Final Reflection on the short 3D Animation “Phobia”
First, I am going to express appreciation to my instructor Michael, TA Dave, my teammates Jason, and Jun. Without the joint effort, we cannot see the birth of such a great video clip. (At least from my perspective, I find our work awesome.) Then I want to share my final thoughts on this project.
The producing experience, for us, is relatively plain sailing, accompanied by only one small obstacle. Beginning with a brief summary of the production process. First two weeks, we have begun with a blur idea around “AI and corridors”, and then we have tried different things in Unity to have a basic understanding of what we can achieve in the later stages. After that, we have determined the basic storyline and 4 major scenes, assigning them to 4 of us. In the following weeks, we focus on scene building. From every week‘s class presentation, we receive lots of feedback, finding most of them very helpful, the scenes are revised accordingly. In the final two weeks, we finally realized that one of the teammates (I’ll keep her anonymous, and that’s the reason why there are 2 teammate names mentioned above) is not doing anything actually. So we have re-divided the work to fill the blank space of the ending part. Meanwhile, we have also focused on the storytelling and audio, music choice for the video clip. And eventually, having finalized the disparity setting and editing one day before the final presentation.
As the only 3-people team, personally speaking, I feel that we have worked closely with each other. In every week’s meeting, I can always find that we are at the same pace, making the coordination between scenes easier to handle. I am really proud of the storyline we have built and the details we have put in the video.
The storyline originates from our different perspectives on the future of HCI and AI in the first-stage discussion. After developing it further, we reached an agreement to have an open-ending rather than endow it with an ending. The story is about a bunch of scientists conducting experiments on clones to examine which AI’s intelligence ability is high enough to become a “human” and how AIs will deal with the fear. And we have used the name of “Alan Turing”, referring to the famous AI test in the beginning, aiming at guiding viewers to view the story from this particular perspective. And then we have added lots of phobia pieces of stuff to help render the atmosphere. The portal becomes the transition and the connection part between every scene, making the story coherent. Details are another carefully designed element in this clip. For example, the universe tunnel actually can be inferred from the first scene that it’s surrounding the hall. And the laughter of the kid belongs to the suddenly disappearing student. We have put lots of effort into this perspective, which we think will make the story logically stronger. And this is basically what has happened to the story part, and I will save my words on the latter plots, more details can be found directly on the youtube link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r16RhHOSJTo
Last, I want to talk about some favorite moments in the whole process.