Overview

20" sting for Disney Channel Halloween special.

Another really fun project, with a good dose of 3D animation, compositing and scripting, where a rendered (2D) ribbon was composited inside an After Effects (3D) scene.

Implementation

The main challenge for this job was to synchronise the camera and ribbon movement from 3dsmax to After Effects. This was achieved through a combination of rendering to RPF for camera moves, and the adaption of some previously-written MaxScript tools to place the hero characters.

Once the initial ribbon and camera path was defined, the animation challenge became one of ensuring the 3D and the live action made sense together. This was achieved using an iterative process back and forth between the two applications, working mainly in 3dsmax to find tune or sometimes completely replace, the ribbon animation with something else.

The ribbon itself was animated across several spline paths, with additional modifiers to add to the twisty-turniness, and on occasions cheating the movement by leaving the shot and coming in again.

Pace and timing was extremely important to us; 20" was a quick spot, and we knew we a wanted to cram quite a lot into that time, so striking a balance between quick and slow parts of the animation was important.

I was responsible for planning, creating the After Effects scenes from flat illustrations, camera moves, overall timing, ribbon animation, 3D (After Effects and 3dsmax), as well as the majority of the compositing and final grading.

Huge was responsible for design and live action.

Links

• Huge Designs (opens new window)