A Lucky Find

A short comedic film exploring the magic of music and memories. This was a client based project for Pie & Vinyl, a vinyl shop local to Portsmouth. It was created to celebrate Record Store Day!

I mostly used Autodesk Maya and Adobe After Effects and created a 3D/2D animation blend.

Behind the scenes

Below I have shared an insight into the process for this project. From concept art pieces, character designs, 3D tests and progress shots, feel free to check them out.

I wanted the Granny's character to have a clear personality, to feel fun, bright and charismatic. I played with shapes and colours and decided to go for rounder shapes and saturated colours. A great inspiration was Robert Valley and his graphic, shape heavy character designs.

The Granny's rockstar alter ego was heavily inspired by great rock legends like KISS. David Bowie, The Sex Pistols, Iron Maiden and Queen.

This other self, is meant to represent the memories she has connected to the genre.

I designed the customer character on the left to represent more indie rock music.

The rock concert venue was inspired by many of David Bowie's own venues, I love how he used to choose a strong theme and create aesthetics around it. The other background showcases the outside of Pie and Vinyl, I wanted it to have a textural feel and capture its charm.

These are initial blockouts of the 3D and the 2D sequences. The aim was to focus on strong posing and timing as it would then be cleaned up in the next animation pass.

I used primitive modelling and then retopologized the Granny's character in Autodesk Maya. Then UV unwrapped her and textured her in Substance Painter. I wanted her design to still feel stylised and the textures to be a blend between hand painted and realistic, once more mixing two worlds.

The shop was modelled in Autodesk Maya and textured with Adobe Photoshop. I wanted the shop to be as similar as the real shop as possible so I made sure to take tons of reference pictures and videos...as well as eating some pies along the way!