Eleven Second Club

For this project we had to work with an audio file from the 11 second club.  We could choose between the November or the December audio. The idea was to animate a character according to the given sound. I choose the December audio file.  Unlike previous audio files of the 11 second club competition, this contained only sound effects. It was a bit challenging however, after a few days I was able to come up with an idea for the animation. My concept was of a ninja that is running on a rooftop, then he slips and falls.  As he falls he hits another roof and falls through that. This is followed by another scene where the ninja is seen to land on a floor of a room. He then stands up and sways from dizziness. Suddenly some bricks hit the ninja, which results in a coma.

At first I did not know what rig I will be using. I even had an Idea of building one myself. However due to the small amount of time I had to use a ready one. After some time searching online I decided to go back to the Eleven Rig. Since the video was about a ninja I had to modify it a bit. This is the rig before and after:

I removed its hair. Then I colored it black leaving the hands, neck and also a small area around the eyes. After this I removed the ears. This seemed to look perfect for what I intended. I then modeled a small stage. I included a running area and a house with a hole in the roof top:

After a while I made a LAV file to help me make the animation. I edited the LAV since, I cannot perform the same actions as intended. After this I imported the sound file in Maya.  It was time to make the pose to pose sequence. The first 2 seconds of the audio file sound like someone is running. So at first I set up a running pose. This is followed by a small slip like sound in the file. I decided that this moment is where the ninja will slip. After this two big “bash” sounds are heard. This was perfect for making the ninja collide with the rooftop and the fall on the floor. In the background, during the same time, a wooden block falling sound can be heard. However to me it also resembled a roof tile falling. So I made some roof tiles fall beside the ninja.  Following in the audio is a silent period and then some footsteps. The silence was perfect for the moment where the ninja stands up. And the footsteps were spaced out enough so that I could get away with the ninja swaying. The final sound was almost like a collapse of a building. For this I decided that the ninja will get hit by rooftop tiles and fall on the floor, followed by other tiles falling around him.

This was the initial Idea however, I had to change the poses a lot since after a while some of them did not seem adequate.  After polishing the poses I made a run cycle for the first scene. This helped me understand how the ninja should run. I also made a falling test to visualize how the bricks would hit him.  I did not use any dynamics for animating the roof tiles. For the style of the animation it seemed better if I make them by hand.  The next thing was to animate the entire character. I did most of the animation using FK, because it worked better, when the character was running and walking.  I concentrated on animating the eyes, since the rest of the face was black. This seemed to work quite well with this character. I then polished the animation and started to build the scene.

For the scene I modeled a very simple building for the ninja to stand on and I placed another one behind him. For the background I used paint effects to create the houses. After this I added a ground plane, which I colored green. In the room I placed a wooden texture for the floor. This I created in Photoshop using the fibers filter.  After all of this was done I made a bump map for every texture. This seemed to give more detail in the background. After this was done I created the roof tiles for the house. The first two scenes were lit with Maya’s sun and sky lighting, the third one by using an area light. The only Editing I had to do afterwards was to add a sky. This was done in after effects by using a ramp gradient.

Overall in my opinion the animation is not that good due to the fast pace of everything. The running scene seems alright, but the final “sway” walk needs to be more believable. On the facial expression part I believe I did alright, since the idea was to make him look confused.

Here is the final video: