IAT 343 Animation Short
by
Team 19 – Racing B
Bobby Hughie Karuno Soetarto (bsoetart@sfu.ca), Justin Chan Pak To (ptc3@sfu.ca), Cora Yim Mui Wong
(yimmuiw@sfu.ca)
ABSTRACT
The three of us did not have any experience in animation but we worked hard to make our animation a good one. Our first
experience of using Autodesk Maya was exciting, unforgettable and incredible. We were interested in creating something
funny, so we decided to create a story that captures the audience’s attention using suspense but ending the story with a funny
twist that is enjoyable for everyone.
INTRODUCTION
PRE-PRODUCTION
We discussed the best possible animation idea that allowed
us to have a great storyline but at the same time a suitable
animation timeline. Advertisement was the first thing that
came into our minds. We wanted to collaborate different
genres, which was action and comedy together. What’s
better than racing for the actions and cuteness of babies for
the comedy part. Thus, we came out with an idea of using
the car racing to portray the meaning of the quality of
diapers for a baby.
These are how we gathered all of our ideas and started our
production plan.
Script
“Ready, set go!” A red car and a blue car start off a car race
tournament. Both cars start off really well and throughout
the race they are neck to neck.
Suddenly, the blue car is caught in an accident and caused
the engine to fail. Meanwhile, the red car wins the race.
A hand gets in and packs up the blue car. He is Sad Baby.
The only thing Sad Baby can do now is just cry and watch
Happy Baby pass by him smiling and winning the race.
RESEARCH / INVESTIGATION
Before doing all the sketches and design, we did a lot of
researches and observed what are the features of cars and
babies, and what could be used in our project. For example,
we would like to use realistic sporty cars but they are
handled by babies, so they are floated on the ground. We
also watched some car racing movies and played some car
racing games to learn how they make different camera
angle shot and how to increase the intensity of a car racing.
To make a car racing be more exciting, we had to make
several different cameras angle at the same frames.
(Apparently, Sad Baby and Happy Baby is having a toy car
race in the playground when Sad Baby’s diaper leaked
causing him to stop and cry, thus causing Happy Baby to
win the race).
Character sketch
Happy Baby (Figure 1 and Table 1) and Sad Baby (Figure 3
and Table 2) are our main characters. Their representatives
are a red car (Figure 2) and a blue car (Figure 4).
PRODUCTION PROCESS
After coming up with the general idea, “Choose your diaper
wisely”, we started working on the script, character design
and environment design as the pre-production. Then we
worked on the production stage, which included modeling,
animation, texturing, lighting, sound and rendering in
storyboard, three second animation, team animatic and
overall animation. It was the most challenged and time
consuming part. Lastly, it came to our post- production
such as combining all the rendering photos together and the
final editing. These were a step by step competition.
Figure 1. The hand sketches of Happy Baby
1
Happy Baby’s Information
Happy Baby’s Information
Age : 2
Gender : Male
Height : 0.7m
Character history : He was born in a
warm and loving family. Small and
cute as his parents hold him, so he
was welcomed with a lot of love. He
grew bigger as the day pass and
never gave trouble to his parents.
Personality : Bubbly and full of life.
Never fails to capture the heart of
other people.
Hobby : He loves to play toy cars and
pretends that he is in the driver seat
when he does so.
Other Details : He loves soft toys and
always loves his pacifier.
Age : 2
Gender : Male
Height : 0.72m
Character history : He was born into
a warm and loving family. He was
always pampered by his parents and
gave him lots of toys. His parents
loved him a lot but did not have the
experience in taking care of a baby.
Personality : He loves to play and get
dirty. Loves to cry and get his parents
attention, which troubles them also.
He loves to hold a tissue as his nose
always secretes mucus.
Hobby : He loves to play toy cars and
pretends that he is in the driver seat
as he does so. He always runs
around and gets dirty.
Other Details : He has freckles on his
face and loves torn socks.
Table 1. The personal information of Happy Baby
Table 2. The personal information of Sad Baby
Environment references
Figure 2. The sketches of Happy Baby's car
Figure 5. References for starting point of a car racetrack
Figure 3. The hand sketch of Sad Baby
Figure 4. The sketches of Sad Baby's car
Figure 6. Reference for a car track
Figure 7. Reference for a tunnel
PRODUCTION
Production Process Diagram
Figure 10. Our tunnel modeling
Texturing Process
Figure 8. Our Production Process Diagram
Week
3
Pre- production
5
Storyboard
6
Modeling, Texturing
7
Three second animation drawing
10
Animation
12
Lighting
13
Rendering
14
Sound, Post-priduction
Figure 11. The texture of our road
Table 2. Our Weekly Schedule
Modeling Process
We have a car modeling and four environment modeling, so
we worked a lot on the environment modeling, such as the
starting point of our car racetrack (Figure 9), the car
racetrack and the tunnel (Figure 10) etc.
Figure 12. The texture of our mountain
We want to make the modeling more realistic, so we
textured all the environments. For example, we want to
make the road (Figure 11) looks rough as how a real road
looks like. We used the rock material and colored with dirty
color like black, grey and white. For our mountain (Figure
12), we textured using mountain material and we arranged
the snow to make it cover parts of the mountain.
Animation Process
We have 5 scenes in total. Our animation started at a
starting point on a car racetrack. We installed cameras in a
way where we could build anticipation. The second scene is
where the cars race into a turn point and where the red car
overtakes the blue car. The third scene is where the cars go
through a tunnel underneath a mountain. This scene is
where we tried to build up some actions, where the blue car
Figure 9. The starting point of our car racetrack modeling
3
tries to overtake the red car. The third scene is where the
unexpected happens, a tree falling down causing the blue
car to crash and spin out of control. The last scene is where
show the red car winning the race with an unexpected twist
that it was 2 children are actually the ones racing with one
another.
CONCLUSION
The overall process was a difficult but at the end we feel
such a big relief when we are able to finish it. It taught us
many different techniques in maya for future purposes. In
the end, the story that we planned out turned to success.
We love our video.
Lighting Process
We wanted the race scene to be at night, as it would look
cooler. We added some lights that will show only the
racetracks. The lights that we used were ambient lights and
we decayed it so that it would look more realistic. We
added lights at the lamppost to make it as if the lights were
coming from the lamppost. We also added light for the
traffic lights in the starting scene and animate it to look like
it is turning from red to yellow. The ambient lights not only
were they decayed but also they were added using ray
tracing shadows.
REFERENCES
1.
Maya AutoDesk 2012
2.
IMovie
3.
AfterEffects
4.
Background song:
o
5.
We are rockstars culture Remix
Sound effects:
Rendering Process
We render under mental ray, as we wanted global
illumination and ray tracing shadow to appear in our image.
We put some in resolution of 800x600 and 640x480.
o
Ferrari 550 sounds
o
Ford GT500 mustang sounds
Sound
We used background music and use two different car
sounds to make it more realistic. The red car was the sound
of a Ferrari 550 and the blue car was a mustang GT500. We
added also crash sounds for the crash scene. We tried to
synchronize the sounds with the animation we did.
POST-PRODUCTION
We used AfterEffects to put the render images into different
parts of scene.
IMovie was used for the scenes to be collaborated together
and also with the music. Transitions between scenes to
scene was used also.
DISCUSSION
•
We could improve on our resolution.
•
If we had more time, we would render the images
with high quality.
•
We separated scenes for different people to do.
•
Different production process was distributed
equally to everyone.
•
We stayed overnight in school to render all the
images together.
Team Member Biographies
•
Justin is a student at SIAT and interested in
architecture.
•
Bobby is a student at SIAT and interested in
information and code design.
•
Cora is a student at SIAT and Business and
interested in doing media art work.
Team Member Contributions
•
Justin did cars and environment modeling,
animation, lighting and rendering.
•
Bobby did environment modeling, animation,
texturing, lighting and rendering.
•
Cora contributed in video editing and document
organizing.