Tag: 2d

Commercial: Orcon’s Daisty and Gav (Go Unlimited)

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I consider myself a competent but frustrated character animator. I say frustrated on account of people’s bias of me as a technical person, I’ve too often been asked, instead, to rig characters. In this case, the characters of this commercial were completely in 2D, illustrated by Gareth Jensen, who also did a lot of the animation along with a few other animators.

The main difference was that the job was going to be done completely in After Effects, including the rigging. I’m not an AE rigger, nor have I animated a character in AE before. While I’ve seen what mind-boggling AE rigging tools can do, at the time of this commercial, I hadn’t seen any of them yet. So I basically had to do everything from scratch: learn Puppet Tools, create the workflow for swapping assets, expressions to switch drawings, etc.

Frankly, I don’t know if I want to do that again, given the powerful rigging tools available today. I think I’d prefer to animate.

Commercial: Little Red Bear (Gau Yeu)

faulknermanoLeave a comment

I worked on this as a freelancer, and it was quite a frantic job. There were so many elements and if a cg forensic psychologist would examine the Maya scenes, they would find that loads of textual clues of how stressful this commercial was.

For all its unbearably fast pace editing and doubtful composition choices, the final renders didn’t look half-bad at all. Of course, I must say that I didn’t contribute to the rendering. :)

My contribution, in fact, was, again, the rigging of the characters; they were actually flat characters (to depict a 2d look), and I rigged them accordingly, which was a crazy thing, actually. I didn’t have a say in the matter, of course. The red bear protagonist was only partly 2d: he had some thickness.

I got a chance to animate some of the characters, like the villainous evil purple guy and the spectators on the stand. But, once again, in the spirit of this thread, to make known what is normally hidden away from the those who view this, my contribution extended far beyond what was nominally given to me. For most of the time, character animation (not limited to this job, of course) had been revised by me, though I couldn’t take credit for it officially because I hadn’t originally been assigned to do it, nor could say it had been mine unless I nixed the original completely, which hardly ever happens. It happens not only in animation, but in every aspect of the job: shading, modelling, rendering, setup, rigging, and even compositing.

Perhaps that’s why it feels much bigger in my mind than what the credits say: to have personally struggled against a stubborn scene that was placed on my lap, and thus produce the grain that otherwise wouldn’t have been produced, impresses upon me the importance of looking beyond the obvious.