APD - Week 2 - Play and Time

Theme

Play and Time

Context

For this week’s theme of ‘Play and Time’, I went for the literal meaning of both play and time. I tried to show how our devotion to playing can make us unaware of time and affect our lifestyle. This is based on how my life is during school breaks.

Method

To create this loop animation, I first modeled the scene and the room in Maya. I used a character rig that I had and posed it in the bed and the chair and exported everything to Unity. In Unity, I wrote a script to create the day and night cycle. I then put everything in place and recorded the game screen. After that, I took the raw video to After Effects, edited it, and created a looping animation.

Response

I created a loop animation as a response to this week’s theme of ‘Play and Time’. Through this loop animation, I tried to tackle the addiction side of playing (games, in this case). I tried to show how a person can get addicted to games and be unaware of their surroundings. We all have been through this exact scenario, where you get so absorbed in something, that you are unaware of what time it is or how long have you been playing. 

In this animation, I used the day and night cycle to show the passing of time and used the positioning of the character to show his affected schedule, i.e. sleeping during the day and playing throughout the night.

Reflection

When trying to think about what I wanted to do for this week’s theme, I kept on getting distracted and my mind kept on going to the game that I have been waiting to play. I just bought the game and haven’t had time to play it yet. This is when I thought about how I have spent a huge amount of time playing games and not caring about what is going on in the world. So, I started thinking about how I can show this in my work for this week. I wanted to stay away from the usual 3D software but ended up coming back to it when I had the idea of trying out a loop animation.

I had lots of fun creating this. I played around with the lighting system in Maya and Unity to get the best day-night cycle result. I am not too familiar with the technicalities of lighting a scene, so even though I was working in a 3D software, I was doing something that I was not familiar with. First, I tried to create the day-night cycle in Maya. After a bunch of failures, I moved on to Unity and was able to come up with something that worked. I played around with the settings for the lights for a while, to end up on something that I was happy with. 

I also had fun playing with the character rig. Trying to position it so that the message is clear to the viewers was a lot of fun. I had to try out a lot of different sleeping positions before I landed on the one, I used. I downloaded a free character rig to use on this work and playing with and dissecting the rig while I was working on this animation was a side bonus.

Through this loop animation, I showed the notion of time through the day-night cycle and I tackled the notion of play through experimentation of the software and the effects of being addicted to games.