Jumpstart World Kindergarten Campfire Video

This was a video I worked on for Jumpstart World Kindergarten. It was part of a series of "Campfire Song" videos that were intended to be used as marketing vids to be played in stores. This idea got canned and instead the videos were just placed in hidden areas within the game. Kids who care to look may eventually find them as kind of "easter eggs".

Anyways, First thing I did for this particular video was I wrote an expression to randomize the brightness of the light that represented the fire. This gave the effect of flickering fire. Yay!

The modeling of the backgrounds were done by the environment team here. Character Models were done by Tim Jones. He also did most of the storyboarding and setting up the camera work for these videos. Seth Reek designed all the characters and animated CJ (Frog) and Pierre (Panda).

My job during production was to animate the Dog (Frankie) and the elephant (Elenor). Now just a little note on how difficult it is to animate here. First off, all the campfire videos were animated at 15 frames per second which makes it difficult to get any of the really nice subtle motions or and subtleties in the facial animations that you can get at 30 fps or even 60 fps. Just to put this in perspective for some of you readers that dont work in the industry, most films and tv programs run at either 24 fps or 29.98 or 30 fps.

Secondly, the rigs for Kindergarten were done by an old school 3D artist and used mostly selection handles and locators for the rig. This is pretty much only slightly different from physically grabbing the bones themselves and animating. Plus it made for very difficult times trying to set key poses. I ended up creating character sets to aid in this process and set up various MEL scripts to do alot of the selecting for me.

Third, we had the deadline of a week to setup, concept, animate, and render these videos with 3 guys working on them and they requested film quality animations. At 15 fps and having 3 days to animate 2-3 minutes of animation (1800-2700 frames) the three of us animators pretty much said "Well, you get what you pay for." Paying not in money but in frame count and time restriction. But we three animators are pretty determined to do the best we can and I think we busted out some pretty great animations considering the constraints.