Alter Ego Hephce Portfolio

ALTER EGO 

I worked on the short movie Alter Ego the next year! If you want to see more about the story of the film you can go to the film of the year contest!    https://www.therookies.co/entries/6421

Here I will explain more about my work on the short.  

During our preparatory research, I made a small clay model of the island.                           It helped the team a lot to visualize the different sets we wanted to represent.  

RESEARCH

Throughout the film I did research to optimize the working time because we had an ambitious project with a lot of characters and very full sets.  

We decided very early on to set up a common rig for all the characters and therefore to develop a script for the namespaces and thus create characters derived from our main characters for the villagers and the crowd.

To anticipate the creation of the facial expressions of the crowd we realized a similar topology to transfer the blendshapes on all the characters. 

I created a script on the rig for the ik/fk switch to maintain the pose. The use of studio Library was also a plus to preserve animations and important poses of our characters.

CFX

For the fx character, I created a template on Houdini.

We really wanted a fluid simulation of the characters loincloths . Then Vellum appeared as the new tool to master to achieve the quality we were looking for. This solution was ideal especially for the shaman and her collar that falls on her shoulders and chest.

Technically, we had:

- a template on Houdini that allowed us to import an animation alembic from maya

- proxy clothing included in the houdini template

- a simulation via Vellum

- simulated proxy clothing transfer to final modeling

- generation of an alembic ready to be fused with textured clothing in maya

For each character I pre-set the template, I had to get back on the simulation for some plans in order to make the movements more realistic.

ANIMATION / EDITING

The contact with the voice actor of our characters and the dubbing session as well as the sound and design sessions brought me a lot in my animation work.

We have received precious advice throughout the short movie, I will remember this one in particular: “There must always be ONE action for a plan. We must not want to say too much in one shot, it damages the understanding of the film.” 

I took care of writing all the scenario with each modification and I wrote the dialogues that's why I took care of the editing. It was kept up to date all the weeks in order to see where we were going and until the end each frame was checked in order to overcome the last minute problems.

At the end of the production, when we couldn’t do animation anymore because of the render time and the deadline of the short movie. I took care of render farm and renders , when it was missing some frame I did another render. And I finally help on compositing for some shots.  

I grown up with this experience, aware of the complexity of managing a script and conducting a production in its entirety and determined to continue my efforts in an animation studio.

Thank You!