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Schafte Ryan HW1
Meiners_Project_2
This was an interesting project, because although I am not completely satisfied with the result it was a good learning experience. This was the first time I had animated anything other than chess pieces in Maya, and in that regard these results are not half bad. Before this project I had never used maya’s rigging and weight tools, or blend shapes, so it was useful to learn how to best use each tool offered. I would say my greatest struggle came in the form of my boy. Although he does not move much during the animation I had intended to use him to a much greater effect. Unfortunately I gave him far too many layers, and combined too many meshes, so manipulating him became next to impossible. Though I do feel like I was making progress in remedying that situation. On the other hand my dog model was fairly easy to manipulate. Often it felt like I would make mistakes on my boy, and would then correct them when I was working on the dog model. This led to the dog being the more active character in the story. One part of this process that surprised me was the final aesthetic the video achieved. On the one hand it is a very stark color palette that could be polarizing, but I think in the context of the story it works. Though I had my disappointments this assignment definitely forced me to explore Maya, which I am glad happened.
Meiners_Paul_Project1
My idea for this project came while I was hiking with a friend. We were up in the hills, and we came upon a viewpoint, but when we looked out most of the trees had been removed leaving hills of dirt in their place. I feel like often people don’t realize the potential danger to our forests if we don’t take more responsibility for them.
Rather than take a factual approach I chose to make my PSA more of an emotional journey. I thought this would be an issue where showing would be more powerful than telling. So I came up with a short story about a father taking his son to one of his favorite camping spots, and finding that the location has been deforested. Throughout the project I struggled with cutting each scene down, in order to get the whole video down to thirty seconds. I especially struggled with the text, which has to be on the screen long enough to read clearly.
To animate this project I used After Effects, which was a new experience for me. I would say most of the software was fairly intuitive making animation a simpler matter. The hardest part of the video to animate was the lip sync for the father’s dialog. To do it I made nine different mouths, and swapped them out every few frames to simulate speaking. This was a tedious process, but I am happy with the results. Overall I found this project to be a good learning experience, and I am happy with the final results.