turn off the lights
turn off the lights
Type: Personal Project
Role: Ideation, Sketching, Animation, Lighting, Rendering
Tools: Maya, Photoshop, Premiere Pro
I love Edith Piaf’s music and I’ve always thought her voice and inflections were so expressive. The ending to Milord is so bombastic and over the top that I thought it would be fun to animate someone singing it.
The first thing I did was make some crude sketches for the set up of the scene.
I then expanded that idea and made a storyboard that involved a panel of judges to add context to the action being shown.
However, once running it over several times, I realised that all the camera movements were a bit excessive and took away from the main action I was trying to present. So I scrapped most of the scenes and decided to only focus on the girl and her performance.
For reference, I recorded myself singing and dancing along to the track so I could get a feel for the energy I wanted to convey in the scene.
I used the BONNIE rig for this animation. I started by syncing her mouth movements to the audio so I could make sure to sell the fact that it really was her singing.
Next, I began blocking the scene. As I was positioning the model, I began to improvise some of the movement to make it feel a bit more lively as I am not very athletic myself. You can see this with the jump and the pas de bourree.
Finally, I finished with adding smaller details like giving the torso and pelvic areas believable twists during steps and jumps, and adding follow through actions from the wrists and fingers and the model moved their hands.
In order to ground the character, I created a stage - using this texture - and some curtains, and to convey the mood of a performance, I added a spotlight as well.
I think I managed to create an animation filled with energy and fun. I’m glad I decided to cut out extra elements that would have distracted from the performance and that I chose to push the actions and poses further than my reference material.
