Semester Project "Dance of the Hours"

Dance of the Hours!

Title: “Dance of the Hours”
Length: 1 minute 45 seconds
Music: Dance of the Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli

Concept
The main concept for this project is a dance sequence, which will be choreographed in time to Poncheilli’s “Dance of the Hours”. The main characters will be clock roman numerals 1 – 12. Each individual numeral/character will be introduced to the scene and will dance in time to the music, except for poor number 5 (V) who is often left out. The character’s motions and mood will be driven by the beat/tone of the music.

Setting
Since my main goal is to create emotive characters that are full of life, the surrounding environment will be need to be kept minimal. A flat colored ground plane will extend backward in the z-axis and then curve upwards into the y-axis. The world of this animation will be purposefully kept simple.

Color and Style
I envision a bold warm-toned color pallet for this sequence. Reds, oranges and warm golds will be used to mirror the energy of the music. My inspiration for the style and color palate has been influenced by Lou Romano’s concept art for Disney Pixar’s “The Incredibles”.

In shading and lighting this scene, I want to create a clean and modern aesthetic. The numerals will be a sharp-edged font with serifs, and will be a bright color to contrast with the equally bright background.

Motion
Above all, I want these numerals to become characters that are full of life. By using n-Dynamics, I can give each character a lifelike bounce and jiggle. Since this is my first time attempt at character animation, I hope to invest some extra energy is a few of the scenes. In these key scenes I will rig a few of the characters, which will allow me to control their movement more finitely. In my concept sketches, I have come across specific postures that strongly suggest a particular emotion. I anticipate that these poses will be pretty time-expensive, which is why I am limiting this approach to a few keys scenes.

The sequence is a callback to Disney’s film Fantasia, which allowed music to drive the plot and character motions of a scene. The song Dance of the Hours is very energetic, and I hope that I can create character movements equal to the piece’s exciting tone. Since much of the song has heavy downbeats, my characters will not only need to dance but to forcefully convey they can keep in time with the beat. This will set a nice contrast for character V, which spends the entire sequence dancing to his own silly line of music, which ultimately, lands all 12 of the numerals spinning dynamically in the frame of a clock.

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April Update:

Its time to update with a few final scene renders! The images are from different scenes in the sequence. I am please that these renders are looking very close to my original concept art. Although some of the scenes do not have the spot lights with Fog Effect, I really like the effect this has and would like to make it consistant throughout the entire animation. I think the lighting could even be pushed further (lights turning on and off in time with the music). This would increase the intensity and excitment of the music.

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One more rendered final image!