Slick 3D animation busts some super-smooth dance moves

Dvein turned out this experimental video interpretation of The Dismemberment Plan's hit song Daddy Was a Real Good Dancer for Rdio. "The brief was really open, like a blank canvas. We set up several crazy ideas and the client selected two of them," explains Teo Guillem, director and designer at Dvein, a collaborative studio that provides director and art direction for live action and animation.

The colourful animation features a cool-looking character playing a game, interacting directly with the camera; the character can operate the camera with his dance and movement.

"The whole project was developed in five weeks," says Guillem. "Once we had the character modelled and rigged, the animation took around three weeks to be completed. The lighting and render was done in parallel. It was a great teamwork, in which we collected talented people that shared our passion regarding animation." Blow Studio also came onboard to create the lighting, and render and compositing, while Víctor Vinyals and Hugo García from Symbiosis worked on the character rigging and animation.

"I think the biggest challenge was to make the character and the environment come alive," Guillem comments. "We needed to get an almost hyper-realistic render and a very smooth and natural movement." To accomplish this, the team avoided cartoon textures and instead aimed for a style closer to realistic details, especially for the sky. But the real effect of the film comes from the movement.

"We filmed ourselves dancing to get real references of body movements and then we shared it with the animator, in order to get as close as possible to a natural movement," explains Guillem. He reveals that the same approach was taken with the camera movement, "we made lots of filming tests looking for natural movements to apply to 3D".

This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 179.