Intention
As the context of the playable city project has changed again(!), I’ll probably be responsible for making an app that will serve as a “time machine” in the Playable City experience. In the time machine, there is an AI to give instructions to the players. I would like to visualize it as something like a robot in the app. Therefore, experiments were done on some gestures of a robot-shaped object. For instance, when it’s happy, it jumps or dances.
Ideation
Jumping
I worked on jumping with references to the slow-motion jumping video. The person bent his legs and the centre of gravity went down. As he straightened his legs, the reaction force from the ground pushed him up quickly and he put his hands up. His legs left the ground after his body was lifted up.
The centre of gravity of the robot was pulled down in the beginning, it goes up quickly after that with its hands going up at the same time. It’s head and body go up earlier than its base. Because its head is light and thus it lifts more than its body.
Dancing
Since the Playable city is a project for people of age ranges, it would be interesting to make the character dance in a fun way. Hence, I used the dancing motion of Kita Kita Oyaji as the reference of the dancing motion of the robot. I focused on the strange wringing of his hand for the robot dance.
I like the dancing animation more, and thus I picked it for the colour experiment. For the first experiment, I changed the colour of the background constantly and left the robot remained black. It gives a feeling that the robot is dancing in a disco. Then, I tried to divide the background into two halves horizontally and coloured the lower part with the colour of sand and the upper part with the colour of the sky. As time passed by, the colour of the “ground” went darker and the “sky” became orange to present the process of a robot dancing from day time till the dusk.
Reflection
After uploading the animation experiment to Youtube, I realized that I’ve missed the lowering of the center of gravity shortly after the person landed. Yet, working on this exercise let me realize that paying attention to the reference motion frame-by-frame helps a lot when animating certain motion to make it “feels right”.
These experiments also gave me a concept of manipulating the colours to present completely different situations. The change in colours can represent a location (the disco) as well as the flow of time (from daytime to dusk).
References
Jumping reference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN3apht8zRs
Dancing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB7Vb8tqTps
Links of the experiments:
Robot jump
https://youtu.be/HYY3DrxAjCA
Robot Dance
https://youtu.be/UGsvyxu0zUM
Robot dancing in Disco
https://youtu.be/kshjft9bd9k
Robot dancing on the seaside
https://youtu.be/SF_hU8909h8