I had a lot of fun with this project. I had the idea very early on of a skinny character who is thin like noodle, kind of inspired by the Hi Stranger character, and that he goes on a journey to become buff and fit. His backstory is that he is tired of looking thin like a noodle and he wants to change, therefore he hits the gym.
The animation process was quite tricky to navigate at first. Because there were so many different ways to rig the character (puppet pins, plugins, null objects, etc.), I was honestly very lost and could not decide on which way to go about rigging noodle man. Eventually though, I settled on sticking to the fundamentals I knew. I went with the most basic and probably not most efficient way which involved exporting every body part that I wanted to animate as a separate Illustrator layer and to parent them using the Pick Whip tool in After Effects. That way, when I move the upper part of noodle man’s arm, his lower arm and hands and whatever object he is holding would move with. This work for a simple animation like mine but for more complicated scenes I probably need a better system because I don’t know if After Effects allows you to un-parent or re-parent the parts. But like I said before, there are many ways to rig characters and I think I’ve only just scratched the surface.
Bring noodle man into Aero took some trial and error as it kept giving me an error about not being able to import asset. However, after reducing the size of the zip file I was finally able to bring noodle man into Aero. From there, I gave a very simple tap interaction to make the animation play. At this point, I had not decided how I want to present this project yet. And some feedback from people seeing the animation, I thought it would be interesting to place him in different scenes and have people “react” to him as the animation plays. I wanted to make a motivational short film about noodle man’s journey from skinny to fit. Later I added in another interaction: scale up when I tap him to further emphasize his transformation.
After gathering all the footage with the support of wonderful NYU students, it was time to put it all together. I really wanted to have fun with this project and the nature of the character I created lends to not taking himself too seriously. Therefore, I included many meme-like editing techniques in the video and put a very energetic soundtrack in the background. However, I did still want to convey a very clear narrative here and that is to go after what you want in life. Hopefully my short film can inspire everyone to go out and achieve whatever goals they have.
