I had lots of fun with this last assignment; I think there is just so much to explore in building 3D environments. If I had had more time, I would have loved to explore the game side of Unreal, since so many of my favorite games were built with this engine. I could see myself going a lot further down this path, maybe in conjunction with some AR/VR stuff, or my interest in weird 3D animations like Late For Meeting.
For this assignment, since I knew I wouldn’t have much time with all my other finals and the winter show looming, I decided to just build off of the world and characters I had made in the last class and to use the robust animation library (so much capoeira!). I mainly wanted to play with camera movement and exploring how distorted I could make the characters, so no emphasis on polish or detail really haha.
In the end, it was a lot longer than I had expected it to turn out, but I think it brings us on a nice little arc, especially with the music I found. All in all, it was nice to dip my toes into this type of software, and very eager to see what else lies beneath this mountain of confusing menus and screens.
Animation Week 11: Drag Race Final Video
I have a feeling this is going to get taken down any second due to audio copyright:
Animation Week 10: Kavanaugh & After Effects
This software is crazy! I love how intuitive it is, or rather, how intuitive it is after spending 2 hours getting used to it. The puppet tool took some wiggling around to get the effect translatable from brain to composition, but I think overall I understand the basic motion capabilities. It was super fun messing around with the distortions; I wish now that I was doing a project where I could just make really silly grotesque characters (perhaps that’ll be my unity project…). Now just to figure out what other dance moves I want good ol’ Brett to do (while hopefully avoiding eye contact, man, he gives me the creeps).
I had to reprocess some of the original illustrator files to make sure they were transparent and clean, and while I was there I should have changed the frame boundary (?), but I didn’t know that would be an issue until later. The only thing I had trouble with was with the layers on the first animation — they would cut off at the boundaries if I moved them too far away, which resulted in Brett’s legs being stuck behind an invisible wall. Looking online led me to believe there was an effect tool I could use called “grow bounds” but I never found it in the menus and by the time I got to the second animation, there was no longer that issue… So not sure what happened there.
Animation Week 8: Stop Motion
This week was crazy! Between all of our hectic schedules, there was luckily one day we could meet and shoot, but man, it was down to the wire. I think we shot the first 15 seconds in 4 hours, and then the last 15 seconds in 45 minutes haha. Obviously, didn’t help that the first two cameras we rented didn’t work with dragon frame, so that was a huge chunk of time. But had a lot of fun doing stop motion again after not having done it in years. The video below doesn’t have sound, but this link does (https://ellielin.com/blog/2018/11/01/stop-motion-whats-happening/).