(Apologies for the YouTube app ... I'll put up a better quality video when I can find my CD of the full render!)
Tight Flight - 1 minute 10 seconds (inc. titles and credits)
3D character animation produced in Maya, February-March 2007
University brief: 1 minute character animation, produced in groups; must involve interaction and lip-syncing.
Written by Paul Christie;
Yuri modelled and animated by Kate Kulendikova;
Cameron modelled and animated by Claire Davis;
Matt modelled and animated by Cayleigh Gardner;
William modelled and animated by Gail McColl;
Voices provided by Harry Ward, Katerina Bryan and Ali Bruce.

This was a 2 month project at the end of my second year of university, and the first where we really had the freedom to work on our own outcome in full. We began by each scripting a one minute piece to be animated (either 2D or 3D) between 3 to 4 people, with one character each, which had to involve some form of interaction and lip-syncing for each character. As a whole we narrowed down the number of scripts, and then re-wrote and improved individual pieces as smaller groups, before voting down to a final six or so, at which point we split ourselves into groups of three or four people to animate.

I had originally wanted to work on a 2D project; however, I had by this point decided that I wanted to concentrate in hand-drawn animation further down the line, so decided that a small venture into Maya might be a refreshing idea. The character of William in this particular script shone out to me a bit, as something about the idea of a slightly uptight business man being lumped with his stepson on a trip just seemed like a lot of fun to work on ... I also found something strangely amusing about being able to use a simple gingerbread-man model wearing a tie. (Believe it or not, that actually took longer than animating most of the rest of the body ...)

Going back to doing hand-drawn 2D animation was a bit of a shock after this, being that the vast majority of the time on this project was spent modelling the characters and setting and working with cameras: my 2D project following this suffered a bit from me forgetting that it would take more than a week to colour and compose several hundred images! However, this was a fun film to work on, and I do like how it turned out on the whole! I think our lighting could have been improved to spruce up the overall atmosphere, but being that all we knew about this was what we found on a single page in a "Teach Yourself Maya" book, I think we could probably be forgiven!