When their college mascot needed to come to life, MuseArts was called in to do the animation. We designed and rigged a 2-D version of Beacon’s alligator mascot using a still image as a starting model. We gave the gator full movement of arms, legs, tail, head, body, jaw and eyes, and designed controllers to give emotion through eyebrow, nose, and cheek movements. We did test animations and refinements to get the character ready for debut in a campus video. Final animation and lip sync was done to an audio track of his narration, and his scenes were rendered with green backgrounds to allow Vermont Films to key the character in over live video backgrounds.
Navi Gator was so popular that he was called back to host a full campus tour video. For this round, we updated the character with more mouth shapes, head turns, and upper body turns to give Navi a greater range of movement. This allowed for better interaction and reaction to the video background he was inhabiting. Again we used a narration track to do lip sync and full animation of the character. We also created a few props and costume elements for Navi to use while acting.