Talking Dog: Knights Sketch.

The BBC have sent comedy sketch scripts to several animation courses across the country asking students to produce a professional animation to suit the script. Comedy sketches are all about timing, it’s about mixing the mundane with the fantastic. If the animation is too busy or the timing is wrong the comedy could be lost completely.
Out of all the sketches my favorite ones included the Strat-equette sketch, a sketch based around health and safety in a Middle Eastern torture facility. The casual approach to torture and political incorrectness of the sketch is what I liked about it. Another one of the sketches I enjoyed reading was the jordi fly. I imagined a really British humor style sketch that mirrored the ridiculous comedic style of the Mighty Boosh. The sketch I chose was the Three Knights sketch. The reason I chose this was because it included no real dialogue just sounds and grunts. It seemed the best sketch to produce because the comedy would be in the animation not the dialogue. In the sketch the knights fight each other. The prospect of animating a fight sequence that included some degree of comedy is what attracted me to work on this project.
The team I’m working with consists of six members all split into different areas of production. The Pre-production team responsibilities includes deciding on a color palette to work with through out the whole production, character design for all three knights armor, knights bodies and squires, background design, storyboard, animatic, and prop design. The producer and art-director decide on the final designs and hand them over to the production team. The Production is a mixture of 2-D backgrounds and C.G.I animation and characters. The production team is responsible for building all the characters and props in Maya, Rigging the characters and Animating the sketch. The models need to be textured the whole team will have to work together to set the UV in Maya and a 2D designer will work on the textures. Post-production includes comping the two styles of animation together and editing the sequence to have a comedic effect. The Sound will be animated to in production but will need to be carefully edited and synched in post-production. I have assumed the role of C.G.I animator and modeler, my responsibilities are to model, rig and animate the knights squire characters, model props such as amour and swords. I have also taken the role of assistant producer helping to keep all the work files organized and have input during production meetings.
This will probably be the most challenging brief I have worked on complete. The project will force me to learn more and improve my modeling and animation skills in Maya.