ANIMATION: Jabberwocky

You can also find this film in higher quality on Vimeo: [link]

This is my first of two films I'm doing this year, and about to be viewed by Robert Zemeckis today, who's coming to USC this evening to view our final motion capture projects.

This film is an experimental facial motion capture film, and basically a bit of every single aspect of animation in a nutshell. The poem is "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll.

I hand painted pages with different inks and charcoal, then shot the pages under the camera. In addition, I shot both regular and colored feathers under the camera, and beads, along with transitions between all the mediums, and even threw in a little paint on glass. I shot all of that on Dragon. Then, I composited the different elements together in After Effects, and after all that, had finished the background.

For the mouth, I motion-captured a face, solved it, and brought it into FaceRobot (a subsection of Softimage XSI), where I character animated overrides to the motion capture. I then changed the materials to render out with flat toon-like shaders, and after all that was done, I brought it back into After Effects, keyed out the different shaders, and replaced all the different elements with fabric textures I had bought in Tokyo and scanned two years ago for another short film of mine.

At the time of my motion capture, I also recorded the actor's narration audio, which I took into REplay Player, which is a software program that shreds existing audio and reconstructs it according to how you manually mix it.

Ultimately, I applied a lot of layer blending and post-production effects and filters. And a super special thank you goes out to to Nick Kenworthy-Browne for composing such a mesmerizing score for it.

Robert Zemeckis (director of Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Beowulf, Polar Express, Christmas Carol, etc) is coming in 1 1/2 hours to review our work. I dedicate this film to him because the idea of him coming to see my work is what motivated me to work so hard on it.

Enjoy : )

P.S. Whether you speak English or not, it's perfectly normal for you to not understand most of the words in this poem. Almost the entire poem features nonsense words, as in, words that were made up/invented just for the sake of imaginative imagery, by Lewis Carroll, who also authored Alice in Wonderland.