Of love, trust and loyalty

Posted by Shu Low on Friday, November 13, 2009 Under: cofa

In a state of bewilderment, and trying to come to terms with the reality and make sense of it all, we'd to decide what is the best and most feasible. Drop the course? The last resort....a possibility. It was already midway through the semester.

At the time, ironically, I'd just completed the dress of Blue after spending one day on it ... a beautiful bluish white elegant dress fashioned after a photo in Bambini Magazine. To allow her to swim gracefully. It was modeled based on the nCloth example in Getting Started with Maya Unlimited 2009 (Lesson 3Creating nCloth clothing); as I'd hope in future to turn her dress into nCloth. And was about to begin UVs and rigging in earnest. With modeling done (the most difficult and slow process for me), I knew I could do it real fast with UVs and rigging as these are just technical tasks - based on how fast I could do those last semester -- UVs in 2 days; rigging in 1.5 days. Except for weights which was the only painstakingly slow task left. And blendshapes might take some time.

"How about my Anna story I did last semester? We could use my model for Anna, which is nearly completed, and has only hair, UVs and rigs left to do -- it was anyway originally modeled with Anna's head model... We could simplify by having only one scene -- the daisy fields," I suggested .... "Ok, better a finished storyboard than to start from scratch..." We looked through my storyboard, explored various options...and ways of simplifying to make things still feasible within half a semester. What about iCinema... "...let's call it Anna's World where we play with colors... make it simple..." "There's nCloth example in Maya we could use for falling papers..." "Ok...how about Jaws jumping from the tree? Is it too hard? Cut it? Anna and Jaws falling?Jaws climbing the tree ...." "Jaws could be hard..." "No it wouldn't be hard... I've a sack step-by-step tutorial in a book I bought as I was going to do Anna story originally..." The only thoughts we had were what is the best and most feasible way to move forward within the limited time ... it was 3 am when we finally had something that we could work on...

Thankfully, we didn't cut the sequence of shots of Jaws jumping from the tree. Because we like it. It is one of the most heartwarming sequence of shots to me. It is about love, trust and loyalty. Jaws would do anything for Anna -- climbing a tree to get the last missing piece of colored paper (to break the Spell) only realizing after dislodging the paper that he doesn't know how to get down, and is scared. Jaws jumps trusting Anna totally to catch it, with a smile on his face. The love that Anna has for Jaws is shown on her face when she looks at Jaws. And I'm really glad we are able to show this emotion quite successfully in the movie! :-)

Watch our movie for these shots ! These are the shots that I really enjoyed doing.... well, in fact I'd a lot of fun and fulfillment doing the various animations with interesting camera angles. It is rewarding after the painstakingly hard and slow task of modeling and weighting Anna.

Last semester, this was what I put up on the COFA blog on my storyboard and concepts (it was good last semester we'd our individual blogs...)