Rollercoaster
At the end of my last semester of college, I was given an opportunity to present my art in a gallery space, so I created an animation with six different styles to showcase the skills I’d learned over the past four years. The scene was based on a video I took at Disneyland with two close friends of mine a few years ago. The rollercoaster serves as a metaphor for the highs and lows of my college experience, with the changing art style reflecting how I changed as a person.
I used clay and twisted steel wire for the base structure of the puppets, felt and craft feathers for the hair, LEGO window panes for the glasses, and the tips of socks for the shirts. To make the background, I blending melted clay by smearing it on paper, used crumpled wrapping paper for the mountains, and clay for the tracks. I shot puppet frames in front of a green screen and added the background frames in AfterEffects.
I animated the digital portion in Procreate, using each layer group as one frame. This kept them organized while still allowing me to make changes to individual layers.
The paper cut-out puppets were colored with COPIC markers and attached with string taped to the back of each piece. I used a multi-plane camera to shoot the frames so I could animate the rollercoaster tracks separately from the puppets in the foreground.
I experimented with a range of color palettes before choosing the final one in the video game-inspired segment.
I animated the toast segment as a set of vector frames in Illustrator, converted them into PDFs, and used a Glowforge to laser engrave them into 26 slices of toast.
I enrolled in a 3D modeling class to learn how to animate in Cinema 4D for this segment. I used a fabric simulator plug-in for the shirts and a hair simulator built into the program.
