School of Motion Holiday Card 2020
Collaboration with School of Motion
Design and Animation: Sarah Talbot
December 2020
This year, the School of Motion team offered it’s alumni the prompt, “How did you get through 2020?,” to kick-off their annual holiday card. Over 120 artists of all levels each contributed a 3 seconds animated shot in response to this prompt, which was then edited together and released by School of Motion. I found that the result to be simultaneously a highly personal, yet extremely universal final piece.
While 2020 urged on many major changes in my life, I found the first, smallest change I made had the most impact on my mental health throughout the year: taking a short walk in my neighborhood twice a day. Working from home in my own “bubble” left me feeling stuck both inside my room and my head. Scheduling these walks in lieu of a commute gave me the space to separate “work time” from “home time,” and allowed me to hold on to the small joy of watching my neighborhood change with the seasons.
Designs and Sketches
My home in a looping animated background
Character Precomps
In order to achieve the outfit morph without overcomplicating the main rig, I built in shape animations inside precompositions for each major body element. Since the outfits animate independently of the main skeleton, I was able to keep the morphs simple and consistent. I needed to make special considerations for some clothing animations that would be contingent on the main walk cycle pose. For example, the bending of the jacket with the knee could not be rigged with the main skeleton, and so had to be counter-animated inside the torso precomp. The tradeoff of this flexibility for more direct transitions between poses still allowed me to me more efficient with animating this rig.
