Warda
A nominee at the Huntington Beach Cultural Film Festival with five prestigious film festival selections
Warda's uneventful and quiet life turns around instantly after she accidently gets shipped, with a bunch of boxes, to the city. The unexpected journey gives Warda the sense of freedom and power that have been lacking in her life since the day she was wheel bound.
Character Design
Warda is a young lady from one of the rural villages in Egypt. I tried to show the culture through Warda's clothing, head scarf, and accessories such as her iconic dangling earrings. Below is a mood board for the character.
Warda's Concept Art
Warda's Technical Drawings
Character Design of The Little Boy
The little boy's character is inspired from the culture within downtown Cairo. His favorite hobby is flying kites from his house's rooftop. Below is the character's mood board and concept art. This character was animated in 2D, so it didn't require technical drawings.
3D Modeling & Texturing
Storyboard & Animatic
Background Art
The environment was a very crucial part of the film. I wanted to exaggerate Warda's experience as she is transferred to one city to another, and using Egypt's already diverse locations as inspiration, I was able to make the backgrounds an active element in portraying this contrast. Below is the initial mood board for the film's background visuals.
The background was rendered 2D in Adobe photoshop in a stylized way that compliments the 3D design of the character. Below are final BG frames from the film.
Before rendering the backgrounds, I went on field research to the flower exhibit to take pictures of the different flowers, landscapes, and take in the ambience that would help me create the environment for the flower exhibit in the film.
On the left is the rendered background and on the right is the image inspiration taken at flower exhibit. This background was not used in the final film due to some storyboard changes.
3D Animation & Rigging
I used the basic 3Ds Max human biped and adjusted the envelopes as needed. For the facial expressions, I used the Morpher modifier and hooked about 30-40 different expressions which gave me decent gradient of expressions to work with. Below are some of the expressions hooked onto the modifier.
Below are snippets from the animation made in 3Ds Max. Since the character would be placed in a 2D environment, I had to make sure camera angles enabled smooth compositing.
Compositing
Compositing was done on After Effects combining the 3D character with the 2D backgrounds. VFX and other necessary 2D animation such as the kite movement or the run cycle of the little boy was also done.
Flying kite using puppet animation.
Little boy running after his kite using puppet animation.
