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Film / TV

GOLDEN AGE SHORT FILM

Year: 2019
Position: Character Art Director
Director: Anthony Di Ninno

I was in charge of designing the characters and working closely with the CG Modeler to properly translate the art into a 3D character.
Copyright ©Stellar Creative Lab.

FUSION DESIGN EXPLORATION

OTHER CHARACTERS
EXPLORATION

Fusion isn’t really the main character of the story, but he is important in the short film so Anthony asked me to start with him. Once we were happy with his design and the 3D on him moving forward, Anthony gave me the task to design some other characters needed for the short film and important for the story itself as a big picture.

TRANSLATING TO 3D

The great thing of working on a small studio is that we all take on other rolls to make it happen. I was very fortunate to work closely with the Character CG Modeler Maritza Louis and the Look Dev Artist Javier Diaz to properly develop the characters into 3D.


Here are some draw overs and notes I did while they were modelling and creating the character. Some of them are also meant for the Rigging team to understand what I was looking out of the character.

WIDGET & MO.
Cartoon

The short film had 2 scenes of an ‘old cartoon’ on the TV. So I offered myself to design it and animate it as well (again one of the great things of working with a small team).

Like the old cartoons I wanted it to feel very limited in specific movements. For example on Shot 01 in which the arms of the cat are very ‘stiff’ while the legs actually do a circle movement. On Shot 02 I limited a lot the cat’s body movement with a very basic cycle on the arms and torso as I wanted the attention on its face and not the body.
The process
For this small piece of animation I did some very quick layout poses for the characters on pencil and then animated it very rough on OpenToonz to get a sense of the movement. For the clean up/in betweening stage I used Photoshop. It is a slow process but for such a quick piece it wasn’t that bad. After all the clean up was done I used After Effects for all the comp. Anthony also gave me some Grain filters to add on top of the entire sequence.