Semester II Group Project

This project was a stop-motion collaboration between Greta Lundy, Jake Combs, Anna Gaiche, Sierra Draney, and myself. When we first started we had no idea what to do. We knew we had to make something stop-motion but were weren't sure what it would be about. We started with a lot of ideas some of which included clothes moving a wall and perform tasks, some story using all Bionicles, and even the same story as what we did but the monster would've been one of us eating candy.

All of us finally agreed on the gummy bear story and we had Greta storyboard it for us so we knew what kinds of shots we would need and about how long the animation would be when finished. 

After we had everything planned we brought in candy to make our set and cast. Sierra, Anna, and I created the houses and main set. It was very fun and most of the candy that didn't end up in the set was consumed by us; including the bag of gummy bears that Jake brought. We started with a giant five pound bag of gummy bears and ended with...well probably a lot less then a pound. If you're reading this Alli, I blame Jake. 

We then started filming once the set and actors were all ready. I didn't do a whole lot during this part because Greta and make were our stop-motion experts. I mostly watched, turned on lights when we needed them, and ate the remaining candy. The filming took about two weeks and once we were finished Greta started to put the footage together while I made the credits and title card. Jake made the words in the title card bounce and while Jake was busy making the words bounce I looked for music for the whole short movie. Greta then added the music, title card, and credits. After some adjustments in the audio and video the short was done! 

Now that I can see the finished product I notice that one thing I would do different is that I would make the story longer and add more detail. Although the movie was supposed to be very short but if I ever had the opportunity I would make it longer. I would also do more set design to make the set look more like a village. Something I would do the same is use candy to tell a story. It's easy to animate and makes a cute story. If I could do this again I could even make the gummy bears talk or have a deeper meaning to the story.

I had a lot of fun on this group project and I'm glad to have done it with other amazing creators. I would love to work with this group again on another project!

Semester 1 Project

During this semester  I started working on a 3-D dragon in Maya. In total I worked 120 hours on this dragon and I am not yet done. Now that I look back on my initial idea I might have been a bit in over my head. I ran into a lot of problems making the dragons head alone and even more for the rest of the dragon. It was very frustrating to keep running into problems after just solving one and that lead to me starting to loose interest in the dragon but I tried my best and this is how hard I got.   

In the beginning the scope of this project was to animate the dragon. Now I am far from animating the dragon and around the middle of semester 1 I made my new goal to just finish modeling the dragon and that still didn't happen. Although I still got pretty far in the modeling process.

 

When I first thought to make a dragon my first idea was to make a tiger and then I thought how about a dragon instead. Since for some reason I wanted what I was animating to fly (The biggest mistake I made). I had my good friend Greta sketch out a basic dragon and I put it into Maya.

I then made the dragon using the sketch that I put into Maya and moving the vertexes to create separate body parts. There was one part of the dragon I could just trace the sketch and that was the wing. I had to extrude a cylinder and move it around in a certain way to make the main to part of my wing and I the extruded certain polygons on the extruded cylinder and made the fingers of the wing.

After the wings I started to work on the feet which I made from a cube and lots of extruding to make the claws. I had made a tail but after making it, deleting it, making it again then hating the new tail I deleted it and I'm going to make it at a later date.

Finally I started working more on my dragon head. I added facial details and moved around the horns to make them look better. I recently added a open mouth and adding teeth to the mouth but I am having a lot of trouble with making the teeth look how I want. 

Here is what I have so far:

Something I learned along the way was how to extrude to my advantage. When I was making the wings I had to manipulate the extrude tool a lot to get it to do what I wanted it to. Another thing I learned is to not get in too deep over my head. I started this project without clearly thinking about how difficult it could be and I just started working on it. Next time when I start a new project I will plan better and know how hard or easy it will be. One thing I would do the same is what I did to the wings and how I manipulated them to do what I want.

Next semester I will not continue this project for a long while. You could say it is going on hiatus while I start on a new project that will hopefully hold my interest.  While at first this project kept me interested and excited to animate once I kept hitting struggling problem after problem I got bored of it and dreaded working on it. Maybe next semester in-between my new project I'll work on this one and I can try to eventually complete it. 

Feast Review

Last year, Disney released Feast: an amazing animated short that played in theaters right before the showing of Big Hero 6. I have become obsessed with this adorable short and decided to do a review about it. Feast is about a dog named Winston and his owners life going on around him. The way the story is told is almost always from the dogs level and perspective. So you can understand how the dog feels while you're also seeing what is happening in his owners life. The camera is mainly stationary through out the short except for some action shots and I love that about the short. It keeps you in the perspective of the dog.

Feast's story was amazing but the animation was even more amazing. The way the creators used 3D and hand drawings to make the animation look better and smoother and then their use of lighting was great as well made Feast look great.

The lighting helped the animation greatly. It was bright and happy during exciting moments and got darker in sad or calm moments. The lighting while expressing the mood it also made the animations looks breath taking. When I watched the short for the first time I remember being impressed by how well lit everything was. The lights made good realistic shadows and brightened up the scenes.

I would love to try and use the same looking art style the creator used in this animation in my animations. It's a very cute and artsy design that makes the 3D animation with a mix of hand drawn that makes the animation look 2D. The creator did an amazing job of making you feel like you're seeing the story from the dogs perspective. You were on the same level as him almost the whole time so you knew what he was seeing and how he was seeing it. 

One thing that I think could be improved is that near the end of the short the camera becomes less stationary and moves up to the people more. I wonder if they could've better portrayed those shots from the dogs perspective.

Feast was an all around great animated short with a good story, lovable characters, and some good comedic parts. If you haven't checked it out there is a video below that you can watch. Although since the short is still fairly new you will have to pay $1.99 to watch it. You can always watch the trailer if you don't want to pay.

Feast:

Avatar Animation

For my final project of the year a few people and I who were in group made a video using greenscreen and 3D effects. My group decide to do an Avatar themed video with all the elements. Below I am in front of a greenscreen "water bending". 

I made the water ball that I water bend in Maya. It wasn't too hard to make and it looked cool in the video. Here it is below. 

Below is the short clip of my 3D water ball and the greenscreen clip. I turned myself into a silhouette and added a water background. 

My group and I put our clips together, added audio, and music and our video was complete. Here is the result below.

Food-imals

Recently a friend and I decided to take a toy animal and a food and combine it to make a toy called Food-imals. It's package had to not only look cool and draw kids attention, but it had to have a hidden purpose behind carrying the toys. We came up with this idea when we realized how hungry we were and we had been trying to think of an idea for a cool toy. Our hunger and a need for a toy idea inspired Food-imals. All thanks to our stomachs.

The first part was the most challenging. We wanted to create a Mystery Fridge and we wanted to make a flat template that could be folded in such a way as to make a two-story fridge that could hold two little plush Food-imals with a working door. This was harder than it sounds. Thankfully my partner, Greta, figured everything out and made the template work.

Greta designed the middle sections to fold inwards to make the middle shelf, causing the rest of the box to squish back together into a rectangular prism. The end result of the folded box looked like this sort of fridge shape:

For our color palette we went for a childlike feel. We then played around with different foods to see what we could make this little cat orb into for our logo:

With Mr. Cherry Cat done we made the logo appear as a magnet for the completed fridge look.

Finished Product:

(Coming Soon)

Grow-A-Monster

I made my own product called Grow-A-Monster. It's an amazing pill that you put in water and a monster minion grows from the pill! I thought of this idea when I was thinking about creating your own monster and the product I had to make had to be a pill for something and this brilliant idea hit me. The logo was a pill and a monster put together that was thought up by Greta, my friend and coworker.  I then made the logo in Illustrator and added it to my box design.

Below is my box design for Grow-A-Monster. I made it in Illustrator along with my logo. I created the color palette and thought of all the text on the package. My favorite part of the who box is the little monster underwater on the front.

Here is my box printed out and folded up and it's bottle. This is its actual size and it will be on shelves soon! (not)

e-Magine

e-Magine is an event at my school, Olathe Northwest. It's known as the red carpet event in e-communications at my school. It happens every year around March or April and it is a very fun and cool event  where schools in the area that are in the technical arts can come and enter their work in competition.

Here I am with my friend Greta at the Photo Booth area. She is a fellow designer and animator and her animation got into the top five in her category. We were both disappointed when she didn't win anything but she'll enter again next year and will whoop everybody!