I love all life forms coming from the ocean, but there's one that has captured my imagination like nothing before it: the giant octopus and all its cephalopod relatives. Enjoy this new hand-crafted keyframe animation project and come face to face with the lord of the deep...THE MIGHTY KRAKEN!
Being a lifelong fan of large cephalopods and all things marine life, I truly wanted to add this giant to my animation gallery, so I took this cool giant octopus rig and turned it into the fierce monster from Norse mythology.
I wanted my Kraken to be a true underwater predator emerging and searching for its next prey, so I studied and based my work on cinematic references like "Deep Rising" (1998) and "Meg 2: The Trench" (2023), which offer fascinating mega-octopus shots.
Here's the animation breakdown, showing all main stages I went through during the straight ahead workflow I adopted.
My goal was to obtain the effect of a "moving mountain of flesh" that is the Kraken, by playing with the IK tentacle system of the octopus rig, which was essential to create the fluid, serpentine and dynamic motion of the eight arms crawling around.
Here you can watch a glimpse of the animation process. I insisted on making the curves in the graph editor as soft as possible, in order to make the beast sluggish, but menacingly heavy at the same time.