Hamburger Abduction
When I first got the idea for this piece I wanted to experiment with a bit of character modeling, animation and blend 2D and 3D elements to make a fun, colorful piece for social media. I think piece really reflects a certain style that I enjoy working in. Colorful, goofy characters, a bit of weirdness with the UFO and most of all, something fun.
I didn’t want to over-complicate the 3D aspect of the animation, so I opted to only model what would be in frame for the render. As you can see in the behind-the-scenes images, that meant I just modeled the head, arm, and hamburger for animation. With those aspects rendered on alpha, I brought the EXRs into After Effects for compositing.
Since I wanted to keep the scene light, I drew the background in Adobe Fresco using a mini drawing tablet plugged in via USB. I found a reference for the kitchen backdrop on Pinterest, and was all set. With my backdrop completed, I just needed to animate the UFO.
Using some box modeling techniques I modeled the head and neck of the character before applying a bone structure to neck in order to give the head some natural deformation and range of movement. Then I modeled hand/arm and the plate with the burger. I made sure to parent the plate with the burger to the hand so when the hand moves at the beginning of the animation, everything moves in sync. Then I used used point level animation to deform the mouth from a happy smile into the distressed bemusement. For the eyebrows, I modeled them with a spline, then animated the spline to change the expression of the character.
I was really happy with the end result of this piece. I learned some techinques to blend 2D and 3D animation, I had a fun portfolio piece, and I got great feedback about it on social media.