IGNITE
Master of Design Technology capstone animation group project
at Victoria University of Wellington.
I was a director of IGNITE and also was responsible for Screenplay, Storyboard, Cinematographer, Character Design, Modelling, Rigging, Texturing, Mocap, Motion Editing, Rendering and Colour Grading.
This is a 4 minutes animation film. We are a team of 4 people and we spent 3 months to finished it.
This story is about father and son. There are 2 ape-like creatures as main characters called oros. They are living in the cave and are threatened by a monster. The older one is Gororo. The younger one is Frizzo. Gororo always tries to protect Frizzo and convince him that we should stay in the cave but Frizzo wants more adventure. Frizzo’s curiosity, recklessness and greed would lead this story to a tragedy.
Screenshots of the film
IGNITE behind the scene
Initial Idea of Ignite:
This idea is from a video I saw in our lecture. It showed how primitive men discovered a way to generate fire. My first idea was like, for the primitive men, fire was a power. They wanted to use it to protect themselves to drive the predators away but they were too greedy in this power, and finally they got killed by this power.
Initial idea of character design
Initial idea of mural design
Character Design:
In the character design, I tried to exaggerate these characters’ shapes and appearances to match the tone of this story.
For the main characters, I tried to design the primitive men more cartoonish to let them look like monkeys, apes, bears, and kinds of fluffy cute fur-covered creatures. Frizzo should look more like a naughty boy and Gororo should look more like a gentle father. They do not really have a mouth, only eyes, eyebrows and ears, as I want the audience more focus on their body language.
In contrast, the monster is quadruped, with a huge mouth but no eye.
In terms of fireflies, they should more look like fairies.
For the main characters, I tried to design the primitive men more cartoonish to let them look like monkeys, apes, bears, and kinds of fluffy cute fur-covered creatures. Frizzo should look more like a naughty boy and Gororo should look more like a gentle father. They do not really have a mouth, only eyes, eyebrows and ears, as I want the audience more focus on their body language.
In contrast, the monster is quadruped, with a huge mouth but no eye.
In terms of fireflies, they should more look like fairies.
Character Modelling, Rigging, Texturing:
Characters' Turntable:
Frizzo
Gororo
Monster
Firefly
Monster sculpting in Zbrush:
Monster rigging in Maya:
Frizzo & Gororo rigging in Maya:
Setting Ctl-Rig in Unreal Engine:
Facial blendshapes:
Characters texturing in Substance Painter:
Mural Design:
Storyboard:
Animatic:
Motion Capture:
Motion in final rendering.
In the mocap section, I tried to guide our actors to use their body language emotionally to express this story. We set up live-link in Unreal Engine 5.1. So we can see how our characters move when our actors were acting.
Setting up cameras:
Animaiting and setting up sequences for rendering:
Contact me if you want to watch the whole film.
