I made this animation for the second of four projects in my ART123 Intro to Expanded Media class. We were tasked with making some form of experimental animation that had some sort of "world". I definitely used a lot of abstraction. This animation was inspired by a real life event. Click to see what the intended interpretation is. Feel free to ignore though.
Originally I wanted to include 9 panels of short looping animation, but I realized I had no idea what I wanted to fill the scene with and I did not have as much time as I anticipated. I definitely could have made it longer, and I think that there could be some benefits to doing so, but I decided to not waste the viewers time. This animation can be looped indefinitely, or not, either way of viewing is equal and has its own manner of being interpreted.
I call this the "Dungeon Crawler" scene because I intended to replicate the feeling of the early Megami Tensei games. This part was all animated in Adobe Animate. I used the masking tool to create the texutres for the walls. The textures were sourced from Touhou games and OpenGameArt. I got the texture of the floor by using an Epson document scanner to scan the texutre of the soft cases for our drawing tablets. I interrupted this scene with the leader face animations from Civilization 3. I got into Civ at a pretty young age, and I remember loving watching this video that just played them out over music from the game. I remembered it a little before I started on this project, adn I knew I wanted to include it.
I accompanied this scene with some low-mid rumbling sounds, which came from me rubbing my hands together close to a microphone. The sound effect that plays when the faces interrupt comes just from the aforementioned video I sourced it from here. The chime sound effect that plays when the maze resumes comes from Heisei Pistol Show.
This scene was really just here to pad things out a bit. I knew I wanted something like this, but I kinda had to rush to get it done. I hastily modeled the camera and got a texture from OpenGameArt for the lens. I put it into p5.js and used this special dithering shader I made earlier this year. I broke the model into 3 pieces and bound the Z position of the lens to a key and the Y position of the "battery" (just a box draw call in p5) to a key and "animated" the video by screen recording and just playing around with pressing the 2 keys.
I drew the car just in Adobe Animate. I found some inspiration on Pinterest, drew a thumbnail in my sketchbook, and then drew it in Animate. I drew 3 frames of it to give it some movement, but just left the color layer static. The background is made up of scans from Vogue magazine. I went through my 2 issues I have here at college and found good outdoor scenes that didn't look too urban. The clicking sounds are my snapping and flicking the microphone. I followed a 3/4 polyrhythm, but added more eighth note delay on the "3" to emulate the sound of the car slowing down at the end. The beats are programmed to the tempo of the animation, I set them up as just sounds in the editing program (I can't remember if I used DaVinci or Premire Pro) to play every other frame, or every 3 frames (maybe this means I counted the polyrhythm wrong).
A few days before I needed to be done with the project, I went in to the art building with my bass guitar and recorded some sounds. I recently learned about the bajoloche technique for playing bass so I tried to incorperate that to get a new sound. I noodled around for about 15 minutes and then chopped it up and stitched it together into a few "songs" in Audacity. I tried to generally associate some "songs" with certain clips, and I cut them out when the scene cut and then resumed them when they came back. I don't know if I made the connection clear enough. I worry that it just came off as sounds generally being chopped up. I also waited a little at the beginning to start the music, and I kinda wish I didn't do that, but I don't think it ruins the video or anything.
Special thanks to Apurba Chakraborty, my instructor for this class.