This was a short animation project submitted for a Studio Projects class in the 3D Animation & Visual Effects department at the School of Visual Arts. I had the wonderful opportunity to work on it alongside my talented classmates and friends: Jade Yoon, Emily Park, James Karr, and Violeta Maffei.

I was primarily responsible for character / prop rigging, water simulation / shading, layout, rendering, compositing, and editing. The rigging was done using a combination of Advanced Skeleton and Python scripting for additional joints. I was also in charge of the storyboards and initial idea of Hook’d, which was further developed by our team throughout the pre-production process. I modeled the fish monster based off Jade Yoon’s concept art, and used Houdini to create a tool that procedurally generates simple rocks that were later tweaked using a lattice deformer to match the scene layout. I also took part in modeling some extra background assets and helped with texturing.

Although the entire process was challenging, we were all happy with the final result. We initially had some doubts about the art direction we were pushing towards, however final product ended up looking exactly as we imagined it in the concepting stage. Hook’d shows the awesome work done through the collaboration between a small team of talented artists with different skill sets, which is something I really value seeing in the final animation. We were able to use our individual strengths to our advantage and create something we are all proud of.