RAVIE CHALLENGE #3
Remember all the myths you created as a kid, all the stories you relived and the timeless legends you played a part in? What’s a more mythic object than cardboard? When Ravie Co announced “Mythic” as prompt for their third animation challenge, my mind went so many places at once as I contemplated stories like the legend of King Arthur or perhaps an old Norse myth. The biggest pull, however, was Greece. I had spent an amazing vacation there years ago and the art and architecture, the stories and culture, all still hang with me.
Soon enough, with the timeless escapades of the Greek gods in mind, I began grounding myself a bit more. I thought to my own childhood and how mythic it seemed years ago. My parents told me they could just give me a cardboard box instead of a gift and I’d be happy. That story seemed almost mythic to me, and it was that feeling I settled on portraying.
PANDORA
From the very beginning I really wanted to think carefully about any character I created in this animation. For my last two entries I had probably unconsciously defaulted to boys. Especially with tight deadlines it’s easy to fall back on what you know or what resonates with you. So, for this one I wanted to challenge myself to make a girl (or woman if the story hadn’t veered toward the myth of childhood). Specifically, I also wanted to portray a person of color as well.
My storyboard hadn’t even been started yet, but after I drew her, I knew she was Pandora. She had a defiant spunk with her playfulness that I really fell in love with throughout animating her. Like me, she also seemed to stick her tongue out while playing or concentrating. She wielded a cardboard tube like a sword, and had a gold laurel leaf in her thick dark brown hair.
THE DOG
Every kid needs a companion, and stories are better with more than one character. I knew early on that I wanted this dopey dog for Pandora to play off of. Within the story she was alone after moving to a new place, but making the best of it with her pal.
The obvious thing would be to portray the dog as cerberus in her imaginings, but I really liked the idea of this canine lost amidst a maze of boxes like the minotaur of myth. That, and he looked truly silly with the minotaur helmet.
He was one of the last additions to the icarus jumping scene, and I almost added him to the trireme ship as Pandora fights off the charybdis monster, but ultimately I ran out of time. He was going to wear a legionnaire helmet if he did find himself in that boat. In the end, he just gets terrorized with a cardboard lightning bolt.
FACE RIG
I used Joysticks N Sliders again for Pandora’s facial rig. I set things up very similarly to my work on Glint, though I pushed the turn a bit further this time and added a tongue control, because why not! I had to separately rig the laurel leaf to disappear when the controls hit a certain angle, and manually fill in a lot of her hair. Unfortunately, I’m not 100% satisfied with how her hair morphing came out, but once things were ready to go I couldn’t really turn back.
Once I had things working, I duplicated my control comp for seven different facial animation compositions throughout.
