E.T. 40th Anniversary AnimationI was approached with a mystery project concerning a children’s book by the great team over at Ted Perez + Associates. They had seen our past work with the Edmonton Oilers and decided that we would be the perfect partners to bring this mystery project to life. As the kickoff got closer, I was brought into the loop and learned that the project was to help promote the 40th anniversary of E.T. by animating the beautiful illustrated children’s novel - originally illustrated by Kim Smith.
This was a very interesting project for me to be on as I am used to taking ideas from the ideation and writing stage all the way through completion. However, for this project, the story and the artwork had already been completed and I would be working off the finished book illustrated by Kim Smith. This took a lot of weight off of the early stages in the process, but I had plenty of challenges along the way. The first challenge was taking all of the two dimensional, flat artwork and turning it into 3D, animation ready assets. This involved a lot of repainting and recreating assets, a custom and automated pipeline to take photoshop files and build meshes, assign uvs, and parent the objects together automatically. This was a fun technical challenge and allowed me the freedom to focus more on the animation rather than spending all of my time processing and prepping the files. On top of that, this was a long animation at six minutes and all of the characters have limited ranges of motion. The biggest challenge for me throughout this piece was how to keep interest through movement of the camera, layering of animations, and timing the action in all the scenes. The team at Ted Perez + Associates was a dream to work with an helped to make this such a rewarding and enjoyable project. You can see some behind the scenes and a larger breakdown of the project on the website of Ambient Press here.
