Project 1: Weight

This was the first major animation project I worked on, and it took the most time and resources to complete at the time. The goal was to breathe life into a character as (s)he struggled to push, pull or lift an object of heavy weight, so I took the opportunity to animate Ori (the little one) and Naru (the heavy one), two characters from the Ori video game series. From the beginning, I wanted to use a jump-cut technique to show passage of time as Ori struggles to move Naru, which can allow me to animate a variety of different interactions with the weight. Possibly the biggest inspiration outside of Ori was the scene from Disney's Tangled (2010) where Rapunzel attempted to haul an unconscious Flynn Rider into her wardrobe. It was a scene that used the jump-cut technique to show many failed attempts with comedic effect, and so I thought it would be best to use this.

To complete the animation, I sketched concepts of the main ways Ori would push or pull Naru in Photoshop, imported them to Harmony, recorded references in which I would push against a wall to the point where'd I fall or slip, and then animate Ori doing the same, starting with key-frames and later adding in-betweens. To ensure the animation had a conclusion, the final segment where Ori looks at the sky and then falls asleep was animated earlier on before going back to the previous sequences. As I went back, I drew some frames of Ori in the same position and looped them similarly to when characters stood still in Ed, Edd N' Eddy, just to make it feel like motion occurs as Ori forces his body against Naru. The first segment in the animation where Ori squats down and pokes Naru was the final segment I animated, based on another reference I recorded, to give the project some introduction. Once all segments were complete, ears were animated on a separate layer as the final step since their movement was dependent on how Ori's head and body moved. Naru was also animated to show how heavy she is and make Ori's ground-pound deliver an impact, but one that isn't strong enough to wake her up. I also imported a background drawn in Adobe Photoshop to ensure there was visible contrast between the characters and the setting.

There were about three other ways Ori was initially going to push or pull Naru with, two of which already had references and parts I animated. However, they needed to be cut due to time constraints and difficulty with the perspective of the shot in one position. Thankfully, the end result is one I felt very proud of myself for.