Today, we were introduced to our new module: Animated Narratives. It focuses on 3D animation primarily and we were introduced to our new assignment which is to create a 30-60 second animated short film with our group. I’m excited to move away from the heavy focus of modelling onto animation as I have been excited for this since the beginning of the first semester. We were allowed to form our own groups, and my group consists of:

• Myself
• Becca
• Sarah
• Alicia

I’m excited to work with them as they are my main friends in university and we have created a lot of characters and stories together, and have proven to work extremely well in a collaborative group setting. I found it relieving to be able to form our own groups as I feel like we can get into the meat of the work much quicker with familiar faces. However, I’m not completely closed off to the idea of meeting new people, as this is what university is all about!

Film Analysis

In class today, we met our lecturer Alec who is taking the lead for this semester. We got right into the module and began with a presentation on discussing the genre, storyline, climax and plot of a short film by Pixar called “Lifted”. It follows an alien who is being assessed on their ability to successfully abduct a human, and follows how they humorously fail to do so, such as accidentally hitting the human off walls or dropping them on accident. Even though it is short, the film does an excellent job at providing intriguing characters, motives, suspense, obstacles and resolutions within just a few minutes of runtime. I found this exercise to be beneficial as it had us think quickly on how to analyse a film in a short amount of time as well as picking out crucial details in a short video to test our knowledge on story structures and timing.

Group Work

For our next exercise, we were given Story Dice by Alec and Rachel in our groups to get our brains thinking of concepts for our short films. Our film’s brief is “Food”, and we have basic complete creative freedom over every aspect. I found the Story Dice to be very helpful as we had a lot of fun with getting creative with such small prompts. Each side of the die had different icons, such as knights, broomsticks, mice and more.

After the Story Dice, we got into our group beside our whiteboard and we began coming up with ideas for our film. We wanted to challenge ourselves by coming up with 50 ideas, so we all spent about an hour together coming up with tons of random concepts. We decided to have an absolute blast and try and think of insane concepts, because we find that the weirder, the better.

We spoke with Rachel and discussed our ideas, and we managed to narrow it down to five:

• Food Gangs in New York
• Astronaut on the search for cheese on the moon
• A stressed chef in a kitchen
• Marshmallows at camp
• Princess and The Pea
• Food slasher horror
• Nuclear Fallout TV chef

After further discussion, we decided that we wanted to narrow it down even further to our gang, camp, astronaut and medieval food concepts. We used the course of the week to develop our concepts and make concept artwork for them. We decided that we’d like to try our best to give each idea equal consideration to make it fair and also more fleshed out so we could definitively choose our best idea.

Blender Work

We also began animating in Blender by starting out with simple bouncing ball animations. By following along to videos posted to Blackboard, we animated cubes at different speeds and variation using Bezier curves and squash and stretch principles. Below is my final product:

I found this to be fun and also easy to understand. I liked how simple the videos were constructed and that key binds were mentioned as I found it to be very helpful in making the process easier. I also found it fun to incorporate the squash and stretch principle.

After that, we were tasked with animating bouncing balls at different speeds; heavy, light and medium. I followed the videos and was able to pick up very quickly on the process for animating them using the keyframes and adjusting the graphs at the later stage of animation. At first I struggled with understanding the X, Y and Z keyframing but I was able to understand it after a full watch of the tutorials. Here is my finished product which I am happy: