Squint Opera brought in the help of Flow Creative to complete several character scenes for Showtown Blackpool's museum. The scenes were to be displayed on screens across the venue with varying novelties from interactive panels, to a long wall display vista.

I got to work on three of the films which accumulated to forty one minutes of character animation. I had approximately a month's worth of time to work on my portion of the production. Due to this I had to get creative with ways of automating the process.

The donkey character could use fairly standard methods of lip sync however the seagull characters were more tricky. I set up a system which had their beaks open and close based on the audio amplitude of their voice overs waveform which worked well for the majority of the dialogue with little tweaks needed in some parts.

I also set up a system that could be applied to every character universally that allowed them to sway side to side and bob up and down, all based on the amplitude and frequency of a sine wave. This worked particularly well on scenes where the characters were dancing as I could set frequency of the sine wave to the BPM of song playing so the characters would dance in time. I also used the same system to automate the flapping of the seagulls wings.

The next big challenge of the production was the ultrawide wall display which was a twenty minute long shot with the characters and hundreds of background elements visible at all times. Squint Opera did a great job of providing me blocking for the characters which kept the shot dynamic and had the characters move around and react to things in their environment appropriately.

I highly recommend checking out Squint Opera's case study for a more detailed write up on the museum.