''Playing with the Audience's emotion is one of the most interesting things'' - Edwin Shaap
Little Freak is a beautiful, brilliant and highly emotional animation short by Edwin Shaap. Done in Maya, this CG animation is beautifully digitally rendered, the greyscale enhancing the emotion in creating such a bleak and austere atmosphere. He has created such intense realism, from the looks down to the perfect face movements. The music appropriately heightens to intensify the little boy's anger, yet again conjuring these emotions inside of you. The remnants of light sparkle on his eyes and tears, his tears slide down his face with a slight white glisten as if they have magical properties, this accentuates them and makes his emotion more evident. The voice fits perfectly, it has a particular nasal quality which suits with the fact he has a large nose.
You feel his pain, his emotion, you want to help him.
Intense lighting effects are used brilliantly, in the trailer the most prominent light source is the candle in his birthday cake, the birthday cake which offers him a wish, the chance for some light to come in his life... for which is says "more wood" and the light is blown out, plunging the setting and everything into darkness, and ending the animation.
I also watched the making of video, which was brilliant to see. Shaap used loads of reference videos which I found most interesting, to get key poses and facial expressions. In order to achieve the realistic face movements he used motion capture on the facial features. It was brilliant to see it come together from initial storyboards, to research and development, to finally 3D sculpting and digitally rendering. I also found it interesting how he used green to intensify the black and white.
No comments:
Post a Comment