Archive for July, 2008

Carl is a character in the upcoming Pixar film “Up”. It appears that someone at Pixar saw my short and copied my character Harold for their movie! Right down to the bowtie!! Where’s my lawyer?

Just kidding of course. Carl is a great looking character, I love the short little guy and his angular face and huge glasses. My original plan was to have Harold wearing a suit like Carl, but I didn’t have the patience to work out some sort of clothing dynamics or deformations for something that complicated. Funny how some of the original character designs of Harold were more angular, but somewhere along the line they smoothed out and became rounded. I really like that look. Pixar’s char designers did a good job.

I don’t know what to expect from this movie, but it looks promising. And I only say that because of the character designs that I’ve seen so far. That isn’t exactly the best measuring stick, but it is something to grasp onto until I see more.

I’ve been asked to create a CG character and make it look like stop motion. It is quite a unique challenge. Something I’ve never done before, but very interested to successfully pull off!

Pepper Films asked me to come up with a story, supervise the modeling, do the rigging, and finally perform the layout and animation. The story, modeling and rigging has been finished. I’m currently doing layout and the first pass of animation. So far I’ve been ignoring the idea that it has to look like stopmo and working exactly how I would on any other CG project. It is really starting to come together.

As usual, my workflow is to not only do the layout/animation in Maya, but also the editing. All the shots are timed and edited in this software using various mel scripts. Once the short is determined, the individual shots will be broken out and animated in separate scene files. Then, from that point on, the assembly of the short will be very straightforward in the editing package.

Making the animation look like stopmo, with all its quirky problems will either be the easiest thing I’ve ever done, or the most difficult. I’ll have to get back to you on that!