Apex Project - Part 2

Just finished work on the animated short for a project with the Apex hotel chain. The video will be officially launched online early next year, but for now here are some screenshots. Sorcha unfortunately left the project, so I ended up completing  it on my own. The shooting was done in seven days in the studio, and I made the film with as little post-production as possible, since our original concept was to focus on the fact that we were interacting with the same physical object that hotel customers would find in their bathrooms. The animation process actually ended up being more of an exercise in special effects than anything else - I spent more than half the studio time on the snowing section. Lighting the scene was also a challenge, as I wanted the light to be bright enough to erase the gap between the platform and the backdrop, but not so bright as to erase detail on the duck or cause multiple strong shadows. The solution I came up with wasn't perfect, but time restraints meant that it had to do.

Apex Project - Part 1

The other project we've got this semester is the Apex Project, a semi-commercial (i.e. for a client, but unpaid) piece of work. We had the choice of two briefs. One was to create two 30-second pieces of animation to be played in the hotel reception on a special three-screen set up. This is to be related to some new branding for the hotel chain, and was intended to be a more abstract piece.

I played around with a couple of ideas involving maps, then star charts and RGB lighting, but this image was as far as I got with that.

Although I'd like to work further on something like this in the future, I didn't feel comfortable enough with this sort of abstract motion graphics subject to pitch it to a client, so I chose to go with the other brief instead. This was to create a 1-minute animation using the Apex hotel chain mascot, a brightly coloured rubber duck, using the theme of one or more of the four seasons.

My initial idea for this brief (after playing around with different ways to draw the duck) was to use the rubber duck itself as a canvas for the animation, rather than a character within it. From there it was a short step to come up with some seasonal imagery than could be painted and then animated on the duck in stop-motion.

Because this technique will be particularly time-consuming, I arranged to work on the project with one of my classmates, Sorcha. The second part of the idea came when we were discussing ideas for the Winter/Spring section and we realised that we could substitute the rubber duck for parts of the film with different models, giving us a lot more flexibility and the ability to physically transform it into different shapes. For example, a snow duck, sand duck and topiary duck:

This helped us create a much more interesting storyboard to pitch to the client, combining painting on the duck with stop-motion animation.

The pitch went well, and we got approval to go ahead with the project. Next we'll work on a finalised, and hopefully improved, version of the storyboards, and do some animation tests to work out how much time in the studio we'll need to realise some of the more complex ideas.