For our interactive installation, a team of 14 students from ASU Prep Local created a room designed for a playful, collaborative, and fully immersive adventure, including art and writing reflecting on childhood, guilt, and acceptance.
In a team, we split into three groups, with me and a partner focusing on animation and character design. For our group, we focused on making our characters and animating them.
Our first step was designing our characters. For our contribution, we would create two alien characters and animate them doing three actions: hiding, sitting, and walking. My alien was named Rocks and I wanted to give him a broader and triangular appearance. Discussing with my partner, we decided that both our aliens would have a blobby appearance.
Shape Layout
Proportions-
Expressions
Additional Features
Finishing our first draft of our characters, I was told that I needed to make more edits to the character. They stated that our installation was to have a more kid friendly and relaxing approach and that my character wasn't detailed enough. To address this, I took inspiration from my partner's characters and adapted elements from hers while also adding my own take on Rocks.
Addressing Criticism and Revising Rocks
2nd Draft Proportions
Different Alien Designs 1
Different Alien Designs 2
Final Design
3D View
The second draft of Rocks was given more praises than the first. After a quick discussion of our characters, we started coloring our characters. For Rocks, his primary colors were red and orange to give him a brighter apperance.
The next process was to start animating. We decided to rotoscope for our characters. For this, we recorded ourselves performing acts of walking, hiding, and sitting so that we can trace with our characters in our animation.
After videoing ourselves, we began animating. I used the blender software, as I wanted to explore a new software for animation. It was hard to use the software at first before I started getting the hang of it as I animated, frame by frame.
Each of us animated three actions our character made. Once we finished, we made sure to render the files by TIF and send them to the google drive. While we were animating, I had to help set up the projectors and projector sheets before our event started in the few coming weeks.
Once we set up the room, we made quick last minute adjustments before the day, as we wanted to make sure the projectors and animations are perfected and in place. As the day came, we started setting up props, turning on the projectors, and turning off the lights to create our immersive experience.
Caves and Props that Represented Regrets and Mistakes
Forest
