when the action happened. Plus, the final scenes required all 3 characters to appear at the same time, so the workload was quite heavy as well.
THE POST-MORTEM
Because this was the first time I experienced rigging and animating characters in Blender, plus the timeline for the project was quite rushed, there was a lot of pressure when doing it. But in the end, I learned a lot from the project, especially how to manage and team up with such a rushed deadline and a heavy amount of character animation.
*All writing is my own - no AI used.