Animated Narratives Week 7

By Harry Hughes

This week I made a short 3D animation using Blender following the prompt "What if..... we're living in a simulation played by aliens".

In recent weeks I've really enjoyed learning little bits and pieces on Blender and so I set myself an achievable yet challenging goal this week of making an actual animation with some form of story. First up I mindmapped some ideas, and came up with this image of some aliens looking over a 3D generated room with some humanoid figures in it. I then wanted the aliens watching over the scene to switch with the humans. OK- ambitious for someone at my level (basically level 1), so I ended up simplyfying it slightly to make the humans/ aliens into very simple spherical creatures, one red and one blue. I followed a few tutorials to build the room, the bed, the lights and the lamps and to add materials to the space and to the world in general. Then I figured out how to animate the camera...

I wanted the audio to be simple and from Paul Taberham's reading this week on the history of audio in animated films, I wanted to make some zip crash style sounds for the transition moment when the blue ball gets trapped in the scene. In zip crash audio, sound plays an important role in the humour of the film and is often highly stylised. It was the first time editors could cut sounds together and add in sounds at any stage of the editing process so they started to have fun with it. I came up with this metal scrape sound- it's a match for the cross dissolve of the video and definitely creates a sense of mystery and confusion, some of my favourite filmic motifs....