Don't Be Tuna'Ive Animation

For our final project of 3rd year, my team and I realized a 20s animation short in 6 weeks called "Don't Be Tuna'Ive" ! I was responsible for the rigging of our lovely fish, Mr. Tuna, the layout of the short, the storyboard, and finally the animation of Takashi.

Indeed, I had to animate Takashi in shots 5 and 7. In this post, I'm going to present all the steps I went through.

For Takashi, we needed him to appear sympathetic and sweet up until he was about to kill Mr.Tuna. To help us with the slightly exaggerated expressions, we needed to pay close attention to his attitude during the concept art. Thanks to the drawing's expressions of my teammate Esther Garcia Fernandez and the storyboard, we were able to define Takashi's actions:

For shot 5, we had to make a soft, calming takashi before he slowly turning into a dangerous character.

For shot 7, as the final surprise is that it was all for an add, Takashi had to appear more charming and confident. 

After the storyboard was completed, the animators on my team and I made the references we needed for our shots to captured the movement of the face, establish the timing based on the storyboard and see the movement of the camera. We decided to be as close as possible to Pixar's animation style (defining the number of frames of overshoots, holds, anticipations, etc.).

Then, as the rigging ran late, we had less than a week to complete all of our shots. So, to work as efficiently as possible without being late, I decided to divide the animation process into three parts. First of all, I focused on the body. Once it was done, I switched to the facial animation and, finally, the lipsing.

I had a blast working with this method because I didn't feel overwhelmed by all the animated controllers. However, the hardest part was the lipsing of the last shot. Indeed, he says "Don't be Tuna'ive" in Japanese, which is phonetically written "naiibu ni naranaide", so I had difficulties making it understandable during "naranai".