Storyboard
My character is called Geoff and he is modelled after me. In the animation the character is on his way to a festival as he has always dreamed of Tomorrowland Festival from a young age. He eventually becomes of age to go to the festival but when he asks his friends to go they all said no because it was too expensive. Geoff made the bold decision to go to the Festival all on his own which meant a travel to Belgium. Finally, his dream came true and he could hear the festival from the fields as he approaches Tomorrowland. Eventually he makes it to Tomorrowland and he has the time of his life. He now spends his days travelling to new festivals blogging about his travels.
When starting my character creation i started with creatures as i liked the idea of creating a funky looking creature. However during the animation process i found problems with rigging the character. Therefore i created a human shaped creature which i then went on to change as i did not like the way he animated. I then had to think about transferring the file into After Effects and if the file was too large it would make the After Effects file very large once it was created and rendering would then take a lot of time. Taking this into account i wanted to make the final Animation as small as possible.
Creating my animation i used After Effects and then installed a PlugIn called DUIK which allows you to create body animations. I first created my character in Illustrator making sure i had the layers separate for the animation process in After Effects. Once i imported my Illustrator file to After Effects i used the pin to created bone points which i then created bones using DUIK. Once i did this i created controllers at different joints of the body allowing me to move my character into different positions which i then key framed to create my walk cycle. Problems i encountered during the Rigging process where the feet of the character. This is because when i moved the legs the feet where static and when i created controllers on the feet it would malfunction. In the end i created separate bones which i could tweak to allow for a smooth animation.
Waving Geoff
