Fall 2021 - Professor Justin Johnson's Interactive Media Studio
Collaborator: Vicky Liu. She created the puppet used in the animations below, as well as some of the 3D assets, and was a wonderful partner throughout the entire process.
We set out to create a multi-media stop motion film: we created props, puppets, and some sets physically, and 3D modeled and designed sets the character doesn't directly interact with using Epic Games' Unreal Engine. It was an experiment in combining the different mediums to create a cohesive world, while also learning the technique behind this software and method of filming, which was all new to us.
I modeled assets in Blender, created textures using Adobe Photoshop and Unreal Engine, utilized assets from the Quixel Megascan Library, set up scenes and filmed them in Unreal Engine, sculpted and constructed physical props, animated a stop motion puppet, and composited footage in Adobe After Effects. It was a lot to learn and do in a semester, and I couldn't have done any of it without Vicky Liu and Professor Justin Johnson's help. I really appreciated getting to dip my toes into so many pieces of software and creation techniques, it gave me a good foundation for future projects.
So while we may not have created the full-length film we originally set out to create, we learned a lot, and still created something with a unique look to it. My favorite part of the process was definitely the post processing in After Effects. Getting to put everything together and using effects like masking out the character to make it look like the passed behind objects in the foreground, or adding a simple drop shadow, and seeing how everything came together was really gratifying.
