A BIRD'S EYE VIEW
SUMMARY
This video was started and lead by one of my fellow instructional developers as a way to re-brand a popular video within the company that teaches how insurance works. Because the original video used pigs on a farm, she wanted to stick with the animal based theme and came up with the idea of using birds in conjunction with the phrase "a bird's eye view", symbolizing the videos intent of looking at insurance from another perspective.
After she created the storyboard, backgrounds and main human characters in Vyond, she realized that Vyond didn't really have the means to provide the bird protagonists. Because of this, she sought my help due to my artistic background in custom character animation. For the sake of time, I suggested using Adobe Character Animator instead of hand-drawn animation due to its motion capture.
However, I had never used Character Animator up until this point so I quickly learned the software in order to animate the birds. Unfortunately, due to the proprietary nature of the video, I'm not permitted to include the final product on my website. But I'm willing to answer any additional questions in regards to it.
TOOLS
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Vyond
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Adobe Character Animator
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Adobe Illustrator
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Adobe After Effects
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Adobe Audition
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Adobe Premiere
CHARACTER DESIGNS
The video consisted of three main bird protagonists and a secondary squirrel character. For the birds, they were designed in Illustrator based on three species of native based birds selected by my fellow developer. They also had to be layered in accordance with Character Animator's rigging protocols. The squirrel doesn't speak but he had the most layers due to his movements such as running and bending down to grab things.
CHARACTER RIGGING
After the designs were done, I imported all of the characters into Character Animator and began the rigging process. The face has the most complexity, where you have to match each feature all the way down to the pupils and mouth syllables/consonants.
MOTION CAPTURE
After the facial rigging was complete, I then animated each character's facial, head and body movements in accordance to the pre-recorded voiceovers provided by my fellow co-workers. I assigned certain angles to specific letters on the keyboard and once all of the animations were completed, I exported each scene as a transparent file to include over the final edit.
VIDEO EDIT
I brought the character animations into Premiere and overlayed them on the original Vyond video scenes provided by my fellow developer. Once exported and approved by our subject matter experts, the video was used as onboarding material.
