Week Six - Unreal Engine

This week we learned how to animate a 3d character using Adobe Fuse and Unreal Engine by Epic games.

First the character was created in Fuse. I designed a warrior not to be messed with who really enjoys the samba. Next I exported the file to Miximo to create an animation of the warrior doing samba, walking, and jumping.

In class, we learned how to use Unreal Engine and I created a world (or house and lawn) in a fantastical dystopian future where it does not seem so bad — at least with the mixed use of materials for a home in a land that is bare of trees. Our warrior enjoys the samba as she dances into her newly built home and the camera follows her around.

This project was quick but fun - I enjoy building out worlds and this was reminiscent of my time in architecture school in building out environments. This time physics didn’t really matter.

I had a really tough time exporting the video so screen grabbed the rendering of the camera view. I deleted all extra cameras yet still was met with a weird angle of the underworld for the entirety of the sequence frame. I took the file cut some audio and title sequences in Adobe Premier and uploaded to Youtube.

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Weeks Two - Five | 2D Animation

For weeks two-five I worked in a team of 3 with Jacky Chen and Jasper Wang. We met early on after the assignment was given (possibly right after class) and discussed building out a story line to personify sporting equipment and make a story arc around the characters interacting. We agreed to think about it and reconvene the next day or so when we had time to plan.

On the second meeting, we transitioned to transportation and built out a story arc for two bicycles (nameless) to connect, go for a ride together as friends, then have tragedy happen with one of them falling off of a cliff and being picked up by an alien and resurrected into a motorcycle and what would possibly happen after that. Below are the pages from our storyboard.

We agreed on this storyline and decided to move forward with light character development and asset finds. We settled on using bicycles that Jasper found on Pinterest and UFO’s and backgrounds that I found on freepik.com. We then prepared the assets and backgrounds with layers for Animation.

I then created a scene list and how the scenes would be broken up. Jasper happened to have come from a background in Animation so wanted to do the bulk of the animation work. I wanted some experience so I did the yellow, and split up the rest between Jasper and Jacky, with Jasper doing the green and Jacky doing the Blue.

Once all the scenes were completed in Adobe After Effects, and submitted into our shared Google Drive folder, I arranged them in Adobe Premier and found a few sound clips using Youtube Sounds. I designed the titles in Adobe Illustrator, and cut the entire arrangement together for our presentation.

Collaboration was difficult with this group, but given the circumstances, I’m happy with what was delivered in the end.

Week One | Stop Motion

Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, I spent countless hours watching claymation and other stop motion animation shows. Gumby may have been one of my favorites, and most allowed in my household. I can also recall watching so many holiday-themed shows that incorporated similar techniques within their story telling. Somehow, all of this was forgotten until the onset of this assignment uplifted those fond memories and past friendships that I had once developed with all of those characters in my childhood.

When I teamed up with Veronica and Jasper to create a stop motion project, it was very clear that claymation had to be a center piece for this effort. I had a clearly defined metaphoric story come in where clay was involved and shared it with the group. It evolved though conversation and it was Jasper who came up with the concept of shape shifting to fit in and not fitting in. Very much so a theme here at ITP — we all come in unique, with our own enormously gifted backgrounds, desperately want to connect with others, adjust/conform to do so, then realize that we just need to be ourselves in the end.

The scenery was a full collaboration with a knowing that we wanted to create NYC out of LEDs and other components found in the shop. We new that the Cube needed to be unique in nature and stand out. Orange is such a powerful color that screams creativity; and we wanted to bring that life into the Cube, regardless of his/her/their awareness of self. The Spheres had to be exaggerated and be the same, referencing that this happens with multiple people simultaneously/ all at once/ the same. They bring an essence of mediocrity; but also so much similarity to one another, showing that we are one-in-the same.

This process was so rewarding - from the planning, to the execution, to the final delivery of all the hours that went into the project. I’m very proud of the team’s efforts and story that was told. We really wanted to emphasize that this story took place in ITP — and purposefully we did not include a static background. It needed to be in the middle of the floor; it’s just an isolated occurrence that happens day-in and day-out here, and it felt important to express that.