Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

My classes have all started (Maya 2011 being the most hands-on right now), so my mind is on animation more so than usual these days and I am seeing through the eyes of a student. This morning, via Neatorama, I discovered Meline, which has been the spare-time project of Sebastien Laban and his girlfriend Virginie Goyons for the last two and a half years. It’s very exciting to me what can be done these days on relatively inexpensive consumer equipment, and I think that it won’t be long before software reaches the point where you can create a story and have a computer automatically create the visuals under your direction, without the need for modeling or technical knowledge — just guidance when the computer needs it (just as a director would guide their own team, by vocally describing the scene, the camera tracking, the characters and their actions, and so on). Something like the holodeck in Star Trek I suppose (interactive or not), empowering everyone to create with the capabilities of what today can only be done with millions of dollars and dozens of highly trained individuals. Putting that much creative power into the hands of just one person makes it a very exciting time to be a bard.

If you’re interested in how they created this movie, this making of is fun and shows a lot of how they did it, from early art and writing, the different tools they used for story boarding and then modeling and adding more and more components, rigging and skinning and facial animation, and so on. Whether you’re just curious or wanting to learn yourself, if you enjoyed the movie, I think you’ll enjoy the how-to as well.

After the break I’ve included two more movies done by Sebastien as a student (2003 and 2004). You can really see his growth, especially in the character animation, which in 2004 was still stuck in the uncanny valley, which I think in “Meline” he’s nearly crawled out of.