Foiled Case Study

CGI & Animation: The Operators

Discipline: CGI, Animation and Compositing

Brief:

The Operators wanted to create an innovative piece of work. Taking a classic phrase of ‘What came first the chicken or the egg?’. We then came up with a fun and quirky way of portraying the story at the same time showing off skill set and ability.

Our Role:

Our role came down to creating the full production piece with a dedicated team working. From the initial creative idea through to the development of the sound engineering to bring the project to life.

Production / Solution:

Everything starts with an initial idea. The Operators worked with the life time question ‘What came first the chicken or the egg?’. Fully story boarding the project allowed us to concept the projects direction and ascertain the flow of the animation before any time consuming work was undertaken.

As this was underway, our in-house CGI artists started research on the form of the chicken, taking different researched frames from head shape, beak, feet and feather formation to construct our own chicken. As the final tweaks to the story board were made the chicken was underway it’s birth and creation within cgi. As the chicken was modelled, our in-house artists had to take into account the construct of the mesh which was going to play the vital role within the deformation from chicken to egg.

Once the chicken had been fully modelled it was taken into Z-Brush where the texture and detailing was developed. The next stage was to break down all the hard work of the chicken creation into a working pipeline using blend shapes. This consisted of developing around 30 different hybrid chicken/egg models which used the specially designed mesh construct. Each one slowly changing from the chicken through to the egg.

Moving into the final stages the chicken was fully rigged and handed over to the animators. They worked closely with our creative leads, making sure the storyboard was followed with natural movement given to the chicken and from ego or basis from chicken to egg was smooth and precise. Finally the image was brought together with the final composition and sound engineering that brought life to the piece.

Result:

The piece is a great example of a full production piece, using a multitude of different skill sets to produce an innovative piece of dynamic cgi animation.

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Pre-Production / Reference Material

Pre-Production / UV Textures

Production / Clay Modelling

Post-Production / Final Renders