The three classes I had were Intermediate Maya, Screenplay Writing and Advanced Computer Animation. The Advanced Computer Animation class is sort of a final project class for the Animation degree. The class consisted of six people, and we had to work as a group for the fifteen weeks of the semester to come up with one project. However stressful it may have been at times, this was a really fun class. There really were no requirements for the project. We just had to have a final animation at the end of the semester. In week one we brainstormed and came up with an idea for an animation. We then created a storyboard, which I can safely say pretty much stayed in tact through the duration of the project. We ended up adding more scenes, but the progression of the story stayed the same. Jobs were assigned to everyone and a script was written. After fifteen weeks, we managed to finish on the final day.
Below is the final product. Continue reading below the video when you are done to read more about the process. Enjoy!
As we came up with more and more absurd features (bulletproof, babysits, etc.)for the product, we came up with a character who would act as a voice of reason to the ridiculous things that are taking place. He would start as a curious consumer, but after not getting answers he would start to get aggravated. This became an amusing aspect of the whole animation. We had the infomercial start normal and just build to absurdity.
We were able to split up the jobs effectively. Two people modeled all of the characters, I rigged them with skeletons, most most of us each modeled different "it" scenes and one person gathered all of the sound effects. We even brought in outside help for the voice actors. Three different friends of group members provided the voices for the announcer, host and voice of reason. One of our lucky members voiced both the paid actor and the assistant. I also credit the voice actors for creatively contributing by improvising a bit and coming up with new lines we eventually used. It was trully a group effort all around.
We used a variety of software tools througout the project. The characters were modeled using Lightwave. Most of the rest of the modeling and animation was done in Autodesk Maya. The audio was edited using Adobe Soundbooth. A couple of scenes were animated using Adobe After Effects. Adobe Photoshop was important at times. Adobe Premiere Pro was the final software used to edit everything together and create a video output file.
Fifteen weeks, six people (plus a few), several software packages and one final video.