Crafting the story

Our story and plot went through a lot of iterations before we finally settled on what our two minutes should consist of. With only 2 minutes to deliver a compelling narrative, every second mattered. We developed the plot through storyboarding.

Animatics are a powerful way of running through an entire story and figuring out what to tweak. My team split sections of the story for sketching and pieced together animatics similar to this one:

There were several challenges I faced here, from "how do I make the curtains look velvet-y enough?" to "how do I make the coin reflective enough to show the puppet's expressions?"

The lighting was one of the toughest parts, but also the part I enjoyed the most. I had to balance visuals with efficiency, keeping in mind that adding too many lights increases the render time a lot. At first, the lighting was too harsh, causing sharp shadows that were distracting. I placed two large spotlights across the set and evened out their shadows, in an attempt to replicate a real life "stage" setup.

Animation & Camera Work

Majority of our time was actually spent animating and refining the motion of our character and camera. We split our work into sequences and each took over some sequences to animate. In addition to making sure our movements were polished, we also had to consider the transitions between sequences as the working styles between animators can be completely different and we had to work parallelly instead of sequentially.

We often made "playblasts" on Maya, which are non-rendered, short sequences to test our animations and get feedback. It was a very useful way to iterate on our work and ensure that we were evoking the right meaning and emotions that we were aiming for. Just hover over (or tap on if you're on a touch screen) some of the playblasts below to get a hint of my work: