Editor’s note: Elham Doust-Haghighi, is a graduate student at ATEC/UTD and a collaborator of the experimenta.l. animation lab. Here she discusses her work “Hope,” a project she completed for her animation studio II graduate course, produced at experimental.l.
Written by: Elham Doust-Haghighi
I produced the short piece “Hope” as an assignment for a graduate course, animation studio II, under the guidance of Associate Professor of Practice Nelson Lim. This project aimed to overcome a technical challenge with the theme of hope and consequences. The two challenges explored in this project were adapting the 3D CG character to the real three-dimensional stop motion scene and projecting the mouth, animated with the stop-motion technique, on the CG character’s face. Therefore, I made the animation scene with clay, cardboard, and wires in the experimenta.l. and photographed. Also, the mouth was animated in the experimenta.l. using clay stop motion techniques. Also, the CG character’s animation is done in Autodesk Maya but is compatible with the stop-motion characteristics.
In producing this project, I overcame some of the aimed challenges, but some remained unresolved. What I was able to solve was to match the CG texture, light, and animation style with the clay scene. Also, the stop-motion adaptation of the mouth on the CG face was executed successfully. However, what remained unfinished is the rendering of the character’s shadows over the log and the ground. Due to my unfamiliarity with this specialized part of animation production, the shadows were not rendered with expected success in Maya but reconstructed in After Effects software. Despite my best efforts, I am not satisfied with the visual result of the shadows, but I like the rest of the work and enjoyed the process of doing the work and struggling with solving the problem.