CHARACTER ANIMATION & RIGGING / COMPOSITING / WIRE REMOVAL

This 10 part series was created leading up to Questlove's #1 best-selling book Creative Quest. My frequent collaborator Joe Baughman was tasked to come up with a series of videos to illustrate brief passages from Quest's book. Joe built and animated all the stop motion sets and shot all the live-action plates. I was then tasked with taking the wonderful illustrations of Questlove (by the talented artist Jon Andrew Castelberry), animate them, and composite them in the scenes. 

Joe had already planned out what to put into the stop motion sets inside Quest's head, but we had to develop tiny visual "gags" for the end shots restrained by the plates that had mostly all already been shot. We looked up interviews to find his favorite movies, one of which was Aliens. I thought it would be fun to place him into the iconic Alien 3 shot with Ripley being...sniffed(?)... by the Alien. We were also having trouble trying to come up with a gag for the fishing episode. We were just going to go with the cliche of him "catching" a boot, until at the 11th hour I thought of the Grammy (pushing my luck, I also suggested that he throw it back in, but Joe thought that may be a step too far). We had very little time by the end (I was doing an entire video's animation per day by the end), so my ideas for visual gags became more and more desperate as things went along ("Let's say there's, like a vine, and that vine...I dunno...steals his glasses and pin and puts it on a cactus!" "Let's say he's got books and he... drops them! Yes, THAT'S the ticket!")