Senior Project Progress

Project

Title: Treasure Hunter

Theme: Space and adventure

Moral: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure

Story: A sly treasure hunter finds out that there is an amazing treasure on an uncharted desert planet and sets out to find it. upon reaching the planet, he is greeted by its barren and desolate environment. He pushes on and finds a temple that contains what he is looking for. Trap after trap and trial after trial he reaches the legendary treasure. upon opening the container he finds that it is just full of water bottles. feeling like he's been tricked, the treasure hunter destroys the container in anger only to see that he's being watched by the temple's inhabitants.

Characters: The Treasure Hunter, and The Temple Dwellers

Progress

Character Development Progress

my first idea for the main character in my story was to have a Russian Cosmonaut and his crew explore space to find treasure. I later realized that the models would take too long to make so i decided to go for a more cartoony low poly model. After deciding this, I chose to start making art for my main character and, taking inspiration from a few games I enjoyed, I created a simple character that would be used in my animation.

After finalizing the character design, I created a reference sheet for the character and began modeling in Maya. 

 

Story Development Progress

My main plan for the story at first was very bland so I had changed it a couple of times until it fit. the story I first started with was about exploration and nothing else but now my story is about finding treasure and morality.

Animation Reflection

Animation End-of-Year Reflection

What I’ve Learned

Major Lessons

Over the course of this school year, I’ve succeeded in learning the essentials of animation and further. This year has been a great year for me since i’ve been able to truly show what i was learning by creating some well made and polished animations. One major lesson I’ve learned is to operate as an individual and mostly manage my time by setting goals for certain points in a production to be finished by and to also communicate with many of my other classmates and help them if they get stuck. Another major lesson i had learned was to use different mediums for animating since animating in one medium could limit you to making certain things. I had also learned to be very patient with producing big projects since one of my productions took around 150 hours to make. There was much that I learned and am still learning in or out of school.

Creating Projects and Challenges

This year, I’ve created many projects and worked with most of them to the end. The best of these animations has been my 3D human skeleton. This had been a huge challenge for me since I had little experience with creating custom objects in Maya. I gradually overcame this by getting familiar with the program and got faster and faster at modeling and rigging. Another great challenge I had to face during this project was that I wouldn’t be able to get any help from my classmates. Since no one else in the class had experience with modeling or animating in Maya, I had to look up videos and learn on my own. In the end, this project I created was one of my favorite since I was allowed to work for as long as I wanted and put as much effort into it as I could. The two other projects that I had been proud of from this year were our hand-drawn animations since I was able to try frame by frame animation.

What I’ve Learned and My Growth As A Student

At the beginning of this school year I did not know what it takes to produce a good animation. I had little experience with making anything in any of the programs we used. Over the year, I had slowly learned about the basics or essentials of making a good animation. Some of our lessons taught us how to apply our understanding of these skills while others let us do whatever we wanted. My growth from knowing very little to knowing a lot about animation has been amazing. I’ve enjoyed this year in E-Communication with all the opportunities it provides me. Over the year i learned of my weaknesses and strengths. My strengths are my ability to quickly learn new programs and new skills. My usual weakness is being able to meet deadlines for projects since I take too long on them.

The Year In Summary

In summary, this school year has been a fun and productive one for me. I learned a great amount of new things and honed my skills with older things. I’ve used and applied all my skills to projects both in and out of school and have had a lot of fun doing so. I have even begun working with real clients on their projects. With these skills that I’ve learned, I plan to further my future and work in fields such as the gaming industry. There is one thing that I wish I could’ve changed about this year and that would have been me going too far with a project and trying to make it too polished causing me to never be able to finish it by the deadline.

Stop Motion Animation Project

Animation Project

           Our assignment for this animation project was to make a live action stop motion animation with. We decided to base ours around using 2 people and paper effects

Preproduction

           We had first spent the first day or two figuring out what our video would be over and what props we would need for the production of the video. Then, before the recording and production of the video, we planned out everything in storyboards. our original plan for the video had been very lengthy and we had many ideas on what we wanted to do so we added them to the storyboards and cut certain parts out if we didn't need it later on. After that we had planned out what effects would be green-screened and what would be in the live video. 

           Our video was planned to be a fight between Kaid and Laura using paper as weapons and throwing paper planes at each other. The fight was to be started by an evil piece of blue paper that would fly straight into Laura's head and start the fight.

Video Production

           Once we had picked out whose job it was film, direct, and do effects we started filming. our original location for the whole video started in an unused printing room and we were later forced out losing about a fourth of our video. We had then moved our filming to the break room between all the Ecom classes. Because of the set back of being moved to another room we had to cut a large portion of our original plan out and get the main parts of our video. Once we had finished creating puppet controls for our paper plane we began filming everything again. Filming was easy and only took about 3 days for us to finish. Once that had been finished we moved on to post production.

Post Production and Editing

           During post production, we had assigned a few people to do video editing, audio, and intro and credits. Post production had been a bit of a challenge for a few of us since we hadn't used After Effects in a while and couldn't remember how to use Keylight and other effects. I had done most of the editing of the video and added effects to it while Kaid and Laura edited the greenscreen effects, sound, intro and credits. The editing didn't take us too long and we were able to submit the project without it being too late.

Reflection

           Personally I would say this project had been some what of a success since we had a major issue with who was leading the whole project and often got confused with expressing our ideas. We had trouble with teamwork as a whole yet were able to produce a moderate quality animation even after having a massive set back part way through. We did do well with constantly working on the project and picking who did what they were assigned to do.