Early animation tests

As mentioned in the previous post, the design of the characters has gone through several iterations throughout the production. Below are some of the tests I animated with the character designs that got as far as some sort of rigging. Some had a face rig and some didn't, but we just wanted to see what we could do and play around with a certain style. We also decided to do the animation on 2's, which means that each pose is held for 2 frames, so you have to deal with 12 frames in a second instead of 24. Fast moves still need to be animated on 1's though so that the animation still reads. There are two reasons for this decision, firstly, Remote was animated on singles, and it requires a lot of polishing time to get the animation to look as nice as possible which is very time consuming and the character needs to be kept alive at all times otherwise it feels dead. However when animating on 2's, it is a lot more forgiving and it's completely fine to hold the character still without it looking dead. Secondly, I like animating on 2's! Having worked at Aardman for over 11 years, I've had to animate in all kinds of styles, and nowadays I prefer the look and feel of animation on 2's. It is also quicker than animating on 1's so there's a good chance we can get this film finished before I retire! So here are a few animation tests of the main characters that were done early on to play with the character rigs...







And this was a short test with the re-designed, simpler character. The staging is quite wide on this and there is no explanation in the shot as to why he looks up, gets scared and runs back into his spaceship. We actually made a short AR experience with this where he landed on a tabletop (or wherever you wanted actually) looked up and saw the viewer, then scarpered. The character was only about 150mm tall and it worked really well to be honest and Andrew Lavery did a great job of building the whole thing in Unreal. We might even get back to finishing it one day.



We are currently in the process of rigging the final versions of the main characters, so once that's done I will post the animation tests for those too!

We will leave you with one final animation test done with a secondary character that was rigger brilliantly by Duncan Rudd. The only way we could figure out how to get the extreme mouth shape was to have 2 separate rigs, and swap them out on over the transition, another advantage in animating on 2's is that it's easier to hide the join.

Monster_animTest_01 from Mathew Rees on Vimeo.