Last Cry of the Wild

             Last Cry of the Wild

Hello everyone! I would like to present you one of my demo projects from my Creature Animation reel and give you a detailed breakdown as well as a deeper insight into my planning and the process of the project.

I created this project during my time at PIXL VISN media arts academy in collaboration with Sascha Bähr, who was responsible for lighting, compositing and layout.

QUADRUPED ANIMATION

Nowadays quadrupeds are getting more and more common in movies or series, especially big cats, as they play a major role in the VFX industry, if we look over the last few years of some big productions brought on to the big screens such as The Lion King or The Jungle Book, in which big cats are involved.

This is why it is more expected from animators these days to be able to animate quadrupeds as this is an essential skill set for an animator to animate big cats such as lions, tigers or leopards.

For this reason when I was planning my Animation reel, I absolutely wanted to include a quadruped shot in my reel. I decided to animate a leopard and to look for several references to stick them together and try to match up my leopard animation as close as possible to the references.

Therefore I teamed up with Sascha Bähr for this project, who was looking for an animator to create a project with an animation for his Lighting reel. As soon as he listened to my idea for this project, he agreed to work with me and the collaboration could start.

PREPARATIONS

It was time to look for some references and to plan how this shot would look like. I already knew that I wanted to animate the leopard more dynamic and to interact with some kind of environment like a tree. Soon I found two footages that I liked where the leopard was jumping from a tree to another branch.

With this start Sascha and I could already plan some things for this project. We came up with a little concept for our project where our leopard is living in a deforestated jungle to make this project more memorable and has some impact for the viewers. Therefore Sascha created a little retouche how we would imagine it.

We knew that we would need a main tree where the animation fits like in the reference. So was Sascha responsible for modeling and texturing the main tree, while I was assisting him by building background trees and tree stumps in SpeedTree. Besides this I was also working on the blocking animation with a proxy tree in the first weeks. 

NEW RIG

After some time animating with a leopard rig we bought, I soon recognized that the rig has some weird deformations. It did not look nice and it also broke sometimes which makes working with it very difficult and slowed me down.

But luckily my classmate Jacob Doehner came to us and offered us his rig of Massimo Righi's leopard. Jacob's rig was working way better than our old one and I could quickly made up for the lost progress.

OVERCOMING DIFFICULTIES AND CHALLENGES

Through the animating process I was having a very hard time to animate as the leopard never looked very believable. It was a challenge to match the animations like in the references, but my biggest difficulties were to make the animation seem believable and realistic. It was hard to animate the transitions between different references as the original speed in the footages are different from what my leopard is doing.

Therefore I was experimenting with the footages and switching between references from time to time, shortening the references trying to achieve seamless transitions and adding more references to maintain the ongoing flow of the leopard. I did this until i was satisfied with my footage and could work with it for now.

NEW CONCEPT

One day Sascha came up with a new idea for our project. His idea was to add a transition so that the leopard jumps from the tree and lands to another environment. He suggested to shift our original idea with the deforestated jungle into the second shot and to create a living jungle in the first shot.

With this new concept, we could create a beautiful contrast of Life & Death between these two shots with an continuous animation which I was really excited about it.

Now that both of us agreed on this new change, Sascha built a new environment for the second shot where I did some minor adjustments for my animation to suit the new environment.

LAST CHANGES

As I am animating, I'm getting closer and closer finishing the animation, especially in the first shot. But there was something in the second shot that had been bothering me for some time. It was the end when the leopard lays down.

This lying pose was very difficult to achieve because his belly always had a weird shape and inflates when it lays down. I really did not know what to do in this situation or how to cover it without making it look odd. I tried many ways how he could laying, tried other laying positions but it was impossible to get a clean shape.

I decided to scrap the laying pose and think of something new so that the project has a nice ending. After a while I came up with new pose. As I was mainly inspired from The Lion King, I chose a strong pose where the leopard roars to imply his anger because of his destroyed habitat.

While the first shot is more realistic because I really sticked to the references, the second shot was rather more artistic and cinematic as I did not have an exact reference for the roaring pose and was freely animating it.

With this solution, I really like how both shots differs from each other and it suits very well to the theme of the second shot.

LAST WORDS

In the end of course the animation is not completely perfect but all in all I am happy how this project turned out. I am happy to get a chance to work on this project with Sascha, who did a beautiful work on the lighting, compositing and setting of both environments. Also a big thank to Jacob who provided us his rig of Massimo's model.

Through this project I learned so much through such as not always to completeley stick to the references but rather to animate more freely sometimes and put your own style into your animation. Furthermore I learned more to be organized and to work together as a team.

Thank you so much for taking your time and reading my entry. I hope I could give you a little insight into the creation of this project.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me!
linkedin.com/in/dinhtrangbui
[email protected]