It's a new year! It was a busy year of learning to balance teaching full-time, freelance work, and Heather's very active freelance gigs. I ended the year working on a few new projects, so hopefully I will be able to show some of that work sooner than later. I think this year will have a lot of new work to talk about - but in the meantime I wanted to post a better look at some last year's work from
Trolls.
I was on the show during the production start up, so most of the work was doing initial animations with the generic trolls rigs. There's a list of general movements we always do up front. It's also a time we can see what's working or not and start exploring how stylized the crowds will be. There's also testing the crowd rigs as well - you have dozens of different body types and when you copy the animation around once awhile the rigs don't all behave the same. So there's a lot of up front work when getting started on a show.
The first sequences in production (the one most rock-solid to stay as-is in the show) were the opening musical number and the Bergen-crashing-the-party one. I had a few one off special cycles for those to create - like coming out of homes and grooving to the song or catching envelopes. The latter was suppose to be in multiple shots and I spent several weeks doing several variations and copying it to all the different body types. In the final film it's in one shot for about 30 frames. The glamorous life of an animator!
It was a fun last DreamWorks movie to work on. We got to see it in the theaters with our two sons and have been singing the songs for months now. Like the tagline for the movie said - find your happy place!
