For this assignment, the class was divided into different groups and tasked with creating a 30 second long 3D animation from scratch. With our previously gained knowledge of making 3D models from our other assignments, we would go on to learn so much more about the whole pipeline and process of creating an original short animation.
My group included Alisa, Dayna, Matthew and Ben; and once we started talking to each other on Blackboard, we created a Miro board to jot down our ideas and a Discord group chat to keep our links and updates.
During our first voice call meeting, We decided that we would all come up with our own ideas based around the concept of ‘Adventure’, and come back together in a few days to discuss them and flesh them out more. For my idea, I wanted to focus on creating appealing designs that were made from simple shapes that we would be able to model without too much trouble. So I came up with the idea of little toys constructed like chess pieces, following along with shape language to help convey each character’s personality on a visual level.
In terms of design, I am still very happy with this concept and I believe I was able to successfully create appealing designs! When it comes to creating a story inspired by ‘Adventure’, however, I struggled to include it with this concept, and I’m honest enough to realise that when presented with everyone else’s ideas, I couldn’t find a way to seamlessly make it work.
When we came back together, we looked over each others’ ideas and discussed them further. We had a lot of ideas at first, but we were able to cut it down to just 6; which included my stuffed toys, the cartoon-ish perspective of a golf ball, a chicken crossing the road, an engaging game of chess, and two different alien stories with one focused on a human being abducted to play a card game and an alien and giraffe becoming friends through bonding over their antennae.
With these ideas all gaining favour from the group, we decided that we would go away to create a storyboard for whatever ideas we liked most, and come back to try and make a final decision. For my stuffed toys idea, I tried to implement the idea of the toys going on a seemingly grand adventure, until we’re brought back to reality to find a little girl being called away by her parents.
When we all posted our storyboards a few days later, we went on to discuss how each story would be developed in 3D, and considered how that would impact our creative process in the future. We took a lot of time to evaluate the pros and cons of each story, and with that we went on to vote out which stories we didn’t want to work on. From this, we widdled it down to just the 2 alien stories, which we considered to both be really strong concepts in their own ways (The ‘Poker Alien’ story employing a good comedic twist, and the ‘Giraffe Alien’ story being super cute and wholesome.)
From here, we further developed these two stories by creating more concept art and refining the ideas into a very simple and clear premise. For my concept art, I took reference from all the images we added to our Miro board, ranging from iconic bug-eyed portrayals of aliens and Among Us inspired astronauts to cartoon deer depictions and cutesy Neopets.
Through one more round of voting after collecting up all the new concept art, we came to the final decision of the ‘Alien Giraffe’ story.