For animation, we have done 2 major projects in our Narrative Visual Perspective unit. Our first project was a lip-syncing project that led up the the Narrative animation.
In order to lip sync our character that I made last unit, I had to create various version of the same mesh with a different facial structure that references all the various sounds that a face could make. I would then be able to combine all nine different versions into one model that could change between them with various sliders.
For the sound that I lip-synced my character too, I used the same clip as last lip-syncing unit, as a throwback to my junior year.
Take a look at the final product below!
Narrative Animation
The narrative animation was probably the hardest project I have done in animation so far. We were put into groups of 4, with me as the team leader. My group members were Kai Zhou, Michael Kurgas, and Teo Teeter Rangel.
For the Animation, we decided to be very ambitious. We wanted to include all 4 of our characters, have a decently long animation, and have many different locations and scenes.
This was a major challenge for many reasons. First, when we modeled and rigged our characters, our inexperience led to our rigs being very buggy. This led to many crashes and scenes that we had to find workarounds for. Another challenge was having a multitude of scenes. Unlike most other groups who wanted their entire story to take place in 1-2 scenes, we had to fully model a forest, bar, city street, bakery, and all the various buildings. This I believe we overestimated our confidence in. Our team ended up needing to use models downloaded from the internet for the bakery and the ending shop scene, plus the trees.
Take a look at the animation below!
Take a look at the other productions here!
Looking back on our Narrative Animation, I am really proud of the teamwork and collaboration that got the story completed. I think that we all worked really hard, and it shows in our work. Taking the entire process that we started out very early in the school year, and using that work really makes me feel proud of what I have done, compared to non freestyle projects where once we are done with it, we forget about it. I am very glad that we were able to use all aspects of our skillset to create a work of art I am proud of.