J’sommes La Dgaîngue
This was an incredible project to be a part of! Working alongside L’Office du Jèrriais and Kit Ashton I designed and animated the virtual band “La Dgaîngue“.
La Dgaîngue were the brain child of Kit, a band who sing in both English as well as Jèrriais, the ancient language of Jersey, Channel Islands. Not very many people understand or speak Jèrriais these days, so the hope was to help preserve the language by helping people to enjoy it and maybe even learn it.
The characters were designed in illustrator before being realised in 3D in Blender. Although the plan was not always for this to be a 3D animation, the further into production we got, the more sense it made to me to create the performance area as a 3D space. This allowed me to do the basic blocking and then treat the camera as if we were shooting a live performance, finding the angles and shots organically.
This project was also a fantastic excuse for me to trial a single video motion capture pipeline, leveraging Autodesk Flow Studio. With most projects, I would usually collect motion reference footage to help me to create believable animation. Being able to turn that reference footage into usable mocap data not only saved me time, reducing the need for initial animation blocking, but was also an amazing way to keep some of the nuances of the performers in their characters performances.
As a man who has little musical talent themselves, I was incredibly grateful to be able to collaborate with some very talented performers and musicians to help me create a library of mocap footage, allowing me to setup full virtual performances that I could retarget to my character rigs, allowing me for a huge amount of freedom in capturing the performance “as live”.
Alot of people to thank for the collaboration on this one, but a huge thanks to:
Laura Cooper – Dancer – For coreographing and capturing Fai, the lead singers, movements.
Matt McManus – Musician – For providing motion capture for both the drummer and bass player.
Christian Foley – Musician, writer and educator – For Not only writing and performing the Black dog segments but also for providing motion capture for that character as well.
I will be updating this post with some behind the scenes, but for now you can find a bit more on my Instagram – PTF Motion
Full Credits:
Concept: Kit Ashton
Songwriting: Kit Ashton, Christian Foley, and Geraint Jennings
Music arranged, produced, and performed by Kit Ashton
Design and Animation: PTF Motion
Voice of Fai: Kim Syvret
Voice of Lé Tchian du Bouôlay: Christian Foley
Voice of La Sirène and La Vioge: Kit Ashton
Voice of girl: Flieur Sauvage
Motion capture dancer for Fai: Laura Cooper
Motion capture musician for La Sirène and La Vioge: Matt McManus
Mixed by Kit Ashton and Eiko Falckenberg
Mastered by Streaky
