A Plush Betrayal

The major task we were assigned within the advanced character animation and production rendering class in the 5th semester was to create a short 20 second animation of an anthropomorphic character from scratch. This includes the entire animation pipeline process from concept design, modelling, rigging, and all the way to animation and rendering. The theme given to our class this year to base our designs off of is “endangered animals”. My character is an endangered humphead wrasse named Lenny.

The prompt for the 20 second animation is to have the character interact with an object or another character, following a given dialogue. The audio I chose was an excerpt taken from the 2020 film Love and Monsters, where Joel Dawson, the main protagonist, expresses his sheer disappointment in a friend that betrayed him. As a challenge to myself, I chose to undertake this especially expressive audio choice and base my character and environment designs based off of it.

Stylistically, I intended my animation project to have a simple cartoonish look and feel. Along with the dialogue choice, I aimed for my project to have a comedic end result. The dialogue scenario is as follows: the character blames his plush toy for being in an open area where the guards found it, resulting in a near-death situation.

The plot follows Lenny, who is looking around nervously and hiding under his large hat from guards on the hunt for him. He bumps into a police box and stops. When these guards finally pass, it is only then that he lifts his hat up and heaves a sigh of relief. Immediately, his demeanor changes from momentary calm to that of an enraged mother telling her child off. He exclaims in shrill “you!” and jabs other words in fury at his plush who is off camera, then wobbles up, dusts himself off, and trots in his hunched frame all the way to his plush, who is stuck on a coral attached to this police box. Lenny then rattles off his anger, disappointment, and betrayal towards the plush. He points to the police box. He asks why the plush has done what he did, which was merely get stuck in a coral (due to the carelessness of its own owner misplacing it). Lenny then retrieves Cedar the plush and leaves the scene together with him.

I came up with this plot as I thought it hilarious to firstly make such a conflicted and avoidable plot, and secondly put a fun twist on the dialogue. Moreover, the choice to have Lenny pick up his plush by a police box was my method of escalating the already tense atmosphere of the situation tenfold, and to further my comedic intentions.

Character and props sculpted and retopologized in ZBrush. Textured in Substance Painted. Rigged and animated in Autodesk Maya. Rendered using Pixar's Renderman.
13/12/2021