I am looking for an artist or artists to model, rig, animate, light and render a talking white mouse in a running wheel.
Animation
There will be three short animations.
- Mouse running fast, wheel spinning. Only a few mouse strides are needed. The animation should be designed to loop: the mouse should end in the same pose in which he started, so that the video can be run in a continuous loop. A little variation in the gait would be good, but not so much that we obviously perceive the repetition of the loop. No more than 8 seconds.
- Mouse running, slows down a little and turns head to camera, and talks. The mouth does not necessarily need to be rigged, speech can be animated with a movement of the nose. If you want to try rigging the mouth be my guest. He will say something short and then go back to running. We need a few variations of this one to match a few different phrases: “drink your tea”, “very funny” and “give it a rest”. Audio will be provided. The start and end pose should match that of animation 1 so that they can be spliced together seamlessly on the fly.
- Mouse running, but the wheel is stopped, so the mouse runs loop-the-loops around the inside of the wheel. Again, this animation should be designed to loop, and the starting and ending pose should match that of animation 1. No more than 8 seconds.
I’m looking for a nearish-to-‘real life’ model, rather than a caricature. It’s humourous, but the character has to believe in himself. Inspiration is the Hitchhiker’s Guide mice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdLHLW1YhlA&t=0m26s (Yes, I know those are real mice).
The model does not need to be super highly detailed as the output render is fairly low resolution. But the mouse should move realistically. If there is an open-source mouse model out there that you want to use, then that is fine, as long as we have the rights to use it, or if there is one that you want to pay for, then please include that in your quote.
The running wheel should be a bit too small for the size of the mouse. It should have no visible means of support, but rather be ‘floating’ screen centre. I attach a rough sketch to give an impression.
Lighting is to be indoor, dark room. Low ambient light, spot light in white from the sides.
The target is the web. This animation is an easter egg in a web site. Splicing between the different animations will depend on what the user does with the mouse. We’ll discuss more and give you more context when you start.
Deliverables
The output size is low resolution, 600 x 400, and we need the animation to be rendered onto a transparent background. This may mean rendering still frames. If it is possible to render video with transparency then that would be better.
We also require the .blend file. We may make use the model again in the future, or re-render the animation.
Deadline
There is no deadline.
Submissions
Please tell us:
- A link to a portfolio
- Your quote
- An idea of how long you think it will take
You can PM me with these things.
For portfolio work, ideally we’d like to see some work of an animal walking or running, in any style.
Priority will be given to good quality work, and a decision will be taken by 18th April.
Thanks for reading!
