Autumn
Thieves grew out of an animation exercise our teacher, Alan
Sperling, gave us. We were supposed to show a character walking
up to an object, re- and interacting with it and ending the exercise
so that the whole thing had a little story.
I had the idea of a thief stealing something and being cut up
by the security lasers. With that idea in mind, I started constructing
a story around that specific scene and after a few weeks of long
hours, Autumn Thieves was done.
The
fact that the music is in sync with the animation was a happy
accident. I always listen to music while I animate and during
the making of Autumn Thieves, I was listening to a lot
of jazz. Once I was done with the rough cut I watched it while
the piece “Autumn Leaves” by Miles Davis and Cannonball
Adderly was playing in the background. To my surprise, a few scenes
happened to be in sync. I then started to test it with other jazz
pieces, but “Leaves” had a laid back feeling to it,
which added contrast between the music and the animation. I then
tweaked the animation and re-edited the short in order for it
to precisely match the music.
Taking
hostage of a lot of computers at school helped me to render everything
in about 2 days. Animation and rendering was done in Maya. Since
I focused on animation, I kept the sets and props very simple.
I wanted to avoid a clean computer look, so I used the GI Joe
lighting script by Emmanuel Campin.
The thief and the guards are the models “Hogan” and
“Milt”, which are provided by the school.
I
remember lots of pizza and not enough sleep, but I had a blast
animating the whole thing. Looking at it now, there is a lot of
very stiff animation, but I still like the story and the editing
of it. I might go back to it and update the animation, we'll see...
If
you want to see more of my work, feel free to go to
my animation
page.
