Over the past 23 weeks, I was able to, I feel, successfully make a documentary which utilises and adapts the animated form to express itself more subjectively. Since animation is a medium I feel should be used in ways that go outside of what can be achieved with the live-action camera, I felt this to be particularly important when portraying interviews adapted from narratives of real people’s lives.
Final Film
Below is the final film, which presented 6 people’s experiences during the coronavirus lockdown in interview format. It uses visual metaphor to encapsulate how the home became an extension of ourselves during this time period by anthropomorphizing the interviewees as architecturally location-relevant houses.
Showreel
Below is the showreel, which delves into some of the processes that helped create this film and highlights the different key stages of production.
Critical Reflection
Retrospectively looking at my film, while I feel it achieved what I had initially set out to do, there are various aspects that I would change in terms of technique and visual presentation. My main regret and focus with the film is that the animation could not be as detailed as I wished, with a lot of sacrifice of secondary animation due to rigging technicalities and time constraints. With more time, I would have loved to explore exactly how each of the different characters would have moved and created individual walk cycles/ character animation tests to see how they are all personified through movement (i.e. blinks with curtains shutting etc.). Secondly, I feel there was a lot of potentials to explore more rendering capabilities and texturing. As mentioned some weeks prior, I wanted to explore how the toon shader may have looked with bump maps and different mesh deforming techniques to try and get the impression of further material, which is something I intend to explore in further depth going forward with my own personal modelling. I feel the blend of using a toon shader and additional texturing techniques is what really sells it within the style, and I look forward to exploring this further. For this film, I also feel I could have researched further into 3D lighting for Arnold as I struggled to adjust each individual environment to portray their time of day effectively. I feel this is particularly highlighted in the scenes at night, as I could have done more with the inclusion of lights with the stars and the moon.
Narratively, the piece seems to work together in humorous aspects, with a few hidden references to other characters and the idea they all exist in the same world; however, in future, I really wish to push for detail in my project, working far more extensively on creating detailed models to see environments. This included researching more into simulation techniques such as X-gen, as I was unable to render ‘wind’ simulations and collisions due to time constraints. I would have also liked to have done more research into particle simulations for the clouds and smoke, and seeing if this can be paired with more stylised aesthetics.
In order to research techniques and considerations further, I have created a list of books which may assist in furthering my knowledge in 3D for future projects.
Further reading:
- John Wiley and Sons Inc. (2013) Maya Visual Effects The Innovator’s Guide. Autodesk Official Press.
- Abishek, K. (2021) Immersive 3D Design Visualisation: With Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine 4. New York: A press.
- Beane, Andy. (2012) 3D Animation Essentials. J. Wiley and Sons: Indianapolis.
- Giambruno, Mark. 3D graphics and Animation: From Starting Up to Standing Out. New Riders: Indianapolis.