The Dreamer Kid is my Student Capstone Film or Graduation Film. The Dreamer Kid tells a story of a family of undocumented family spending time together and the fears that come with being undocumented manifesting through the child's dreams.
During my Capstone class, we each pitched our stories to our professors and every week we would come back with revisions as the semester went on. Once I had the story in a good spot is when we would begin production.
I wanted to make the characters feel like a loving everyday family. My main goal for this film is to switch the narrative of "illegal immigrant" to a family that happened to be undocumented- contrasting the narrative we often see in the news.
During production one of the challenges I faced was having multiple characters of different sizes and proportions. I had to design, model, texture and rig 5 different characters, and budgeting time for animation, rendering and more postproduction work.
The little girl or Sophia Rig was a full IK/FK rig with advanced twist on her spine and her neck. Her facial controls were a combination of joints and SDKs.
The Dad Rig is also a full IK/FK rig with advance twist on his spine and neck similar to Sophia's rig, but I also used a blend shape to his face to make the Officer rig- along with different texture maps and some wrapped deformer uniform pieces.
The Unicorn Plush Rig was fully FK since I knew they would never walk on their own in the short film
The Monster Rig was FK arms and IK legs. Since I knew exactly what I needed for the monster to do- kept it pretty simple. I used an animated texture on the monster to give him a more distributive feel and to call back from him in the 2D sections of the film.
