*Refer to Hypercinema Assignment Week 7 - Animation: Storyboard for the early stage of this project.
First week, we prepared every character in a separate PSD. So in the second week, we were able to quickly divide our workload.
We organized the animation details by characters, body parts and movements.
We each worked on 2~3 characters, making the animated assets. We got together to check on each other's work, talked about the animation style and aesthetic. Most importantly, we figured out the best practice on exporting collectable project files.
Thanks to the great workflow, this week we were able to quickly move on to combining all our animated assets into one final project.
While Leia began constructing the physical diorama, I collected all the projects, used lighting to color each character (thanks to Marianne's suggestion, it was incredibly fast and effective).
The image to the right is one of the artwork from Gabriel Alcala, based on which we colored Sister Ray.
I tried overlaying them all on the diorama image, thinking they could be exported into one single animation, and that it would be easier to match to the music time code. But Francisco pointed out the content would look flat in AR, so we should export each characters as individual animation, and edit their placements in Aero instead.
As we were adding assets to Aero, we couldn't get Aero to recognize our diorama box, it kept seeing the table, floor, chair or even my lap as a surface.
We brought our project to the Feedback Collective, and were advised to either lift the diorama away from other surface, or to add some sort of QR code-like target as part of the set.
The QR code method worked. So we decided to make sailor's carpet real with a QR code pattern.
And made a bigger diorama box!
DEMO version (Friday 11. 12. 2021)
After Friday's demo testing, there were still flaws - the characters' positions', anchor target not registered correctly. Eventually we made a very big QR code that goes just outside the box, and adjusted each character's position by its x, y, z values instead of pinching and dragging it.
The properly working version is shown in the first video on this page.
I am incredibly grateful for my teammates for being diligent with problem-solving, open to try new things, and resilient when facing technical difficulties. None of us was familiar with the tools and had little animation experience, but we made this happen! It was a challenging but joyful lesson.