Sunday, November 29, 2009

Chance of Rain Choreography

For my senior project, I am an animator on team Acid Rainbow. Our short, Chance of Rain, features an overly obese, Gaia-archetype woman named Fatima performing an acid rain dance to purge a post apocalyptic, pollution ruined world.

As an animator and dancer of several years, I was responsible for choreographing the dance. It took some time; we of course did a lot of research, shot tons of video reference and even visited a motion capture studio in order to provide ourselves with more extensive reference and option to do a pseudo rotoscope (although, to be clear, we are not using the motion capture data to animate the rig for us in any way). Everyone is warning us about the immense challenge of animating a dance sequence and we are taking every concern to heart. In any case, I'm excited that I have the opportunity to take such a risk as a student and learn from what ever lessons lay ahead before I entire the professional world, and it is also rewarding to have two passions of my life come together so beautifully when I had only associated one with the other as merely similar in principle.

The following is an early video we shot of the choreography to send to Kamal Siegal (a professor at DigiPen and owner of Digital Double, the mocap studio). It does NOT represent the shots we'll be using; it was just to address any possible concerns about the mocap rig capturing the movement. It went well. The song was composed and produced by Sarah Grissom (team lead) and her brother, Tommy Grissom. Interspersed with the footage are storyboards of the environment shots, all of which was done by Sarah.

Visit Sarah Grissom's blog here.

The choreography itself has since undergone revisions, but most of it is the same. Choreographing is by no means my forté, but the response was favorable and working forward has gone smoothly. Overall it's been a pretty enjoyable experience.