Hypercinema Week #9

Project Concept: I changed the concept of my project many times so I really only had one week to plan, create assets, animate, and export to aero. The final concept that I decided upon was to create an AR christmas card. When I send cards to family, I use the fancy ones with the pop-up decorations. I think the company is called LovePop.  The art of card crafting has only become more extravagant as time goes on, so it seemed like a logical step to me that eventually we'd make novelty digital cards. 

I could see the project that I worked on becoming a legitimate business where you could customize several assets of the card and perhaps green screen the background to be custom as well, before sending your AR card recording to a loved one. For example, my card has both English and Polish expressions of holiday wishes because my in-laws are Polish. I imagine this being one of the aspects that could be customized based on cultural or religious differences. The video and image assets could be replaced easily with personal memories. If I were to make this a business, I would offer a selection of assets you could choose from to put on the card, like replacing Santa with a snowman or replacing the tree with a menorah. Ultimately, I was envisioning a completely customizable product that would feel personal and thoughtful when gifted to someone else.

Outcome: 

Final Product

I consider this project a success in that I created something I would actually send to family members. I think the final recording of the actual project could be better because my hands were shaking and I lack appealing flat surfaces in my apartment.  I tried to set it up in front of a christmas-y wallpaper for atmosphere. 

Overall, I think I did decently with the animations. This is the kind of project that could really be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. I played around with puppet animating the santa asset but it slowed down the rendering significantly and I wasn't sure whether it enhanced the experience or took away from the illusion of it being made out of paper, since paper would never behave that way. 

The main factor that I would have needed to improve the project is time. Between the first and second week of working on this project I completely changed the concept. And it only occurred to me in class last week to create a pop-up card inspired by the real ones I mentioned. Given more time, perhaps I would have played around with puppet animating more or more fluid animation styles.

The one thing I learned from this is that there's a million ways to do any given thing and sometimes just figuring it out yourself is the fastest and easiest way. There are a lot of tutorials on pop-up style animation in after effects but none of them were particularly relevant to the type of animating I wanted to do and with AR in mind. I put together a simple solution to create the pop-up effect, albeit it looks less impressive than the other methods.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hypercinema Week #4

ArtLine: This creates line art from an image. I found this model interesting immediately. I think it has potential for a lot of reasons. It could be used to expedite the animation process by creating amazing line art from real photos. It'd be good way to incorporate real locations or people into animation easily. I also think it could be interesting as a way for non-artists to convert their pictures into a drawing. It could also be used as a learning tool for artists to better see what parts of an image to emphasize in line art and where to shade. For my concept, I would upload a series of images from a piece of media and create a manga style page with the results in illustrator or photoshop. It'd be cool to see how quickly and easily we could make things like that with this. Style2Paints: This automatically colorizes line art. I think this would be an interesting part 2 to the ArtLine model. I would put a set of photos through ArtLine to create line art and then put those gene...
Read more

Feeling Patterns Assignment #1

 P5.js code I wanted to explore patterns that aren't really repetitive in an obvious pattern way but that we still try to make sense of. Specifically, I remember someone mentioning raindrops on a window as one of the patterns they noticed and it stuck out to me because raindrops on a window isn't really a repetitive sound. The size of the drops, the amount, and the time between drops all vary every time. So why then does it stand out as a pattern? Probably because we try to make sense of the new pattern as the sound evolves and over time it all starts to sound the same. It is consistent in it's inconsistency.  For this project, I decided to play around with the sound of raindrops and specifically creating patterns and then breaking them with new patterns. Each segment is composed of a pattern. For example, short length clips spaced out evenly, but then layered with more short length clips spaced out evenly but at a different start point and some long length clips spaced out...
Read more

ICM Week #7

For my midterm project, I wanted to make a rhythm game. I was uncertain about how exactly would be the best way to go about that, but I settled on a 3x3 grid with "notes" coming in from off-screen and the proper keys would need to be pressed when the note passed in front of the corresponding box. This was a challenging and long project. I'm proud of the coding even if I think from a game design point of view it could be better. The only thing that is "incomplete" about it is that I didn't feel like coding in all of the music cues so there's enough of the game set up to play about 40 seconds right now. Right now it's coded to use the keypad, which I'm not sure if mac laptops have, but it was more intuitive than using the letter keys. There is a volume slider, but if you change the volume it also messes with the beat detection that changes the background color. So if you turn the volume all the way down, the background stops changing colors. I don...
Read more