ALENA MEALY
THE MONKEY
BREAKDOWN / MONKEY BUSINESS
Time to break this monkey down! This piece was originally created for my first dive into Grooming and I had a great teacher who unlocked what is now my favorite part of the CG pipeline!
This started as a simple composition. My main goal initially was to complete a full groom.
I knew that I wanted to feature this monkey in my reel eventually- which meant returning back to a project.
It was both jarring and awesome to see how much I'd improved since that class, and I took to cleaning this project up and creating the final look with a little story! Now this Monkey can be seen across the Gnomon campus screensavers!
A TRIBUTE TO CHILDHOOD
ORIGINAL CONCEPT
My idea for the final shot was to create a highly narrative shot that would capture a serene moment between a parent and child, and capture the magic and wonder of that feeling when you're lifted up into the air high. I can remember many moments in my childhood experiencing this feeling, especially when my dad would put me on his shoulders so I could feel like a giant.
As the original intention of this monkey was primarily to focus on grooming, it was a great challenge to push it further and really sell a story along with it. And because I wanted this monkey to more along the lines of a fantastic creature, it made both the grooming and lookdev such a blast!
MODELING
I decided to base my monkey off of mainly the glorious Snub-Nosed Monkey and took influence from the Wizard of Oz Flying Monkeys, and eventually took inspiration from the stylized characters of Zootopia, one of my favorite films!
THE JOURNEY AND PROGRESS
POSING
During my test phase of poses that worked and didn't I created several different scenarios, for example what if this monkey had a family and there the goal was to show the sibling and parenthood dynamic?
I'm constantly trying to get into the practice of creating quick variation to things so I can really see what's going to work and what doesn't!
GROOMING
The goal was always to dive head first into learning everything about yeti and grooming, so in the beginning process of this groom, my little monkey went through a whirlwind of iterations. Eventually I returned to the project at the end to finally put what I learned into creating the final piece featuring the two monkeys you see at the top!
It all had to start somewhere though and I it's no doubt my favorite party and most challenging. His groom was very meticulously broken down into 10 different nodes, with 5 grooms in the Head node alone!
MORE BREAKDOWN AND PROGRESS
