Steven Harrington, Kingdom of Something
Meraas Dubai
Steven Harrington is arguably the leader of a contemporary Californian psychedelic-pop aesthetic. The opportunity arose for us to work with Kingdom of Something in Amsterdam, along with Steven’s characters, to create an exciting, memorable and eye-catching animation piece for Meraas in Dubai.
Our brief for this project was to bring Steven’s whimsical characters to life in 3D, with Kingdom of Something taking care of storyboarding, lighting, rendering and compositing.
Step 1 - Rigging
To begin with, our rigging team took existing 3D models and optimized them to be rigged. They then added a control rig to the characters and skinned the “joints” of each character accordingly so the controls could be manipulated by our animators.
Here’s what our characters look like before being animated:
Step 2 - Planning/ Reference
Just like with any great work, planning needs to be solid before proceeding to the minutia.
A logical step for animation is to film video reference. This helps our process in many ways including posing, timing and overall idea. It’s the quickest way to iterate on ideas and to learn what works (and what doesn’t) in a particular shot.
We had a layout pass already done (including cameras) by Kingdom of Something so we could visualize where the character would be in each shot before filming reference.
Step 3 - Animation
Once we had our ideas down, it was time for the animation bit.
The process of 3D character animation usually happens in 3 parts: blocking, spline and polish. Each of these stages represents the level of completion of a particular shot. If there are any big idea changes, it’s best for these to take place in blocking before more detail is added in the later stages. Here’s an example of one of our shots at all 3 stages:
Blocking
Spline
Polish
Step 4 - Lighting, Rendering (+ everything else)
Kingdom of Something took care of everything else and made our character animations really shine! Below are some shots showing before and after, from final character animation to final look:
Credits
Client: Steven Harrington & Kingdom Of Something
Lead Producer: Sean MacWilliams
Art Director: Colin Ozawa
Animation Director: Kane Pickerill
Animators: Kane Pickerill, Martyn Smith
Rigging: Tianqing Chen