This 4-minute movie tells a story about an unpopular guy at work:
VIDEO
I hope you enjoy it.
The workflow was like this:
Head and body are separate skeletons, rigged in Spine, for the 3 characters.
A web-based tool I wrote is used to author and programmatically control the facial animation, outputting a png sequence of frames for the head.
Body animations were made in Spine, synced to the audio track. These were exported to png sequences.
Various PNG sequences imported into After Effects and composited there. On this project I learned about Spine's ability to animate multiple skeletons together. I think the tool wasn't designed foremost for authoring scenes like this, but it works quite well. Arguably, I would have been better off to comp everything inside of Spine, but there are a small number of things for my project that I can't accomplish in Spine or just work better inside AE.
I imagine it looks a little crude by pro standards. I'm committed to a kind of South Parkian ideal of building a factory to turn out animation fast. So many of the refinements other people would aim for just aren't important to me.
-Erik
