Project 4: Motion Path Ride

Created By: Sydnee Belcher

Date due: March 19, 2019

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Final Animation:

The final animation for the motion path ride, using batch rendered .jpegs and Shotcut video editor.

Storyboards

The idea was to start slowly in a boat and travel down the river. As we reach the mushrooms at the corner, the camera looks up to see the underside of them before turning back ahead. Then the camera would look up at the mushroom branches of a different color before turning to look down at a small waterfall below. When going down the waterfall, the camera would bounce some to simulate the rocking of a boat. Then the boat would travel into a small pond area, where it would come to a slow stop and look back at part of the scenery it had just come from.

This would all be done with a single camera in a single first-person shot, no cuts or perspective shifts.

Basic Principles of Animation:

Timing, slow in and slow out, staging, and appeal

Timing:

I tried to slow everything down so that it felt more like a slow boat ride. There was an attempt to give the little waterfall bit a faster speed to show the downward path.

Slow in, slow out:

I used a slow in and slow out because it felt right for boat movement. The boat takes a bit of push to get going in water, and then comes to a slow at the end of the ride.

Staging/Appeal:

I wanted to choose a fantasy-like scene. I thought a forest of glowing mushrooms would be interesting and mysterious. The bright colors sort of give off an ethereal feel. Clearly, the mushrooms were made as the main focus. Their size and camera angles were supposed to lend to their enormous size and allure.

Models and textures:

The Mushrooms (3 different models), grass tufts, and boat were all modeled by me specifically for this project.

The textures for the moss, mushroom stems, and mushroom caps were gotten from google images as well as the wooded background image

Some final notes :

The speed of the animation is still a little too fast for me. I would have loved to slow it down more, but it was getting too long.
The camera was also very difficult to get right. It's still too jerky for my liking and it gets a little crazy around the waterfall part. I would have loved to smooth it out more, but I ran out of time.
You might notice that I forgot to add glow to some of the mushrooms. I spent 12 hours making the models, texturing them, and adding the glow effect. I got cross-eyed and missed them, oops.
Overall, I really enjoyed this project. I think it turned out quite pretty despite my time constraints.

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