Finn De Brie | Animation portfolio

GIANT OF THE STEPPE

Last semester I’ve had the privilege to work on an amazing project called "Giant of the Steppe". It was made over the course of half a year by a team of six students. It serves as a glimpse into a larger story, about a young girl traveling through the vast landscapes of the steppe on the back of a Great Yakram, looking for her lost family. She lives a completely nomadic lifestyle, with all the supplies she needs located on the back of her animal friend.
Within these 80 seconds of film, we follow the girl, Asel, through her morning routine on the back of this huge beast.

I've had the privilege to be able to work with some of the most beautiful people out there. Those individuals were: Mari Gallet, Roy Terium, Katharina Alexander, Theoni Fotoglou, and Arnout Zeghari. If you'd like to learn more about the creation process we went through you can find the entry under the name Giant of the Steppe.

I was responsible for a lot of the animation inside this short. I animated Asel the main character, Plov the Giant Yakram, and the little birds.

Here is some of my work in progress from during the project to show where we came from and how it got to a better state.

Here is a Timelapse I made from a recording of my animation progress during the Plov walkcycle.

Demo Reel

My Demo Reel consists of animation clips I made myself and projects where I was part of a group of students.

Selfie with a dead

This was an animation to attempt in a contest of The-11-second-club. I never participated because I wasn't ready in time. I later decided to render it out. For those who don't know what a contest of The-11-second-club is: you get a piece of sound that is 11 seconds long, and you have to animate it. My soundtrack came from the movie "Love Hard". I used the free Lou and Zombie from Hotel Transilvania rig. I gave the Zombie rig more mouth controllers which it initially didn't have. I needed this for the lipsink. Playblast version, without ambient sound.

Fight scene | Animated short

I wanted to try out a fight scene animation and ended up with this. Animation made in Maya, it was rendered in Unreal Engine and finally edited in Premiere Pro.

Rig provided by Roman Jeffery.

Shadowed Flames

A short animation all done by myself. Rigs were downloaded: Dude rig & Irex rig. The character animation was made with Mocap which I recorded and cleaned. Animation made in Maya and rendered in Unreal.

Here I have a clip where I show my raw mocap file next to my cleaned mocap.

Monster walk cycle

This is a monster walk cycle created for a collaborative project with my colleague Robbe Verduyn. I used references like Gorilla walk cycles for the arms and shoulders combined with reference from a komodo dragon for the head and body movement. For the hind legs, I used reference from an ostrich.

For my tail, I tested out the Maya plugin Ragdoll Dynamics to simulate the tail movement. Here is a clip of the different views of my cycle. I didn't put the tail animation on there to only see the animated frames.

Clockobot

I am an animator but I do like modeling as well. Here is a render named Clockobot which I am very proud of.
My idea was to make a small, cute robot that folds up whenever it's sleeping. When it is time to wake up, the robot jumps out of his sleeping mode and makes the alarm sound. My first idea was that he sits on top of a drawer waiting for his owner to wake up, and he is bored. Throughout this project, I changed the story. Now this clock is a showroom model in an antique clock shop. His friends are shut down, folded, and ready to be sold. He is the only robot awake and that is why he is bored. I like to think of it as in the far future where these tiny robots are being seen as antique.