Category: FMP

Artemis, Apollo and Memnon rig by Ramon Arango will be used for this project as the rigs are professionally made and the anatomy of the character models are athletic with long limbs useful for strong posing.

I want the work to be loosely based on the performance and not be a direct visualization of it, this is to minimize religious connotation and keep it secular for broader appeal but also be respectful to the cultural heritage of the origins of the performance.

For the reasons stated above the performative format of the embedded video seems appropriate for this project.

The two clips above are two animations found online that for research purposes, the first is a 3D animation by a collective of animators and CGI artists, the FX of the dress was made in Maya using nCloth. The second animation is hand drawn frame by frame.

The whirling dervish or commonly known as whirling sufi is a religious meditative practice performed in Sufism a sect within Islam. It is a performative ritual which without context looks like a dance, but the ritual is a form of meditation and worship the purpose of it is to reach a state of “ecstatic trances”.

Practitioners of the whirling sufi dance often wear a dress that elevates elegantly during the dance.

The dance itself consists of continuously spinning around, it’s not choreographed in advance.

The dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is a dance sequence from the two act classical ballet Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It is a ballet performance that is very dynamic and subtly elegant at the same time. I chose this dance as a potential source of reference for the project due to it’s strong poses and fluid movement.

My Final Major Project is the culmination of my animation progress on the course so far, throughout the course I have focused on body mechanics and animation. I want to further focus on that and center my project around body movement. I want to animate a dance sequence, emphasizing on strong poses, dynamic movement and timing.

At this stage two dances have been chosen for potential reference, the first is a ballet iteration of the Nutcracker and the second the whirling dervish dance practiced in Sufism.