BREAKDOWN

HAMSA, a thesis film directed by Daniela Dwek, Chrisy Baek, and Maya Mendonca

Previs & Layout, Final Camera, Staging, Character Animation, Mo-cap

Seq 1: For this sequence in my thesis, the goal was to replicate a moment of chaos through the perspective of a child. I made sure to look at a lot of camera reference from chaotic scenes. Some of my inspiration came from Saving Private Ryan, Game of Thrones, World War Z, Slumdog Millionaire, and Children of Men. For crowd, I used the mixamo rigs as placeholders for where Daniela’s crowd rigs would go. Using downloaded animations from Mixamo, I put them in the time editor from Maya to combine and merge animations such as walking and stopping. Then, I baked the animation. I attached a locator to the joints with the animation and placed each crowd person where I planned. Using the MoCap Matcher from Advanced Skeleton, I matched animation from the proxy rig’s joints onto Daniela’s crowd rig. Lastly, I went into the graph editor and cleaned up some of the animation.

Seq 2: In Hamsa, Ora (the mother, “Ima”) finds Tikvah (daughter) in the tunnel. I wanted to reveal her presence in a way that becomes shocking after the intimate moment of Tikvah and Nour (lady in the hijab) hugging. In addition, I wanted to show a change in focus from Nour onto Ora which is why I made the camera go from behind Nour to empasize her being outkasted again while also focusing on the intimacy of Ora and Tikvah’s hug. The first and second to last shot of this sequence are reversals to show Tikvah’s change of focus.