Shattered

A short animation created by a team of six: myself and five other students of the Texas A&M Visualization program. As a team, we brainstormed the initial concept, produced story development materials, and took that story to completion. Shattered was created over the course of about three months— mainly using Pixar’s Renderman, Autodesk Maya, and Adobe’s Substance Suite.

Thanks to my team:

Ayomiposi Babalope

Andrew Mahoney

Ansley Herrin

Genna Marenco

Sarah Marek

My Contributions

I surfaced, rigged, and animated “Devin,” the main character for this short film Shattered. I also did the 3D Layout passes for the short. The rig features a full joint-based facial rig, as well as automatic squash-and-stretch for Devin’s torso. He was animated on stepped frames in order to better emulate a claymation style.

Animation Tests

During the preproduction phase, I used a simple biped rig I had made previously to implement an example of how the stepped frames might work. I did this test as early as week 2 in pre-production to make sure my team members were on board with the idea. I based the shot setup on a shot from the 2D storyboards that ended up making it all the way to final production.

Layout Passes

This layout was an interesting project. I had three main goals when going into the layout:

    Emphasizing the joke reveal of the statue’s head.
    Setting up anticipation for the pedestal breaking.
    Playing up the drama of the final crash.

In order to accentuate the character’s distress in the final shot, I ended up putting it in a low shot looking alongside the destruction to our main character, “Devin”. This more dramatic angle allowed us to emphasize the destruction and provided a good view of Devin’s reaction without putting us too close to him to find humor in the situation.

Due to the scene construction, I initially ran into trouble maintaining the 180-degree rule when cutting back and forth between Devin and his statue. In the end, I decided to use the reverse shot where we see Devin from the perspective of the statue as an intermediary to ease the shift in screen direction that came with the climactic shot.

The 2D animatic was drawn by Sarah Marek and edited together by Ayomiposi Babatope