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Interactive Animation (Senior Thesis)
For my senior thesis at Montclair State University (Class of 2022, Animation Track), I initially wanted to make a regular animation, but my professor suggested creating a piece based on immersive storytelling after I drew and explained my storyboard in front of her. Thus, I set out to learn and create a 360 degree animation, and the final product is here.
My senior thesis final product, an interactive, 360 degree animation. When you play the video, you can drag the screen to look around the room. May 2022.
Getting to this point was not a straight line. I learned a lot of things while creating this piece and hope to bring that into my future pieces, to create something even more sophisticated and impressive. Keep scrolling down for my progress.
First storyboard, senior thesis proposal. 2021.
The idea that I came up with at the beginning of the year was using seeds and plants as a metaphor for what you liked. I wanted to have animal characters because I like them (especially rabbits), so I thought about having a kindergarten animal class picking out their seeds because planting was the activity of the day. The conflict in the story would come from certain characters (the crocodile teacher) disagreeing with the main character (bunny)'s choices and urging/forcing her to pick another kind of seed. It was this part of the story that I was trying to hone as the semester went by, and I thought about perhaps the bunny being expected and stereotyped to like carrots, so the teacher gives her seeds for carrots instead of what she really likes (a specific type of flower).
I continued to rework ideas for the storyboard/progression of the story as time went by. This is my final storyboard for the idea. 2022.
One of the biggest challenges I had during this project was figuring out and actually narrowing down the scope of what I wanted to do and accomplish. I knew animation took a lot of time and effort, but I was also ambitious, wanting to create a lot of characters and do a lot of different things even while doing everything by myself.
It was during one of my scheduled class meetings with my professor that she suggested creating an immersive animation while I was still trying to get all my thoughts together of what I wanted to actually do, and because it sounded like a cool and unique idea, I decided to go for it.
Now spending my time conducting research on the idea of immersive animation and how to create it, I learned about Spherical Panorama mode in Photoshop. The following video is a screen recording of me giving a short demonstration of it.
1 minute and 22 second demo of Spherical Panorama mode in Photoshop. There is no sound. 2022.
I also learned that Premiere Pro had a VR (virtual reality) Video Display button, which would allow me to look at a picture/video in 360 degrees. While balancing this work with 5 other classes and 2 jobs (I took a break from one of those jobs in March so I could focus solely on my senior thesis), I learned and figured out a workflow throughout the year. (I used AnimDessin2 to animate in Photoshop and AnimCouleur2 to color-- both Photoshop extensions.)
My original idea about the animal characters and the seeds was still the same, but I adjusted it in my head to adapt to and take full advantage of the new medium. Unfortunately, because I was again ambitious and wanted to animate the background moving, have multiple characters, and even have the animation longer than the expected 30-45 seconds, I ran into trouble quickly.
Spherical panorama, or 360 degree, drawings are different from rectangular grid drawings (what most people are used to because they're drawing in 2D). Spherical panorama drawings are curved and twisty, so because keeping drawings consistent is already not easy to do when animating normally, I decided to use Maya to help me map out where the characters should go in a 360 degree drawing.
Example of what a 360 degree (spherical panorama) image looks like, as one frame. 2022.
The following video is a screen recording I did of the classroom scene I created in Maya to help me animate. Because it was only meant to serve as a reference, I didn't try to make the models perfect.
1 minute and 2 second video showing the models I created in Maya as a reference for the final animation. The colored spheres were going to be other students. 2022.
From there, all I had to do was animate the models moving in Maya and then render those animations out frame by frame to use as a reference to draw over for the final video. I rendered out a lot of images and the rendering took hours (even after reducing the image quality to the lowest possible), but because the images were so low quality, my hand-drawing over the background produced shaky animations. To add to that, we already know that spherical panorama curves things, but the more changes added to a drawing, the more wobbly and inconsistent it looked.
In the end, one of my early goals of having the camera (the character, aka the bunny, aka you the viewer) move in the animation had to be scrapped. I had wanted to do a lot of things to make the animation cooler, but those things made the animation even more difficult to pull off, which I learned the hard way after spending 40+ hours trying out animating things in the background.
Example of one of the many animation tests I rendered out to check on the progress of my video. The Maya animation frames and models have been retained here, showing you what I was drawing over. I wanted to draw over the background to have hand-drawn animation of the viewer (you're a character in the animation too: the bunny in the original storyboard) being a part of the scene too and approaching the table for seeds, but it didn't work out as you can see in the next video. Animation done in Photoshop and assembled in Premiere Pro. 2022.
I animated in different layers and parts. This is how much of the background I animated before I decided it was too sloppy to be considered a final product. Not only were there a lot of objects with almost 30 drawings each just for 2 seconds (animating on twos); I was hoping that the overall movement would mask any shakiness/sloppiness of the animation in general, but it just didn't look good in my opinion. I decided I would stop trying to brute force animate the background. 2022.
If I had wanted to move the background, it would've been better to use Toon Shader in Maya, which I had learned about in one of my classes, but as I mentioned earlier, the Maya models were only supposed to be for reference, so they weren't that neat or professional.
I still had a deadline and I wanted at least some animation in my final 360 degree room, so I decided to focus on what I could do instead of what I didn't have time to do.
I mentioned that the Maya renders were poor quality on purpose to speed up the rendering time, but even when I tried to make them better, they took a really long time and didn't really help, so with what time I had left, I decided to focus on the characters. I had spent most of my time on the background because I thought the "immersive" part of immersive storytelling would be best shown through a camera movement (as if you're part of the scene), so I didn't have time to animate all the characters I'd wanted to (I'd brainstormed a lot).
This is an example of the before and after of the Maya renders after messing with the render settings (but they didn't make much of a difference in improving the animation).
Maya reference image for animating over. On the left, the quality settings were the lowest. On the right, I tried to improve the quality to make seeing and animating over a bit better. Because of the nature of 360 degree animations, however, it didn't really help (objects unnaturally curve so you have to be EXTREMELY precise when animating and I was on a deadline). 2022.
The final result of my senior thesis can be seen by scrolling all the way up.
After lots of trial and error and learning, I was able to create an interactive animation, but I was unable to accomplish all of my lofty ambitions and goals. I learned a lot about 360 degree animations in the process, however, and I see the use of 3D in media a lot more than if I hadn't tried to do what a simple 3D animation would have done better. (Moving the background/room.)
I'm happy that I learned a new skill, but I want to create things that are even better. This senior thesis project helped show me how I should better approach animation projects, and because there is always more to learn, I'm going to keep studying and working hard to make what I wanted come true.
I hope you were able to gain something from reading this too!
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