Tezcatlipoca

Tezcatlipoca is a three minute short animation inspired by the music from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. In the tradition of Walt Disney’s Fantasia, it combines the elements of classical music and imaginative animation to retell the Aztec myth of Tezcatlipoca, the deity who descends from heaven in the form of a jaguar.

Tezcatlipoca is my graduating project from Southern Adventist University's School of Visual Art and Design. From September 2007 to January 2009, it took about a year and a half to take from conception to completion as a solo project. It has been a huge learning experience for me as I inched through each phase; I started with storyboards and animatic, then moved to modeling, rigging, texturing, and preliminary set design, then eventually moved to character animation and ultimately to final sets, backgrounds, lighting, rendering and finally compositing. I was lucky enough to have my classmate Chris Wombold do lava simulation for me, as well as the help and advisement of my teachers Aaron Adams and Zach Gray.

Tezcatlipoca premiered at the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival, and also won "Best Animation" and "Audience Choice" awards at the SONscreen 2009 Film Festival.

Click here to watch the online version

Screenshots

The clips that are shown are the basic walk, trot and run cycles that I have animated. The rendering represents the preliminary stylistic passes at the final look of the project.

The animatic for the project.