Challenge
Design and animate a projection mapped character that interacts with a live actor as part of an immersive experience. The character should appear as a powerful and mysterious entity from another realm.
What we did
Our final design was born out of a need for a character that would be quick to animate, be expressive and have a strong presence in the space.
We went with a giant serpent-like eye, inspired in part by the eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings. Eyes can be very emotive and mysterious, plus having an eye appear through a hole in the wall gave us the ability to play with scale, making the entity seem powerful and dominant.
To help further sell the illusion we wanted the eye to be 3 dimensional, to give it volume. However, we didn’t have the time to produce the character in 3D so we developed a 2D animation rig with a faux 3D effect which worked quite well.
Once we had the layered assets for the eye created in Photoshop, we imported the layers into Aftereffects to build the rig.
To get the faux 3D effect a circle gradient warp effect was added to the image.
[Animation sample with distort beside a version without]
Based on the storyboard and animatic we blocked out and animated the eye to match the recorded script.
[Animatic beside the final animation]
Sound design
We used the Dehumanizer plugin from Krotos for Yar’s voice, which gave the entity a deep and dominating growling vocal range.
[Before / after audio] and/or image of dehumanizer plug-in.
The graphics and dialogue were now ready to go, but the scenes still lacked music and sound design. By a spooooky coincidence, we were contacted around this time by Edinburgh-based sound designer Fred Yuan Feng. He had seen and liked our stuff, and was wondering if there were any collaboration opportunities coming up. We summarised what we needed and within days Fred and his colleague Astrud Espinoza at Wavegrinder Audio had cooked up the atmospheric sound design and original music for the show.
Outcome
The simple character rig meant we could achieve a lot with a little, rapidly producing a strong and dominant focal point for the show. The resulting aesthetic and sound design created the spooky yet playful atmosphere the show needed.
Learnings
Despite the animation being ‘on rails’ and pre-animated, the interaction between the live actor and the digital character was very effective. We believe this approach of blending animated content with live performance has a lot more potential.
