Virtual Storytelling

Stefanie Hatzis Ekt2

12 - 04 - 2010

Contentspage 2 - Assignment

page 3 - My choices

page 5 - Extra task

page 6 - My experiences

Assignment.The project for Virtual Storytelling was to make an animation for the poem “if”, by Rudyard Kipling. We did the assignment with a group, and each person got her/his own lines to make a short animation, and there were a few common tasks.

First we learned more about the poem and about the author and his life, the poem describes situations of live and tells us how to deal with them. The first part of the poem is about self confidence, and self refection. The second part is about being yourself and not letting others and thoughts influence your behavour.And the third part is that you shouldn’t let anything interfere with furfilling your goals, always stay yourself no matter what.

We devided the lines, and everybody got 2 lines to work with. My lines were: “or being hated, dont give way to hating. and yet, don’t look to good, nor talk too wise.” The idea was that every one made his own amination, and added the soundsAnd we also devided the common tasks that needed to be done to get the perfect end re-sult. We made a team for the DVD menu, the intro and outro of the video, an audio team, an editing tream an a team for the making of. I chose to go in the intro/outro team, because i thought that was the most interesting of all tjhe common tasks.

My choices.Because I liked the lines it wasn’t hard for me to get ideas for the animation. I had no idea what medium i would use to get the end result, and it didn’t matter because with each programm I can learn new things and I don’t mind making things difficoult to solve.

At first i had an idea about my animation, where you see an angry person throwing away a picture, and then the person in the picture kissing an image of the first person. Then the person puts the picture down, grabs a mask and goes out the door. Symbolical I thought it was really nice but when i found out i had only 6 seconds for my animation I knew it was too much. And the day we showed our moodboards I found that it didn’t connect with the anima-tion before me, because Freek-Jan uses a mask and I also wanted to use a mask, that would be confusing.

Then i decided to totally change my idea, I chose make my shapes with lines, which added up to the lines in the poem. In the video you see the lines coming and making the shape of a man, which is then being ‘attacked’ by ropes. The ropes bend away and disappear, and lines that make the man fiure also slide out. Then new lines appear wich create the face of Mona Lisa, which then get transformed into a less pretty face (based on the wheeping woman from Picasso). The lines disappear again and new lines turn into a serious looking Albert Einstein, who then sticks out his tong.

For the “being hated” part i chose for strings of rope to symbolise the Hate. I thought about barbed wire instead of rope, but when i tried it i found out that the rope would look better. For the lines that appear in the whole animation i chose for simple red lines, to add up to the blood theme that we have in the intro and outro of the total animation.

My choices.For the audio part the group decided that every animation would have a heartbeat intergrated, but in the final version you vcant hear it because of the soundtrack . I didn’t want to use a lot of extra sound elements, just the what you see is what you get sound effects. I added a sound for the sliding lines and a hissing sound for the ropes, to make it sound a bit more threatening. I found the sound files online, on the website Soundsnap.com.

I used Maya and Paint Effects to make the animation, that was a suggestion of Herman and it worked out nicely. I used Premiere CS4 to make the final adjustment and add the sound files. At first i had some trouble with Maya, then i found some tutoirals and it went smoothly.

There is one thing that I did have in the animatic but didn’t work in maya. The idea was the man figure in the first part of my animation would stop the ropes from atacking and send them off by lifting his arms as if they were a shield. Unfortunately i couldn’t find a way to make that happen in Maya, that’s why I just didn’t put it in. The visualisation of the “don’t give way to anger” part is a bit unclear, but I also think a person who sees it will not notice something is missing.

The rest of the animation i had no problems, when I knew what steps I had to make to get the result I wanted, I was surprised that it wasn’t that difficoult. All in all I am pleased with the animation I made, and I don‘t think i would have done it any differen in an other time.

Extra task.For the extra task I was in the Intro/Outro team, with Freek-Jan, Tuomas and Marie. At first we decided to go for the blood theme and then we thought about the style of the intro and outro. We came up with some ideas and later we decided to seperate the intro and outro activities, me and Freek-Jan were the ones responsible for the outro.

For the outro we modelled a big artery in maya using a technique similar to the one I used for my personal animation. Most things we decided together, Freek-Jan did spent more time on it, mainly because we worked on his computer and we both had a full agenda. Freek-Jan did the bloodcells and particles, with he made with the same tutorial Marie used for the intro.

In the end I think the outro doesn’t look as good as I hoped, we had some difficoulties and had to change a lot of settings, but in the end i think we have done a great job in the short time we had for it.

My experiences.I liked working in a team and working on a project this big, i have never done anything like it before. I think it’s great that we worked together like this and finished the DVD in time, the end result is really great and I was surprised that so many different animations could still look good when combined.

I did miss some classes which i could have used for feedback, for advise or just to keep the rest up to date with my progress. Some times I was busy with other school projects, I still had a lot to do over from last year but most things i did finish with a good grade.

About my own animation.I am happy about the result. Some thing I could have done differently, but thats something I will take with me for another time. In the beginning of the project I would try to combine a few programs together for the animation, but in my animation I didn’t need to.