Juicy....

Developed in a few weeks and worked on for over 6 months, 'Juicy' is the first animation video I've done using Maya, and the first one so far, that I'd actually feel quite happy to show people. What is it about - well, if I had to describe it, I would say its about a bunch of half naked women smiling, holding hands and dancing around to a song called 'juicy'. But, that's only if I had to describe it.

If you did watch it however, you'd realise that its more of a cheesy take on the very famous ABC's 'Desperate Housewives - Season 2 Juicy Promo', a promo that I thought was directed very well, with superior production standards and a very well edited, catchy song by Better Than Ezra - Juicy.

Having seen it a few times, I couldn't get the song, or the video out of my head, and decided to create my reel based on the promo. The video and the concept have been inspired by various elements of popular culture - different characters such as Catwoman and Poison Ivy and a number of Spice Girls videos (yes, I'm a fan, shut up). But mainly, its a take on Desperate Housewives and I think shows a range of my skills - in modeling, texturing, rigging, lighting, rendering, animation, compositing, fluid dynamics, realflow dynamics and editing.

I didn't want to create a modeling, or a texturing reel....I wanted to create a video that would, if not anything more, make people smile.

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Download Juicy

You can watch the entire video on Youtube or CGTalk.
For DVD Quality - On Request

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The Production

For creating the video, I first made an animatic using Newtek Lightwave, based on a rough edit of how I wanted different poses and movements for different parts of the soundtrack. The most important aspects for me were the transitions between the women and developing a 'theme' in the way each character is introduced - with shots of the feet, moving up the body and focusing on the hands at the start and end of each character. I also focused a lot on cinematography and composition. Each shot has a specific camera angle for a specific reason and if you look carefully, you'll see that a lot of the poses for the different women are mirror opposites of each other.

Have rigged a female character, and rigged the clothes and hair, I had to focus on the dynamics side of the video. When I had thought of the concept I was initially planning to do a completely different video, but I decide to work on this idea as I knew it would push me towards learning dynamics - something I had never really been interested in before.

Working on this idea meant that I had to not only learn about Paint Effects and Particle Dynamics, but also Maya Fluids and Realflow. This is where I spent the most amounts of time, as I had to learn and understand complex systems (and in one case, another program) and try and create suitable effects for each different scene, at times combining different systems in one scene.

Having completed the video I realise that although I still prefer animation, I have developed a lot of respect for the complexity of these different systems as well as their ability to add to the overall quality of any scene.

In terms of the characters, I wanted the women to be realistic but stylised, the way characters are portrayed in comic books - based on reality, with slightly exaggerated proportions. This meant that I could also take some liberty with the hair and textures, both of which are convincing but more stylised.

My main focus however, was the animation. Completed in about four weeks, I wanted the animation to be smooth and believable. The animation isn't that complex but I wanted to pay special attention to principles such as follow-through and secondary motion, adding subtle movements to make the animation look complete.

Rendering was completed mainly using the software render system in Maya, I did however, use render layers for backgrounds, dynamics and occlusion passes. The Realflow elements were rendered in Mental Ray.

The composition as well as the editing of the soundtrack (slightly different to that used in the promo) were done using After Effects, with some elements edited using Photoshop.

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