Purpose and Goals
The purpose of the project was to be positive in some sort of way to the audience to at least add a little bit of happiness or life within them. The goal of the project was to encompass this feeling around the audience that there is more to life than it seems. You don't have to limit yourself or let anyone else limit yourself, be the person you want to be. There were so many poems with deep meaning behind it and I loved them all but in a sense of you taking in the music, sound design, you might not be listening to the lyrics themselves and just watching the visuals. So when I wrote the lyrics of my poem, it didn't seem like there was much meaning behind it. There aren't any really deep words or connections, keeping it basic allowed the audience to make their own connections without encrypting the message(not saying that is bad).
Planning Process
Comparing my storyboard from the beginning to what the final product is, many things have changed. In the beginning, I originally was going to animate a character in 2D(Krita), model an environment in 3D(Blender), create the music(CakeWalk by Bandlab), and try and go deep with the sound design in post production(Davinci Resolve). In the end I dropped 2D animation entirely, animated in 3D, created the music in FL Studio, and still finished in Davinci Resolve. My schedule completely changed, many things went wrong, and I had to figure out what I could and couldn't do in the time of the final stretch. Learning was a very large part to it like for example, shading nodes were one of the biggest things I have learned and still don't know much of it. It wasn't stressful though, I surprisingly had a lot of fun even though there were many hiccups along the way.
Creativity & Technology Usage
Creative Process
I was playing around with my keyboard trying to find the feel that I wanted and after a little I got a general and basic idea. Once I had went to my friend's house to use his software to fully build the music his keyboard was very sensitive and weren't weighted which caused the process to be strange. I would have to change the cut and change the velocity of the notes within the program because of it feeling bloated, the samples for the software's keyboard was different than what I had. Adding slight reverb to the keys and giving the volume of them to be slowly increasing was very important to let the piano still be alive when the song gets energetic.
FL Studio
FL Studio is a very powerful DAW that amazed me with the help of my friend Tony Chavez. The goal was to bring the music to increase emotionally with the visuals and poem and the use of multiple tools like the audio editors (Edison, Newtime, & Newtone). Equalizing all of the audio and changing the velocity of the instruments gave the power to change the aggression so the song can grow correctly and not as rigidly. Lastly another basic tool that was amazing to me was being able to move notes and resize them.
Blender - Nodes/Landscape
Blender was the main tool that I used throughout project 4 letting me create terrain, backgrounds, textures, models, animations, particles, and more! I tried to use many aspects of it, especially the node system in the program that can change basic materials into completely different designs. The node system is like visual scripting, you build a material with an different nodes to get a specific style that is wanted. For example, below are two examples of the nodes for the mountains and one for the Northern lights.
Blender - Texturing
I also used Texture Painting to create the models different facial animations like the eyes being open, closed, and angry. There aren't many tools but you are allowed to import brushes and get good textures and styles. Overall there are many workarounds to getting color and lighting types on models!
Blender - Modeling
To model most of the objects I used simple geometry but with negative space. Instead of spending time modeling a desk or holes within parts, you can take another model and add a boolean modifier and intersect the two telling the program, "Hey! Delete this part for me with this object," and it will do it but you might sometimes come out with unwanted and weird geometry. You can also tell the program to combine two or more objects together to make it into one mesh like how I did with the bed and its legs.
Blender - Planning/Tools
When modeling the city, keeping it limited while still making it look good was a definite requirement. That is why the foreground and mid-ground are in 3D while the background is a 2D layer. Some of the buildings aren't textured due to them not being in the shot. Everything in this was modeled with very simple geometry and texturing. Proportional editing was an amazing tool that is definitely a must-have tool with a Blender user that allows you to create landscapes, move parts all at once, create symmetrical curves like how I used it for the road making a bend along the edges.
Motion Poem
The purpose of Aesthetic Media is the visual appearance of that form of media that brings a certain emotion or tone to it. Aesthetic Media engages the audience possibly better than static or written word artwork because the visuals can flow and move in ways that complement the audio and music if done right.
My motion poem is supposed to build up emotion happiness and realization with the combination of the music, visuals, and sound. The first scene tries to get a sense of the character's situation while the second scene tries to convey the character's growth to accept the situation. The last scene is supposed to be a resolution to the story showing that this could be anyone. Personally, I think the music did a great job of adding to the character's growth, making the voice-over sound better, and the visuals in general. The SFX that I put it harmed the audio quality because there wasn't a constant noise being made, there were many pockets throughout the video. I think overall the video did a decent job at conveying the emotions to the audience, it gets the idea around but there are many questions and mistakes that I made. Many bumps along the road of animation caused this but it was fun and exciting to make.
Conclusion
I learned many things along the process of making the video, and I have found myself more interested in this entire creation. I find that the importance of using different types of media to reach an audience is very important because some need to grow faster than others. It is like how there are books that do movies better and movies that are better as books. Each type of art reaches its own audience that has a compelling story based on certain events that the writer is passionate to talk about. Creativity is extremely important because it builds stories in different ways of perceiving things. I would like to say thank you for your time and support.