We are a five-person student animation studio currently producing a short film, Sirena. This project is a part of our University and we are trying to produce the film in 15 weeks. The film will be an adaptation of the “Sirena of Guam” myth. Through a traditional animated format, we hope to present the dazzling legend of a young girl as she transforms into a beautiful mermaid.
My role on this project is to animate the main character Sirena as she transforms from a girl into a mermaid. I animated the character as a human as well as mermaid for all the shots in the film. I worked with two separate rigs the human and the mermaid and our biggest challenge was execution of the transformation scene. The animation was done in 3-4 weeks.
Here is the animated short film 'Sirena'.
We started the animation for Sirena by first blocking the animation using a free online rig. This was only done to save time and to help get an understanding ogf how the human body behaves underwater. After the rig was done we used the blocked out animation as a reference to animate Sirena. After the animation was done for one shot the file would then be passed to our technical artists to add in cloth and hair simulation as well as lights.
For animating the above water shots I worked with the technical artists on our team to get the water as a placeholder from Houdini into Maya to help me create the illusion of Sirena floating above water.
Apart from the animation I was also responsible for layout out the cameras and working with my team to create an animatic that could be used as a reference for all the other shots. There were around 14 cameras that were setup for the film. I was also responsible for animating the cameras and used the shot sequencer in Maya to bring different shots together