I was very interested by Tom's suggestion last week on how we should view the matter from the oil's perspective. Oil is neutral, it only became problematic and "bad" when people started mining, transporting and making profits out of it.
If oil becomes a character, the first thing I related it to is Muk from pokemon. He is essentially a slime monster. However, I feel that it is important to eliminate any emotion of the oil in order to stay neutral. The oil character should be something like a rag doll, he doesn't decide what he wants, where he is going, and he doesn't respond to anything that's happening. He simply observes.
 |
| slime animation can be really fun and is doable both in 3D (rigging challenge!) and 2D |
Muk is a great inspiration for me because I want the character to be just as simple as Muk, maybe even simpler. Speaking of simple characters, the first thing that comes to mind is Lucas Bleackley Petter's animation. In his work - "The Mountain", the character has no mouth and the eyes are pretty much responsible for all of its emotion.
Everyone's animation ability is different in this class, but one thing I know for sure is that everyone's done the flour sack exercise. So if that is the case, then everyone should be able to animate a character as simple as the oil.
After thinking about the character, I thought about the technical aspect of the animation. Since our class has a pretty good balance of 2D and 3D animators (plus a couple illustrators), I imagine it would be likely that we will eventually merge 2D and 3D animation. In that case, a great reference film is Salesman Pete:
Somebody last week also mentioned the idea to do an info graphic type of video, or we can have info graphic aspects merged into animations later on. Anyhow, here are some inspirations I found:
 |
| bold and rich colors are used effectively to distinguish one thing from another |
 |
| motion graphics makes statistics and facts less boring to watch |
 |
| anyone good at AFX? |
I made a couple scenes demonstrating how the oil character might look like and how he will likely behave.
