Case Study 01 - "The Boy Who Learned to Fly"

Case Study 01: "The Boy Who Learned to Fly"

This is a short animation (7 minutes) based around Usain Bolt. This animation was made my Gatorade working with Moonbot Studios. A link to the short animation can be found below:

"The Boy Who Learned to Fly" - Moonbot Studios

https://vimeo.com/176787091

"The Boy Who Learned to Fly": The Making of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1VCyM9abHA

This Short at times might not look it but it is indeed a 3D animation made to look 2D with the use of flat colours. My case study though of course is going to revolve around the animation, more precisely, the character performance. 

I want to brush over the animation (disregarding the character performance for now), because the character of Usian Bolt (child) is stylized in his body proportions, it allows for more exaggeration with his animations. It allows the animations to have more bounce in my opinion. It seems to come naturally to the character. His long slender legs allow him to look believable while running at a fast pace. I have seen some animations with the similar style of legs where there is no change in thickness and they come across as more eerie than anything else, one of these examples though is Jack Skeleton, but he is animated in stop motion and this helps to create that eerie feeling in his movements. I suppose this shows how characters can be somewhat styled in the same fashion but be animated in completely different ways. There are three versions of Usain Bolt though in this animation, boy, teenager and man. As a teenager and man his legs have more definition but you can still see how they have captured his long legs in these later stages of his rig.

His slender legs as a child are probably to do with how children don't really have developed muscles at that age but compared to the other children in the short, Usains' legs appear longer.

Now onto the performance, when watching some bits in this later on in the short I really did feel like I was watching Usain Bolt. I had just assumed that the animators used reference footage of Usain Bolt himself but in the credits this is shown:

You can see one of the animators (as it appears) being recorded for some reference footage. This really puts into perspective for me how important and key acting is for an animator. The fact that this animator was able to mimic Usain Bolt himself and then animate the character using himself as reference is quite an eye opener. So he has basically not used Usain Bolt as direct reference for his animation but has opted to use him as reference for his own reference footage. You can also see some of the springiness that Usain Bolt has in the animations for teenage Usain Bolt as well which shows how the animators have tried to captures his character in all the ages.

One other very important factor in this animation is how his running technique progresses and improves throughout the whole short. There is very little technique as a child and as a teenager he is starting to show some better technique but still appears to be developing, it's only as a man that we see him running like a proper sprinter.

My conclusion for this animation is that there is a very strong character performance that also develops throughout the story to change with the characters life as he ages. We are seeing a character mature on the screen and his personality and body movements develop along side.

GIF time

This particular moment is just spell bounding in my opinion.  I just have to GIF this. Essentially, the way the character defies gravity for just a split second has amazing effect on the movement. This is the effect of timing in an action. it is exaggerated in the sense of timing and yet, it seems to fit in the action so well. It does not appear out of place.