Brianstorm:
binaries/dualities/opposites
past/ present
local/ non-local
digital/ physical
past/ future
time/ space
AI/ human
energy/ battery
energy/ food
happy/ sad
Briefly discusses your choice of opposites/binaries in relation to your project.
I've picked number 7 (energy and battery) and number nine (happy and sad). In my project, the players are from the future and their time machine cannot function well due to the lack of energy. They have to collect energy from different time periods to go back to the future. In the app, I present the energy in the form of a battery. Thus, I came up with the binary of battery and energy.
On the other hand, the AI character looks sad because the player is trapped in the past. When the players collect all the energy to go back to the future, the AI character will look happy. Therefore, I picked the happy and sad opposites.
What route you chose A or B? and why?
I've chosen option A because it fits with my project, to animate the AI character in the time machine, more.
Describe your thinking behind your approach to the experiments you conducted
As advised by Nick about not using the bezier curves and working with a more frame-by-frame method, I switched from Adobe After Effects to Animate this week. I’ve picked the character design with the most number of votes to animate in this exercise.
energy/battery
In our app, there will be an animation to show the collection of energy when the players scan the AR tracker. I experimented with the expression of charging up the battery with energy by passing a stream of energy in the form of waves through the battery.
Happy/sad
The AI character is going to show different emotions in the app. Firstly, I experimented with the blinking eyes. Then, I tried to change the neutral face to a happy face as well as a sad face.
Metamorphosis
It’s my first time to work with Animate, I chose to work on the metamorphosis from neutral to happy and then sad because it seems more related to my project proposed in folio 1. I thought about how to make the metamorphosis look neutral. Then, I thought about the old television in which the horizontal stripes go from the top to the bottom of the screen over time. I thought it could be a “medium” for metamorphosis.
Old television: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptVyFS8T9QI
Reflect on the outcome pieces.
It takes a much longer time to work on animation in a frame-by-frame way than using after effect. For the energy/ battery binaries, I think the waves of energy going into the battery can be more dynamic instead of translating horizontally.
For the happy/sad opposites and metamorphosis, I quite like the outcome piece of metamorphosis. It really gives me the feeling of a robotic and old television. Yet, only the “facial expression” of the character changes over time may look too boring. Maybe I can try to make the character floating slightly up and down to give the feeling of a “future robot”.
Is there any way your exercise might feed into your larger studio project or inspire an aspect of it?
I can shift to use Adobe Animate to animate the character in my project. The animation looks richer if the character changes from a happy face to a sad face through metamorphosis. It can somehow trigger the curiosity of the audiences to guess what’s happening during the metamorphosis and thus engaging the audiences.
Binary (Battery/ Energy)
https://youtu.be/DsByipJzp-s
Robot opposite (Happy/Sad)
https://youtu.be/LR_lhhNkTJI
Robot Metamorphosis
https://youtu.be/hC9UXr0dm8k