Final Animation

Five weeks of animation, one week of rendering and numerous grey hairs later, here is my final project. Enjoy!

Sophie's Animation Journey

With my character having reached the point where it was ready to start animating, it was time to nail down exactly what I was going to animate! Before sitting down with Maya to actually animate the character, I had to determine what I was intending to produce.

I started with thumbnail drawings, exploring movements and poses to fill in the blocks outlined by the storyboards.

I also had acting lessons with my coach Kitty, and filmed myself acting out each scene to use as a life reference. I also used references from books and films, particularly the following:

• "Acting for Animators: A complete guide to performance animation," by Ed Hooks, a very good general reference.
• "The Glenn Miller Story," for all the dancing showgirls.
• www.champagneshowgirls.com for real-life Vegas showgirls.
• "Touching the Void," for its dehydrated, hallucinating crawling.

Sorry guys; you're not going to see my acting reference videos! As a consolation, here's a sneak peek of my favourite scene from my final animation.

Sophie's story

Remember the painting at the National Gallery, "A Cup of Water and a Rose on a Silver Plate" by Francisco de Zurbarán.

So I've been inspired by the painting in the National Gallery, and my character has been fully developed both emotionally and physically. I've tried to explain the relationship between the flower and the water, and I've mentioned that I was planning to keep to a rather literal translation of my interpretation of the relationship between the rose and the water, as I had struggled to communicate a more abstract interpretation. So hey presto! Here is my story of a thirsty showgirl. She gets ever more thirsty and dehydrated until she finally reaches her goal, at which point she becomes comically overhydrated.

Problems I faced with my storyline were that my audience could not understand why she was so thirsty, or what the obstacles were to her satisfying her thirst. I've therefore altered my story to address these issues by adding props to indicate the heat (fans, windows to the desert conditions outside, and a radio in the background discussing the present heatwave, and a quick shot of a thermometer rising, all to establish the overpowering heat), and I will use camera techniques to establish the impression that the corridor to the water cooler (her destination) is extremely long. Iam not updating the storyboard to include this, though, so you will have to wait for the final film (or intervening progress reports including the 3D assets described above).