Concept: To build a choreographic story in Motionbuilder’s story mode from a seed of an idea I began when an elf character, Jolleen, created a glowing ball in her hands.

Methodology: I downloaded the models (Jolleen and Doozy) from Mixamo, 0’ed out portions of the skeletons, characterized, and assigned control rigs to them, cleaned up the movement with animation layers, and Fcurves. Imported clips to assemble in story mode using ghosting, matching, blending, and various other techniques.

Discoveries and Outcome: Beginning the process was difficult because it requires an artistic mind that sees a vision before you create it. When I’m beginning in the studio with movement, I don’t have a complete plan with a story boarded vision prior to creating the choreography. I begin by providing inspiration through concepts and words and then bodies can begin to build things without a fleshed out plan. When beginning this project, like with Luna the Crazy Loon, it seems better to have a goal or at least a starting point before you begin. I finally decided to build from one of our technical studies, which was the tall green elf, Jolleen. In our previous project we just had to download a model and assign her some data, characterize the skeleton and clean it up. At the very end of this study, I changed her arms to hold a glowing orb. Continuing this story, I decided to experiment with the Previs Movement available and download things as needed from Mixamo to build the relationship and let it evolve as I learned more about how to create this way. We were lucky to have data from a mysterious Laura (a previous dance student at OSU that had recorded in the Motion Capture Studio for another project). Laura’s beautiful dance improvisations gave me interesting sequences to edit, reorient, move, etc. I really enjoyed putting the movement and story together and seeing where it ended. Previs has very basic movements and fight choreography and once you know what things look like it is easier to imagine what you can create. I really enjoyed also animating the camera angles, setting it to music, and cleaning up the edits similar to video editing.

Credits:
Music in the clip is by Pictures of the Floating World. This project used motion data from ACCAD’s database, Mixamo, and Motionbuilder PrevisMoves. Created for Motion Capture Production and Experimentation taught by Vita Berezina-Blackburn.