- Director
- Daniel Kleinman
- Creative Agency
- VCCP
- Production Company
- Rattling Stick
For this talking dog we wanted to go the full CG route as opposed to the old method of feeding a dog peanut butter and video editing the poor animal trying to get its mouth clean, or simply doing a mouth replacement. To start with my colleague and I took a trip to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and took many of photos for modelling reference and textures as well as video for animation reference. I then did:
Lighting
A system to convert images of hair to individual hair colour (without this a single hair from a photo results in a streak of hairs all with the same colour)
Helped develop our grooming workflow
Dynamics (ear, jowl and tongue movement, flesh jiggle, paw compression)
As part of the pitch to win the job my colleague and I put together the test below in a little over two weeks. It came a long way from here though it's satisfying to see the beagle in it's early stages. Along with the above I did the rigging and animation, though I'm no rigger or animator (we didn't have anyone else!).