concept for final animation

For developing the concept I began with the rather simple idea of a landlord coming round to the house of a tenant to retrive the rent with the inital plan of the landlord being animated using a rotoscope of a vulture to put emphasis on greed and the tenant being motion captured. However after a meeting with my project supervisor we agreed the story was fairly boring so i decided to focus on the most insteresting element of it which was the vulture landlord.
  After some more research on vultures i eventually unconvered some myths about their wing's having the ability to eclipse the moon and discovered the amazonian myth of Urubutsin the vulture god who was described as a horder of light and the king of all birds.

The myth of Urubutsin goes that he had all the light in the world and his minions wings blocked out any other light from touching the earth. Two brothers named Kuat and Iae who's tribe was in constant fear of attack from wild beasts due to the darkness decide to steal the light from Urubutsin. They hid themselves in a corpse and when Urubutsin came down to feed Kuat grabbed his leg preventing him from escaping forcing the king of birds to negotiate. He offers half of his light to the brothers in return for his freedom this light became the sun and the moon and it was agreed that day should alter with night. After this Kuat became associated with the sun and Iae the moon.
   This was a much more interesting tale and began to look at ways of adapting it to make it work in a short animation. Eventually it was decided to take it one step further and base it in a different setting, after looking at some south american art and deciding that the style wouldn't work well with my aim I decided to create an after-story based in the renaissance period during the black plauge.


The story i decided on was one where Urubutsin tries to retieve the light that was taken from him by Kuat and Iae by harvesting it from their corpses which were being kept in a temple to solar deities in Italy. Disguising himself as a plauge doctor he enters the town where the temple is and enters the temple. Unknowingly to him another 2 brothers notice the suspicious plauge doctor and follow him to the temple and stop him after noticing the moonlight disappearing.

Rotoscope and keyframed 2

Here is my second attempt at adding keyframed animation on top of rotoscoped footage. The issue i found mainly with doing this as a test was attempting to find a balance between what was allready being shown on screen and what i was adding to it with keyframed animation so i could keep the actors origional performance while implying my own influence to it.
    The issue i've found with the use of this technique in a film scene such as this is that essentially the intention is to try and improve on an established performance created by the actors involved and trying to improve on it. I believe aswell with this test i focused a bit too much on attempting to mimic certain actions of the live actors due to the nature of the test and because of that the overall performance may have suffered for it.

motion capture and keyframed 2

Here is my second attempt at editing motion capture footage but this time I have the kinect rig controling the morpheus rig. The Morpheus rig is a highly customisable rig created by Josh Burton (link below) and will most likely be the rig i will use in future when using motion captured footage.
http://www.joshburton.com/projects/morpheus.asp

 Allthough the capture itself was intenionally bad to begin with i managed to clean up a lot of the more jittery parts of animation and fix some positioning issues. However from doing this test i have identified how to correctly apply the mesh to the rig the next time and also the importance of having a clean as possible inital capture.
    The major issues with using the kinect system for motion capture that i've identidied from this test are crossing limbs, hidden limbs and also planting the entire rig to a set floor plane. However when applied correctly there should be no longer any mesh issues and the main concern at that point would be to improve the animation on the capture

motion capture and keyframed animation first attempt

I attempted to simply record and fix a peice of motion capture footage using the kinect system and animation layers in maya. For the sake of test i simply added some quick rigging to the kinect skeleton in maya and used the animation layers to blend the key-framed and motion captured footage together to remove some of the glitches that appearred in the footage.
It worked well and served its purpose however i now need to focus on attempting to attach the rig i'll be using to the skeleton so that i can quickly apply the animation to a custom rig.

Rotoscope and Keyframed animation first attempt

I have begun the combination tests of adding keyframed animation to both the rotoscope and motion capture footage. I am avoiding the combination of motion capture and rotoscoping given that they are both ways of achiving a similar outcome and with the exception of facial expressions there is no benefit to combining them.
My first attempt at combining techniques was the combination of rotoscope and keyframed animation using a the construct scene from The Matrix. I used rotoscoping to animate the scene then attempted to add to it using keyframed animation however even though the peice was animated and looked decent, through exagerating the movements of the characters I lost sight of the inital point of the scene and the movements werent approriate to the peice.
My next attempt i will be trying to focus more on the emotional performance in the scene rather than the movement within it.