Overview

Project theme: “__ cycles”

For this project, you will produce an animation centered around a theme that you create by choosing a pair word and combining it with “cycles”. For example, if your pair word is “light”, then your project theme would be “light cycles”. This does not have to be the title of the work. Complete the project theme by filling in the blank. You will design, model, texture, animate, and render a 30 second animation solving for the project theme. Once you have a project idea and storyboard created, locate sound that you find on freemusicarchive.org that is licensed for remix. Pay special attention to the audio track’s licensing. You cannot use anything that states no derivatives, indicated by “ND” in the license. If the license requires you to give credit (CC-BY), you can give credit in the Vimeo.com (where you will be uploading your video) description. You are encouraged to edit, modify, and combine different audio tracks to suit the needs of your animation.

You will also critically reflect on your work and the project theme in a 150 word work statement.

A successful project will demonstrate understanding and mastery of 3D tools and processes, application of formal design principles, attention to detail and composition, and lead to discussion about your work during a critique.

Project format

Choose a format that you can reasonable accomplish within the timeframe of the project. Examples include:

• Narrative short film
• Motion graphics for branding and identity
• Explainer animation
• VJ loops for live performances
• Experimental or non-narrative content: Examples on vimeo.com
• Scientific or data-driven simulations and visualizations
• Projection mapping (projecting video onto structures or surfaces).

The video should contain 30 seconds of animation ±5 seconds. While this may not seem like a very long time for an animation, it’s actually quite a lot of work to make 30 well crafted and polished seconds in terms of animation, modeling and materials, and rendering quality.

Production Process (All steps required)

Week 1: Pre-production

1. Concept(s):
   • Resources
     • What makes for a good concept: Concept Definition, Concept Formation, Design Concept Thoughts
   • Requirements:
     • 3 to 5 different written ideas.
     • Sound clip from freemusicarchive.org.
     • Visual reference sheet(s): Example of visual reference sheet.
     • Note: Develop the concept around your interests. Are you interested in fashion or video game environments? Great, solve the theme around your interests!
2. Storyboard
   • Resources
     • Template download: storyboard-template.pdf
     • Tutorial 1: LinkedIn Learning
     • Tutorial 2: Storyboarding
   • Requirements:
     • Create thumbnail sketches with descriptions to show how your animation will work.
     • Upload storyboards to assignment dropbox

Week 2-4: Production

1. 3D Scene Layouts (formerly called Animatic)
   • See demo videos for detailed instructions
   • Tutorial: Shot composition advice
   • Typically, and animatic is a moving version of the storyboards with sound. For our purposes, we will combine this idea with 3D animation blocking to produce viewport renders edited with sound.
   • Requirements:
     • Create a 15-30 second compressed .mp4 of your viewport animation videos edited with sound. Please consider relevant aspects of camera, composition, staging, pacing, and animation.
     • 1080 HD preset
     • Post your in-process work to the Project 2: Progress report discussion thread
2. Test Renders
   • Note: 20 second render times per frame takes 4 hours for a computer to render 30 seconds worth of frames
   • Requirements:
     • 3 to 5 test renders, each from a different part of the animation
     • 1080 HD preset
     • Render time must be under a minute (unless you plan to pay for an online render farm)
3. Meet with instructor if needed

Week 4-5: Finish production

1. Statement
   • Requirements:
     • Write and add upload a statement format named (min 150 words) called statement.doc
2. Final Submission
   • Requirements:
     • Upload .mp4 video file in compressed H.264 format
     • .txt file with link to Vimeo.com
3. Revision (optional)
   • Requirements:
     • Upload revised .mp4 video file in compressed H.264 format
     • .txt file with link to Vimeo.com

Writing a work statement

A work statement is a clear articulation about what you’ve made. This is not a journal entry, where you might feel compelled to complain about problems you’ve had with software, or that it didn’t turn out how you wanted. Instead, imagine this is being printed in a magazine, or put on the side of a gallery. What do you want your viewers to come away with?

Example projects with work and artist statements:

• geist.xyz by Zeitguised
• Mushtari by Neri Oxman
• Institute for New Feeling by Nina Sarnelle

Include the following to create a clear work statement:

1. Your name and date
2. Title of your work
3. What did you create?
   • IE - “I created an animation that depict …”
4. Why did you make it?
   • IE - “I created this work because I am interested in exploring …”
5. What is the work about?
   • IE - “This work is primarily focused on …”
6. How is what you did in your work demonstrating what what you’ve said the work is about?
   • IE - “You can see an example of this in the work where I have used … to reference …”
7. Were there any unexpected, interesting, or strange outcomes?
8. Did you have any interesting moments where the projects theme helped you understand something new or from a new perspective?

Constraints

All assets used in the production of the work must be created by you, be appropriately licensed for use, or be appropriated in a transformative way that significantly alters the nature of the original asset. For example, you can use a texture pack you downloaded from a texture website, however, if you render an image of just a flat plane with the texture applied, this is not really creative transformation since the entirety of the image is work from someone else. Your transformation and contextualization is what’s important. A render with a background that uses an image from Google image search (please don’t do this) that comprises more than 50% of the work is also not really enough creative transformation. If someone reviews your work and says that the image’s background is their favorite part of the image, you’ll have to then explain how you didn’t make the background, which is not a great situation to be in.