Laundromat

 Project Proposal

The purpose of this blog site is for research, collaboration and sharing of ideas, in order to create a proposal for a moving image project, that explorers some key concepts associated with the study of animation.  The people working on this project are Hudson Millar, James Hadley and Yoon Soo Chung, all students of the University of Waikato NZ. Our proposal is to make a moving image animation in the setting of a laundromat that has been constructed in 3D space. The 3D space will be realistic, however the washing machines will be anthropomorphic. An example of where machines show anthropomorphism is in the pixar movie Cars (Lasseter and Ranft, 2006). The narrative will be a conflict between a human animated character and a washing machine.  Although the laundromat space is intended to be 3D, (constructed using Maya) the human characters will be 2D shapes, moving through this space as cutouts. An example of 3D space that uses 2D characters is in the animated movie called Flatworld (Daniel Greaves, 1997) http://youtu.be/6DE3qPuJLV4. Unlike Flatworld however we do not intend to emphasise the characters flatness as was done in this movie. The man motivation for using a flat character, opposed to a 3D animated character (that could be modelled in Maya), is a decision driven mainly by technology. We have found that Maya is not the best software to animate a characters, whereas Adobe After Effects has a great effect know as the 'Puppet Tool'.  Because of the incompatibility of sharing 3D models between Maya and After Effects it was decided to keep the character 2D.

Characters

This character is only an example

Space