Building Boba
By: Adam Bradish

After the initial idea was brought up to bring fett into this short in 2 shots, the first thing that had to be done was to create the model to be used in the shots and the sets.

Now that the models was done it was time to start animating it in the shots that we came up with. The first shot was replicating the scene from Empire Strikes Back, which after studying the scene the animation would be really simple to do. After the first pass very little of the animation needed to be fixed, but we decided to move the camera so fett seemed more menacing, by having part of his helmet and body in shadow. Even after that fix we still felt something was missing, so we ended up adding the Imperial Officer pushing Han, which we already had the Officer, I just had to make a quick model of Han in Carbonite. The model didn’t have to be too detailed since we only intended on seeing the silhouette of Han and the Officer. Once we added those elements to the shot, we were happy with the result and sent it off for rendering and compositing.

Since we were going with the style of the clone wars cartoons, and gentle giants were making statues of the original trilogy characters, that was our main point of reference. I was tasked with making the Boba Fett Character look like the statue which in itself can be a difficult thing to accomplish since he has such a definitive look that everyone recognizes. When I first began to model him, it was a little difficult to get the shape defined to what the statue had with just pictures. After I finally had the actual statue in front of me to look at and a few hours of trial and error, I began the model with the legs since they were the easiest part of him to do. Once the legs matched up with what the statue had the upper body went a little easier since I knew what type of shapes I had to create to get that animated look. The next problem I encountered was the arms, since they were tucked up into his body armor I had a little trouble figuring out where the shoulder joint should go so that his arm could be properly, after a few trial and error moments the arms no longer became a problem and I was able to get the model done in the appointed time and handed it off to be rigged. Now that I had the base model done I had to go back and make an alternate version where his legs were all cut up, his armor dented and his helmet having a big gash for when he was escaping the sarlacc.

The Next shot was Fett escaping the sarlacc pit, which we had originally intended to be two shots. One of which would have been fett still in the pit flying out but gets caught by a tentacle on the way out and is pulled back in but shoots at the tentacle and escapes, this shot was cut mostly because of time but also because we felt we could get the same effect by just seeing the pit in the background as he lands. The one shot that we did end up with was a little difficult then the other shot since I had a limited number of frames to work with to get him down on the ground and  in the same pose as the statue which lee was very admit about getting in there. My initial first run of the animation was almost what you see in the final shot, however there were some retiming issues that had to be fixed, mostly just how quick fett landed on the ground and how fast he came up in the pose. After some tweaking and timing fixes the shot was done. But then the other shot was cut so, I had to retool the set so that the sarlacc could be seen behind fett, which proved to be not very difficult to do. All that needed to be done was just rotating the set and moving fett’s feet and legs up so they didn’t go through the geometry. Once that was done all that was missing was the cape, which all that was down for that was, I just added and object displacement map to the cape which made the waving motion, after that the shot was sent off the render and be composted.