Animation Competition - Joy

Seeing as I have been entering a few 11 Second Club competitions, I wanted to try and find another type of animation competition. I came across this one that is run by Splinebomb.com. I thought it would be quite a good one to enter as you are given a emotion to portray, in this case it's 'Joy' and there are more stricter rules to follow which gives me good practice to working to a specific brief. I'm only allowed to use one character, the shot should be no longer than 6 seconds and no music should be added. Without the use of music you are just purely concentrating on the performance and animation.

I've come up with an idea for the shot that I want to produce, a girl playing with her teddy bear and hugging it tight and smiling. For this I knew I would need to model my own teddy bear and probably rig it in some way in order to get movement out of the legs. Even though it is an inanimate object, something like a teddy bear will still have movement when picked up, held etc.

Below are some screenshots of my finished teddy bear and its rig. I was planning on using the HumanIK system to generate the skeleton for me, but I had issues with mirroring the joints. I found it a lot easier to place the joints in by hand and constrain everything like I've done before. Because of the bear's simple shape it wasn't too much of a hard task to get this all done.

I've started setting up my scene and I'm planning to start blocking this out this week. I have until the 30th of November so I think I'll have enough time. The rig that I have chosen to use for the girl is the Andy Rig by John Doublestein - I wanted to try using a rig that I haven't used before and I found this one seemed quite good and you are able to change the appearance of the rig from male to female and also the clothes and hairstyles.