I worked as an animator and rigging artist on Elizabeth Ito's "Mall Stories"! Check out the full playlist of Mall Stories episodes and extras here.
All content property of Chromosphere Studio and Kikutowne.

Atilla the Grilla

In the short film "Atilla the Grilla" I served as an animator. Animating stylized characters in a documentary style was a fun exercise; we aimed to keep acting choices naturalistic while allowing our timing and spacing to be a smidge limited and cartoon-y.

Here's a sequence I animated in which Minnie introduces the restaurant's manager, Patricia. Hearing Minnie's deep appreciation and care for Patricia is so touching in the recorded audio, and I really enjoyed working through the performances here. (Note: some of the bg characters, like the ones walking and idling, were animated by other team members)
[timestamps 4:44 to 5:54]

Mini Mall Stories

For the three-episode series "Mini Mall Stories", the team would be animating within UE5, so I was responsible for converting several existing character rigs to UE Control Rigs, and also rigging all new characters in UE as well.

The rigs for these characters were quite simple and with very few variations between them as far as the skeletons and controls go, so I was able to bundle all of the control rig logic into two dynamic functions (one for Construction, one for Forwards Solve) that worked for all characters. The rig procedurally adapted to each's skeletons proportions and created prop and costume controls where indicated in the skeletal hierarchy. For a few more unique props, I added a bit more scripting to their individual rigs, for example the strawberry hat that the fashion influencer dons in "Tropico Beat".

Watch "Tropico Beat", "Chicken Crispy Training Video", and "Channel 8 News Report - Gamers" all in the Mall Stories YouTube playlist!