For this project, I was grouped with Nicole, Danielle, Amber and Curtis, and after some brainstorming, we decided to make our short about a hungry ghost. The ghost would wake up in the middle of the night, starving, only to remember that there is a mouldy sandwich in the fridge. The ghost “eats” the sandwich, only for it to fall out of it’s stomach and the ghost is sad. This was later dubbed “Midnight Snack Adventure.”
First order of business was to design our one and only character, while also rough drafting the environments. Amber, Curtis and I worked on the character, while Nicole and Danielle focused on the environments.
These are the concepts I came up with:
Each concept, bar concept 1, was inspired by something. Concept 2 was inspired by a short film I once saw, Concept 3 was based off of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh and Concept 4 used Whisper from Yokai Watch as inspiration. However, the main goal remained the same; make it cute. The group decided to go with Concept 1 with some tweaks, like removing the arms to make it easier to animate.
With that done, we assigned roles to each other so we all knew what to model. Nicole and Danielle modelled the kitchen, Amber modelled the ghost and rigged it and Curtis modelled the hallway at the start of the animation, while I worked on the sandwich.
I sketched the basic sandwich shape with the filling while looking at references before I set to work.
These are the early models of my sandwich. In later models I removed the tomatoes as I found they didn’t add anything. The sandwich itself was also unnaturally straight, and didn’t look realistic at all. Following the tutors feedback, I made to rectify this and added the textures when I was happy with it.
I was much happier with this model as was the rest of my group members.
With that squared away, I began working on the rough animations. We splitted the animations into parts; I got part 4 where the ghost emerges from the fridge and the sandwich slides out of his stomach.
Playblast of the rough animation ==> Tori Part 4 Animation (1)
I needed to change the camera angle to fit more with the storyboards, but this was easily fixed as I looked back upon old lecture videos from class. I also needed to change the ghost’s position and body to make the move seem more natural. The tutors advised adding tiny movements in the tail to give the ghost more personality and I attempted to do that as well. I had some issues with timing, but with the help of my group members, I was able to fix this.
Finally, my part of the animation was completely finished and was ready to be added into the final animation.
Full Animation Video: