ANIMATED ANIMALS
Director Craig Wilkinson tells Kerrie Hughes how a Mixamo and Maya pipeline provided the perfect solution for animation, Beware Strangers Bearing Gifts
Believe it or not, making good money choices isn’t all about how much you should spend on your next tablet or 3D software package. In fact, it’s such an important subject that The UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association (UKSIF) runs an annual campaign, Good Money Week, to raise awareness of sustainable, responsible and ethical finance.
“In order to highlight the event this year, the team at UKSIF contacted creative studio Taylor Mckenzie to create a promotional video. It was then that the task of writing, directing and animating a video to promote ‘Finance for a Better Future’ fell at the feet of Taylor Mckenzie director Craig Wilkinson. And the result culminated in ‘Beware Strangers Bearing Gifts’, a beautiful allegorical tale that follows a young couple as they embark on a journey to undo the perils brought on by some hasty financial decisions.
First things first
Inspired by the work of illustrator Emily Carew Woodard, whose work is reminiscent of Arthur Rackham, Craig quickly decided on the film’s unique, stylised look. “I love Emily’s work,” he says. “Her illustration style was the main inspiration for the film. There’s a spooky, otherworldliness to it which we thought would resonate with the target audience; millennials embarking on their first financial journey.”
next came the main challenge; creating a coherent, (almost) four-minute film in just six weeks and on a very tight budget. But after considering his toolset, Craig came up with a highly time-efficient and cost-effective pipeline to get the job done. “We needed to have a solution that facilitated delivering the message in the most convincing way possible, quickly,” he explains. “Fuse has these great characterbuilding tools, maybe not for everything,
There’s a spooky, otherworldliness To IT which we Thought would resonate with The Target audience Craig Wilkinson, director, Taylor Mckenzie
but if you have a deadline, and you know what you want, you can certainly get a long way. It was fortunate that the clothing required very little customisation to fit with Emily’s style too.”
Using the bodies they had created in Fuse, Craig and the team mixed them with models of animal heads from digital media marketplace Turbosquid before importing the characters into Mixamo for rigging. “The animated rigs on Mixamo are really nice,” Craig comments. “And, luckily, what was available suited our needs perfectly. The integration with Fuse is pretty seamless too.”
time-saving tools
Refining their workflow as they went along, the team worked on creating an effective process to finish the project on schedule. “We built a master model in Maya for each character using the Fuse model, augmented with the Turbosquid animal head, which we constrained to the Mixamo rig using Maya constraints,” says Craig. “We were able to then source and import the required animation from Mixamo as an .fbx file and swap it out in the Maya master rig to give us the desired animated character. The model with animation was then imported to the relevant scene for lighting.”
Throughout the project, one tool proved useful. “We used the new Time Editor in Maya 2017 to sequence the animated clips where necessary,” says Craig. “It was a great help where the animation clips from Mixamo weren’t the right length or speed. Retiming clips, plus adding holds and cycles quickly was really useful.”