Storytelling Through Computer Animation
Objectives
I really enjoyed our group conversation today, and the small-group breakout that took place afterwards. Lots of good thought and discussion regarding our first short story.
For Monday, each group has different tasks... but, they're all kinda similar, and kinda different. (We'll be working together across groups to bring everything together in the end, so everyone will get a taste of all parts of the project.)
If you're in the character group, you're modeling two characters from the story. You should have overlap as well.
You should be modeling two scenes from the story. You should also be thinking about sound effects and soundtrack, and hopefully, you've all split up the scenes so that you each have two to work on.
The narrative group should put together some "scenes" that have objects and characters... but you should not focus on those objects and characters in any detail. That is, you can drop in a gnome to represent Harrison, and do nothing to it. Your job is a bit more abstract: develop some camera work and cinematography to support the narrative that you imagine taking place. Think about angles and what they say about the characters during those scenes.
You should submit three things:
A Word document discussing your scenes/characters/cinematography, discussing each of the two pieces and what you're trying to capture in your work. (This is like an artist's statement: it's about helping the viewer understand what you're trying to convey.)
Two Alice worlds. Each world should contain one of your pieces of work.
There's a spot in Moodle! Yay!
DO GREAT AWESOME.
Be aware, we're going to iterate on this. Put another way, we're going to discuss and critique this work, and potentially revise and refine it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't invest yourself in the work, but it does mean that we're going to come back together and collaborate across groups to see how each-other's work impacts what we're thinking.
But, that's all part of the creative process.
STOP HERE.
EVERYTHING BELOW THIS POINT WAS MY ORIGINAL IDEA FOR THE HOMEWORK. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE STUFF BEYOND THIS POINT. I HAVE ONLY KEPT IT FOR FUTURE HISTORICAL REFERENCE.
This is an assignment in three pieces. It has three deadlines. This is to force you to have a bit of time to "breathe" between each piece... time for the ideas to work, in the back of your mind, without being rushed.
Our goal is to bring together an animation for a short story. Consider this a "group midterm project," if you will.
To bring our work together, we're going to have to have a common set of character designs that run our code. And, to do that, we're going to have to design these characters, export them, and share them.
Pick a character. Pick a character from the story. It could be a primary character, or it might be a character that you think is critical to your scene.
Create them. Think about what makes this character interesting. Remember that everyone has a "handicap" that is forced upon them by the government. You can probably simulate this with props and geometric shapes that you attach to your character.
Do this for two characters in your story. Hopefully we'll get an interesting range of characters, and where we have multiple characters that are the same, we'll either combine elements of them, or perhaps have a vote/competition to decide which to keep. (A "casting," if you will.)
You've storyboarded three scenes. From these, pick two.
Now, over the weekend, animate two of these scenes. You want to start experimenting with the ideas we've explored so far: color, scene, and camera work to create a mood or convey information about the story. Your storyboards, if they're thorough, will provide a good guide for your animation work.
This website is provided under a CC BY-SA license by the
The Berea CS Department.
Fall 2013 offering of Storytelling taught by Matt Jadud