An Alien
and a Fat Guy
an Animation by Anand Agarawala

for CSC2529 - Character Animation

Inspiration

 I was inspired by the sweet stick figure-esque drawings of explodingdog.com, whose characters I took as inspiration for my 3D animation 'An Alien and a Fat Guy'. Here are some pics from explodingdog that were particularly useful.
 

 

Storyboards

 

 Here's some storyboards I made outlining the story. [Storyboard 1] [Storyboard 2]
The Look

I was going for a cartoony look like explodingdog.com. Here's some stills I rendered out with Mental Ray that aren't all in the final animation. The frames took a relaly long time to render out, up to an 8 hours each, motion blur was particularly problematic. [Cilck here for Stills]

MEL Scripts

 

 I used the nprs script for some of my cartoon shading. Also I used 2 scripts for the stars to randomly instance the star geometry (which I wrote myself) and one to generate copies of star geometry that blink at random intervals. They can be downloaded here: Blink.mel

Post-Production

 

 I used Adobe Premiere to edit everything together. The 3D scan of my head at the beginning was done at the University of Calgary. The sound effects for the intro were ripped from a Star Wars Episode III trailer. The music I used includes Kid A by Radiohead (Album: Kid A) and Heavy Soup by Cornershop (Album: When I Was Born for the 7th Time), both really solid albums. Alien sound effects were found on the internet.

 

Anand Agarawala Homepage.