In my final project, I made a clock inspired by clouds. There are two panels on the screen, the right side indicates seconds, and the left indicates minutes. On the left side, there are 60 boxes in total, each minute the cloud released from the right side would be filled into a box on the left.

There were a lot of challenges with Unity and I’m glad I could make it this far to almost something I imagined at the beginning. Instead of setting up animations in Unity, I manipulated most things in scripts – it seemed like the only way when every movement is connected to real-time. I also found scripting to be an easier way to keep track of everything, just open the code file and change values, compared to going through inspector layers and finding the thing you want to change.

I used the function “System.DateTime.Now” a lot in this project, to call different actions at a specific time.

However, when I built it into an application, the particle systems (ie. the clouds) couldn’t be activated. I haven’t got the time to solve this problem, so for the presentation, I rendered a video for my final demo.

Say Trees!

These two weeks, we focused mainly on After Effect and Aero to create animations and put them into real-life settings. Our story is about a day of some trees; they visited this concrete jungle, New York, and had some short dialogues with us along the way. 

Creation

Starting with the concept, we created a storyboard. This storyboard evolved a lot as the project unfolded. In the beginning, we did not consider real-life settings, so the plot was slightly different. But as we learned about Aero, we changed our story into a bit more interactive piece. 

Having the storyboard, we then start drafting our characters in Illustrator and later bringing them into life in After Effect.

Most of the video was done in After Effect, including the animation of trees and texts. Then we place those animated elements in Aero instead of using the 3D camera tracker in AE. However, some assets were more challenging to control than others. So for those parts, we edited them back in after recording in Aero.

To me, if we were to create a pre-recorded video, I think the camera tracker in After Effect performs a lot better than Aero. However, the way Aero can include audience and interactions are also important. Unfortunately, we did not manage to make it into a live, interactive piece this time, but I’d definitely like to try it out in the future!

Final video

This week, together with my partners Julia and Shirley, we created two stop motion loops.

Leaves

We used the leaves that Shirley collected to make a short loop of leaves turning brown as they float through the screen. We had leaves in similar shapes that were in different colors, so that we could swap leaves every other frame to create this smooth transition. 

[Read more…] about Stop Motion

This week, Ophelia, Yuan, and I discussed some topics we’re interested in exploring. 

[Read more…] about Runway ML

From the article I read online, I understand synthetic media as artificial creation or modification made by machines, and this often includes AI (artificial intelligence) and ML(machine learning). 

Following this definition, I found some works that I’d like to share.

[Read more…] about Synthetic Media