Planet Fitness

Are you ready to have your world go round?

Planet Fitness is an animated musical in which Earth is proving once and for all that he is *not* flat -- through bulking up and working out.

The film is not yet publicly available and is currently only available for judges and recruiters. However! Keep scrolling for a bunch of process work to see how I brought this film from a one sentence pitch to a 1 1/2 minute film that was brought through the whole animation pipeline!

Meet Earth!

Earth is the main performance and he knows it! All he wants is for everyone to understand that he is, in-fact, not flat. He's got a song in his heart and a guitar ready to sing all about some of his best qualities!

From ideation to visual development to modeling, texturing and grooming and then to rigging, he has been on quite the journey. Below are some early design ideas and then the final painting for Earth! 

Visual Development for all props and environments were also done before the film was brought into the 3D stages.

Earth's Rig!

Earth's rig required some extra research and development in order to obtain the final look that I was going for. The biggest task was ensuring that every single body part (even down to the pupils, eyelids, and sweatbands) could all move independently of each other while still keeping his perfectly round silhouette. Once his rig was working, I then was able to dup that off and work on the other 8 planets. What's a Milky Way concert without all the planets present?

Animation!

From rigging, it was onto layout, reference videos, thumbnails, blocking, splining, and polishing all of the animation! 

The name of the game for Earth's animation was ensuring that he always kept his round silhouette, no matter what he was doing or saying! This allowed for a lot of thought to go into which shots/lines be more cartoony and exaggerated and in which areas he should stay more realistic in the acting and movements. The ultimate goal was to keep him round even when singing because, after all, he is!

The entire film was storyboarded by me before moving into all of the production aspects of the film. Here's an example of Planet Fitness going from storyboard to animation to final comp!

Lighting and Compositing!

After animation was done, it was time to light and comp every shot! With this process, I got a chance to really expand my knowledge and understanding of Nuke. I first started with colorkeys and paintovers. From there I moved into renders and Nuke! 

Because of my newfound understanding and confidence with compositing, I was able to fully comp my film to the highest standards that I envisioned way back when the film was mere storyboards!

Thank you so much for reading and watching! My thesis film has been an amazing cap to my exciting 4 years at Ringling College of Art and Design! I've learned and grown so much throughout this process so I'm excited to share it all with everyone!

Feel free to check out my other work:

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