The Huddle - animator, camera
The Huddle is a 3D animation project that recreates a one-handed catch by a football player in the New York Giants. It was a school project done in a group of five, almost entirely with Maya.
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I worked on the animations, storyboard, the camera work, and the video editing with Premiere from the beginning up to the quarterback pass.
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Project website: https://fannxllwo.wixsite.com/iat343animation
Contributions
Brainstorming & Storyboard
Rigging & Skinning
Animating
Brainstorming and Storboarding
For the conceptual sketches, I gave the characters a more robotic and cartoon appearance, so that the production time could be better managed within the course schedule. Characters could use the same model with different textures to reduce the modelling time. They can also slide or float instead of running in the animation process.
conceptual sketches for the football players, notice the wheels and jetpacks
conceptual sketches for the the stadium
The storyboard focuses on the transitions between shots and the camera work.
some sketches for storyboard, noting the movement of the characters as well as the camera movement
Rigging and Skinning
I did some fixes to the skin weight before I proceed to the animation process. Due to the clipping between the parts of the models, some parts of the painting for the skin weight were missed.
a fully rigged character
clipping between different parts of the model
Animating
During the animation process, anticipation and timing were my main focus, so the audience would have time to absorb the moving images they are viewing.
aniticipation
action
follow throw
more follow throw
a gif of the throwing animation
The movement of the characters was relatively easy to animate due to characters travel with wheels. Though later with more experience in animation, some additional shoulder movement and some stretching of the models could bring more life to the characters.
placing characters into their positions
animate individual character in the scene
setup positions of the cameras and render scene from the cameras' perspective