THE BALLOON
This was a Project me and my friend, Owen Lye, signed up for a Animation bootcamp hosted by WECA and NextGen Skills. It was a 10-11 week course mainly hosted like a university lecture by online meetings every Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the bootcamp, Me and 9 other participants were tasked to create a short film from a premade script. We had nothing to use beforehand, no assets, no sound effects, no storyboard. The bootcamp would teach us each step and give us a chance to learn and try all sorts of different tasks we may have never got to try beforehand such as rigging and animation.
This project was also sponsored by Aardman and A-Productions.
Credits:
City Environment made by Ellen Paynter
Balloon Rig and model by Will Clarke
Helicopter Rig and Model by Lotta Kokko
SH204 Storyboard by Tanja Langgner
Lighting during the sunset sequence by Michael Taylor
Cloud environment by Michael Taylor
SH204 Animated by Michael Taylor
FINAL PRODUCT
BEHIND THE SCENES
As we only had 10 weeks to do this entire project from start to finish, we had to divide the task between 10 people.
This includes Storyboarding, Concepting, Modeling, Rigging and animating.
I mainly knew mostly modeling so I took a bunch of the models from the list we were given,
Out of the 16 models I took 3 of them,
CONCEPTS
ASTRONAUT
MODELING AND RIGGING
CYCLES RENDER
RIGGING SHOWCASE
SATELLITE
CYCLES RENDER
RIGGING SHOWCASE
ASTRONAUT'S TOOLBOX
CYCLES RENDER
RIGGING SHOWCASE
ANIMATION
As for animation we all were tasked between 1-2 shots each, I had also got quite busy as I was working my normal job whilst this course was on so I had to only take 1 shot, I took SH204 where the balloon was described as followed.
"Up goes the balloon. A helicopter passes but the balloon is just blown around.
Up and up. Clouds go past.
It’s getting dark."
STORYBOARD REFERENCE
Storyboard sequence by Tanja Langgner
ANIMATIC
Storyboard sequence by Tanja Langgner
ARTISTIC INPUT
Our course lead, David Hallows, Insisted if we wanted to add any artistic input into our shots we can. I took the route of making the camera more easy to follow with all the subjects in frame.
I first started with the first shot where it shows the balloon floating away with the city in the background, I first started to bring the background to the foreground to show the balloon starting to float away, I added in some reference of time as the script said "It's getting dark" I took this as a daytime cycle so it would be starting off during sunset and we can easily transition to the space scenes later on where every element of the background is void.