Cosmic Purrsuit

For our masterclass project during this semester, I created an animated short film together with two other study colleagues. Together we decided on an idea – a chance meeting between a cat and a UFO – and developed it further through concept art and storyboarding. My primary focus was especially our main character, the cat. I created the concept art for it and later on was also responsible for the modelling, texturing, rigging, and parts of the animation. It was my first time creating and working with a quadruped character model, and I ran into several obstacles along the way. For instance, the first iteration of the face looked rather unsettling because the proportions were not right, and especially the rigging and weight-painting gave me a lot of headaches (we decided to use the pre-built cat rig from Blender due to time constraints, but adaptations were still necessary). Regardless I think it was a valuable learning experience. Once we moved past those struggles, things got easier though, and especially once we reached the VFX and editing stage we could slowly see everything come together. There is of course always room for improvement, but we are very happy about what we achieved, especially in such a small team. The film also has a particularly special meaning to me, as the design of the cat was inspired by my own beloved cat Maxi, who sadly left this life far too early already, but I think I was able to create a small memorial for her in this way. The film is currently not publicly available in full length yet, as we may still want to submit it to a few animation festivals and student contests first. Therefore, for now I only included a small video compilation of the scenes where I did the character animation and VFX.