Blinged-Out

What's that thing dancing across the sand? Oh! It's a raccoon all blinged-out! 

Me and my friend had been given the assignment of rotoscoping a raccoon walk-cycle, and rather than simply trace the movement of the trash panda, we wanted to use this as an opportunity to explore how we could animate something really unexpected from a reference. As a result, we came up with the idea of animating a raccoon made up of an assemblage of parts--on fire. I worked on the character animation of the racoon, while my friend animated the flame effects. Choosing what I would replace the different parts of the raccoon were all based on intuition, but I knew we wanted the overall aesthetic and result to be a mix between regal objects and neighbourhood trash.