The Little Tree
Group 2 | Nicky Fung | Crystal Lam | Sindy Yu | Vivian Lau
Week 1 | Brainstorming
First desk critique with our TA, William. We proposed our initial idea to him, which is a simple short animation story. We decided to focus on creating a commercial as our final project. After some iteration processes, we figured that we wanted to make something that could raise awareness to world's issue. We were inspired by Greenpeace's "Ending Overfishing" video. We thought it might be interesting to create something that is related to a world's issue, therefore, we decided to make a story about cutting down trees.
Ending Overfishing is an animation created under Greenpeace and other organizations addressing the issue of overfishing.
Week 2 | Finalizing Concept
The concept of our story is to raise the awareness of overcutting trees. We have decided to utilize a story telling approach to draw audience attention. Throughout the plot, there is one main tree as the protagonist leading through the transitions.
Week 3 | Storyboarding
Hand sketching the storyboard for each scene and character.
Week 4 | Pitched Storyboard
Recorded narration along with sketches of storyboard describing camera views and scene transitions.
Week 5 - 8 | 3D Modelling
Modelling characters and objects such as trees, animals and sceneries into 3D modles on Maya.
Week 9 | Animatics
Basic animation on Maya building the entire story based on storyboard with texture and lighting. Animals are with basic rigging, peopel and cars also have main structure. Both forest and city landscape have the main elements.
Week 10 | Animation
In order to make our story more lively, animation has been taken place this week. Living objects such as animals and people are rigged by bone element in the Maya software. Trees have been inputted with more motion details to create a more realistic feel to the forest. Buildings are animated in a more exaggerated style to emphasize our story climax.
Week 11 + 12 | Adding more details + scenes
After receiving critiques from our animatics, we decided to add more details to the main scenes. We added some elements such as streetlights, benches, and shops to the city landscape. We also added mountains and river to make the forest scene looks more realistic.
Week 13 | Final Renderings
Starting to render the scenes into images and do the final editing with After Effects.
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