Our Narrative Project in Animation was a huge project, that went all the way from learning to rig and animate our characters in 3D to creating a full narrative animation with our classmates!

Throughout the project I learned so much about modeling, texturing and coloring, rigging, animation, lighting, and more.

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The very first thing we did was create a character bio for our character model from last unit. I ended up re-designing my character’s clothing too, to make them fit more with the name and personality I gave them. This is Clover!

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The next thing we did was create walk, run, and jump animations with our character. To do this we had to create a rig and learn to use keyframes to animate each bone! Here is the result:

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Next, we made a lip sync animation! We created different lip shapes and put all of them into one character using the Maya Shape Editor, which allowed us to swap between different lip shapes using keyframe animation. We used MoCap data to animate our character after we did the lip sync to the song!

I chose the same song as I did last year, “Everything Stays” from Adventure Time. I thought it would be nice to have both 2D and 3D lip syncs to the same audio! Here is the final result!

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Narrative Animation

Finally, we got into groups and worked together to create a short narrative animation! I worked together with Sofia D. and Estelle S. who I had so much fun collaborating with :]

Our story follows two childhood best friends, Clover and Pollen, who even when facing some not-so-nice peers, always have each other. Please enjoy!

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Behind the Scenes: Storyboarding

The first step in creating this story was to plan out our story and storyboard, which you can see below! It was a messy process, but some of the most fun I’ve had in class. We even got down on the floor to act out certain scenes when we weren’t sure about posing.

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Behind the Scenes: Modeling & Animation

This is the background for the opening scene in our animation! I used imported models of trees, bushes, and a house to create two angles the characters could be viewed from from the center.

Here is the model of the characters’ hideout! I modeled the wood planks and positioned them around the tree, and made a sort of blanket to go on the top as a roof. I also added a ground using a plane and added lots of trees, bushes, etc. around the hideout!

Finally, here is a screenshot of what the character rigs look like! They have bones inside that we can manipulate, and animate using keyframes.

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Final Thoughts

I had so, so much fun working on this project with Sofia and Estelle. There are definitely things I would do differently next time, I’m so proud of the final product we created!

I loved that we were able to incorporate all three of our characters into the story. Throughout the process I’ve grown very attached to all of them and the story we created together. I’ve learned an incredible amount from this project too! At the start of the year I could barely use Maya, but I now have a much more solid understanding of the 3D space and how to use the software.

I also want to say thank you SO much to Mr. Cho for his help and guidance throughout the project! He helped so much with technical problems and keeping us on track to finish when our ideas were too ambitious, and his feedback really improved our story and animation too.

Overall I had so much fun, and this is definitely a project I’ll remember and look back on for the rest of my life.