AOYI CHEN
About the Animatic
A Happy Place is a short animatic inspired by The Little Match Girl.
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It is the third year of famine. A young boy is in the woods trying to find some food that can keep him going for a bit longer. As he was about to pass out, he saw in the corner of his eyes some colorful mushrooms. It tastes delicious, as he shoves them in his mouth. He never felt so light before and a magical word starts to appear in front of him.
I worked on Storyboarding, 3D Modeling, Rigging, Animation, and Camera movements in Unreal for this project.
Starting with Storyboards
After the scripts are written, I took all the scripts together and drew out storyboards to visualize our story. Along the way, I added interesting camera movements and edited the plots for better visualizations.
Animatic of our storyboards put together by the editor in the team
Character Model & Rigging
After we are certain of the characters that will be in our short film, the concept artist delivered a reference for the character for Modelers to follow. I was assigned to model the head of our main character and put it together with his body using Maya.
We do not have a rigger on our team. I volunteered to give it a try since I know some from animation classes. Using Maximo and tutorials on YouTube, I added a body and simple face skeleton that allow us to create animations with facial expressions.
Animations
Animations are key for adding life to our animatic. We scheduled a time to use the Motion Capture room and got an actor to act out the movements we need. Then, all the Mocap information then is handed to me, the animator, for edits and transfer to our character rig in Maya.
Camera Movements and Rendering
After we got all of our Animations and Scenes ready, it's time to put them together in Unreal into clips for our editor! Since I draw the storyboards, I have the best idea of how the camera movements should look. I assisted with any camera questions along the way while helping to render shots from Forest, Fairyland, and Town.
All the clips are then edited together by our editor along with sound effects and music from our Sound Engineer, forming our lovely short Animatic.