David Seaman Wetlands PSA

https://vimeo.com/141849522

When making this animation, I wanted to focus on more of a narrative approach with a single voice over call to action at the very end to make it have more impact. Making it somewhat abstract until the very end was intentional, as I think the sudden realization of what the narrative focus was at the very end, again, adds impact to the call to action. For this project I focused on creating IK character rigs to make movement more fluid and consistent. As I have never made rigs before, there were some issues with limbs slightly detaching from their character, or odd deformations due to the IK chains. However, I constantly fiddled with the individual bones and controllers until I got it to the state it is currently, which I think is not too offensive in terms of deformation. For sound, I used free sounds from various websites and did some of my own foley work for a couple selected parts. In addition, the garbled voices of the stickmen is obviously my own work, ran through several filters to try and make it sound humanoid, but still abstract. The reason I went with the strange but familiar feel of the whole project was admittedly an attempt to try and bypass the uncanny valley and go further into cartoon world. The beaver lacks eyes due to him looking extremely strange when wearing them when he was placed alongside the other characters. Overall, this project was a fun way to try and focus on my character driven narration, rather than visual or textual information solely based on text/fact.