Gitfs from Santa
School of Motion Holiday Card 2017
This piece was originally done for School of Motion Alumni's Holiday Card for 2017. However, I did not make it to the deadline but better late than never, right?
We picked out a word to finish the sentence "A holiday is not a holiday without ______ ." My word is "Gifts from Santa" and we were given a color palette to work with. I wanted to be out of my comfort zone and decided on some bird's eye view and a heavy walk cycle. I went to school for Digital Filmmaking so I always want to add cinematic feel to my work by using Depth of Field and a little parallax as the camera pulls out to give the frame much more life.
Tools:
Cinema4D
Photoshop
After Effects
Composition and Lighting Previsualization
After several hours browsing the internet, I could not find any good reference images for the bird's eye view angle that I wanted. I decided to turn to Cinema4D and created the scene myself. Using a generic DAZStudio model, I could quickly pose him to look like he is dragging a heavy bag. I went through a couple of different lighting options to see how I can ultilize the tree shadow to break up the plain snow ground.
Assets Creation
I wanted a painterly textured look so I opted for Photoshop instead of my go-to Illustrator. The tricky part is adapting the given color palette to the scene. After many attempts, I ended up with this frame. I'm not used to doing a full background scene so this process took quite a long time. Even after it was done, during the animation stage, I still had Photoshop open and continued refining the detail to serve the animation better.
Animation
I animated the scene in After Effects using Duik. It was a lot of fun. I ended up rewatching the intro scene of "Prince of Egypt" because where can you see a lot of animation reference of somebody carrying a heavy bag?
You can download my project file below.