About
The Journey to "Emotions on Rye"
Hello! In this section, we will detail a bit of what went into the making of this short.
Initial Idea
In one week, we were tasked to come up with a capstone that we would work on for the rest of the semester. We decided to make this short because we wanted to show how our animation skills have progressed throughout the semesters. Though we knew that making an animated short would be a risk to take for our capstone, we believed that the experience that it would give us would be more vaulable than whatever we would gain from taking the easy route.
Storyboarding Phase
Before we started with any animation, we wanted to solidfy our ideas with a storyboard. Originally, these were located only on a PDF that we flipped through to shoe our peers. Eventually, we decided it would be best to have it be somewhat animated to give us a rough estimate of the timing.
Blocking Phase
From there, we entered the blocking phase for our animation. This part of our production was very fast compared to the spline, as we were just testing how we wanted the short to look. Admittedly, I have my partner Jasmine to thank for her skills with blocking, as she helped me immenesly.
Some examples of Nylah's blocking passes:
Some examples of Jasmine's blocking passes:
Spline Phase
Finally came our spline phase. This was easily the longest and hardest part of this production. Jasmine and I aimed to polish the animation that we had from our blocking phase into something smoother. We had time for around three passes of our splines and, in the end, had to settle on our final pass to turn in.
Some examples of Nylah's spline passes:
Some examples of Jasmine's spline passes:
Challenges
Apart from the time limit, our challenges mainly stemmed from complications from Maya. No matter how much we changed our workflow to compensate for the challenges Maya presented, it seemed as if Maya created more problems to add on to our load. The reason why some scenes moved quickly in our project is because in Maya, the scenes were paced as intended. It was only when we exported them did they move quicker. We couldn't move the project to another, faster computer, as the Maya file would corrupt and delete character models. Perhaps we could have planned more effectively in our file managament or used less intensive models for our animation, but I deem that this was mostly an unavoidable experience that we will only learn from.
As a side note, here's a picture from my graph editor at the time. At one point, it wouldn't even let me convert the blocking into spline!
Conclusion and Looking Forward
Despite all of the challenges and technical issues we faced, I can say that I am proud of what I have produced with Jasmine. It's not perfect by any means but, for having three months to do something I've never done before, I'd say that we were successful in what we sought out to do. I wasn't striving for this to be our best animation. I knew that with our classes and any mishaps abound, this short wouldn't get as much time as I would hoped. This, however, isn't a bad thing, as I proved to myself that I could make something just as complex, if not more, in the future. This has only opened my eyes to the animation pipeline (from creating a storyboard to even adding the sound effects and editing the video) and has solidifed that animation is something I truly wish to make a career. We will only improve from this capstone and I am excited to create more projects with Jasmine in the future.
