James Waite
History
This animation was inspired by "The Karate Kid II", the Simpsons episode entitled "Das Bus", and the movie "Stand By Me".
The basic premise is that there is some area of every town in which there is an obvious difference between "the good part" and "the bad part" of town. In the case of this animation, the two areas are seperated by a set of train tracks.
To the left of the viewer is the bad part of town. Old, dreary brick buildings and garbage populate this area. To the right of the viewer is the nice part of town which is characterized by colourful buildings, a nice park, and lush green grass. The second thing to note about the two areas is that on the bad side of town there is crime and violence while on the good side of the tracks children can be heard laughing and enjoying themselves.
The key to this animation is the set of train tracks that run down the
middle of the two sides of the town. The train tracks serve as a focal
point for the viewer, also the train tracks lead up to the surprise end
of the animation.
Technical
The images created for this animation were created using Paint for Win98. Three images were created, brick.bmp, rainbow.bmp, and rust.bmp. All other colours and textures(wood, sky, train tracks) were created using Maya included images.
Many of the models in the animation are very simple(eg. a well proportioned cube did just fine for a building and cylinders and cones made perfect trees).
Most of the models were repeated many times over to create a large sense of space. One building was created and duplicated, but the textures and colours were changed. Also, I only created one section of the train tracks and simply duplicated it many times.
I did make one slightly complicated model, that being the train. It was created using basic polygonal shapes such as cubes, cylinders, and a sphere. These shapes were then grouped together in Maya to create the appearance of a train. Unfortunately, the train was not very well displayed in the final animation.
Camera work was probably the most time consuming aspect of this entire work. From figuring out how to animate cameras(see Problems) to where the camera should be looking at any given time.
This animation was created using a variety of programs. Maya 3.0.1 for WinNTwas used to create the bulk of the animation and the 3D world of the scene. Also Maya was used to render the scene into image files which were put onto a CD so that they could then processed by MediaConvert on the SGI machines.
The original sound was captured using Sound Record for Win98 and was later edited to fit the animation time using soundeditor on the SGI machines.
MediaConvert was also used to combine the video with the audio to create the bulk of the animation.
moviemaker for the SGI machines was used to add in an opening title,
a closing title, and a copyright screen.
Problems
When the animation was created using Maya the animation length came to be about 30seconds. When the rendered images were joined together the animation came to be about 24seconds long. In order to remedy the situation, soundeditor was used to cut out dead space to make the soundtrack fit the animation. If I had known about this situation earlier I would have been able to use a program such as GoldWave to just make the 30seconds of sound into 24seconds of sound by compressing the timeline, but I feel that soundeditor did a good enough job for what I needed.
Another problem I encountered when doing this animation was the experience of having to learn Maya on my own. Hopefully the next version of Maya will be more intuitive. (i.e. get rid of Hypershade and allow adding textures and colours to objects using the Textures menu)
Another aspect of learning maya was that since Maya is so big, it was often difficult to figure out how to perform an effect or action. The documentation was quite complete, but it was also confusing at times.
Sound editing was somewhat difficult with a generic microphone as feedback
and other background noises made getting the right sounds on the first
take almost impossible.
Now sit back and enjoy the completed animation.