John created over 4 minutes of character animation bringing to life Gus the Gudgeon fish, the mascot for the Wivenhoe Dam Information Centre. Gus tells the visitors all about how important water quality is and why we should take it seriously.  John received an Australian Effects & Animation Festival Award (his third AEAF award) in December 2005 for his work on this project.  You can take a sneak peak at Gus here, but to hear his full story you'll need to visit Wivenhoe Dam.

	Download the MPEG (5MB)	Gus looks for visitors

In the 'Meet Gus' sequence Gus welcomes visitors to the centre, while in the 'Water Story' sequence Gus tells us a bit more about why it's so important to have clean, fresh water.  He relates how scary it was living somewhere else where thoughtless  people had left some nasty surprises in the water.  For this sequence the animation was created on black for display in a Pepper's Ghost 'holographic' display.  Gus floats ghostlike in the middle of his own forced perspective pond complete with archway he swims through.  The resulting 'holographic' Gus adds an extra thrill to a visit to the Information Centre.

John created Gus using Maya and After Effects, and Magpie Pro.  Magpie Pro was invaluable in creating Gus's lipsync animation quickly and easily using its Phonetic Alignment Recognizer.   In addition to phoneme targets John also setup morph targets in Magpie for Head Down/Up, Left/Right, Twist Left/Right and Closed Eyes.  In this way John 
could scrub through the video of the voiceover artist in Magpie and closely mimic her head motion and eyeblinks.  Only one slider was needed for each move as a negative Head Down was interpreted by Magpie as a Head Up move.  These movements were then exported to Maya along with the lipsync.  In Maya, while the phoneme blend targets were used to morph Gus in the traditional way, the other targets were not.  Dummy neutral poses were assigned to the blendshapes for the Down/Up, Left/Right, Twist Left/Right and Closed Eyes but the animation curves imported to these blendshapes were used to drive NonLinear Deformers via Set Driven Key.  In this way, the non-lipsync animation created in Magpie Pro was used to deform Gus in more sophisticated ways than simple morph targets could.  This combination worked well and capitalised on both the strengths of Magpie Pro and Maya.