Animation

80lv: We were amazed to learn that you did most of the animations by hand, I mean, this is insane! Could you walk us through your process: timing, interesting solutions, physics influencing the little details like hair and earrings. And the dance itself is just nuts. By the way, are all of the characters moving simultaneously on one rig, or did you make slight differences in each character’s movement?

Barthelemy Maunoury:

Yes, everything is keyframe animation done by hand, no mocap was used. There is no much mystery or wizardry here, only time, effort, dedication and talent from the animation team. We started with multiple dance footages provided by Riot and gathered them all in one rough animation we did of the entire choreography. Once we were all happy with it, we used that same rough animation to layout and edit the chorus part of the music video. Finally, we animated each shot separately. We didn’t have any specific technology or solution but we do have powerful rigs which allow us to transfer animation from one character to another. We used that as a first pass for our dancing shots and then added variations on the timing and the poses on each girl to enhance their personality and avoid having them look like clones. The rap section was also a challenge as we didn’t have any reference footage for that. None of us was really a rap expert but we knew we could easily fall into a cheesy/cliché aspect of it. So we did extensive research online, watching lots of rap music videos and doing some rough animation tests to come up with something we felt was right.