Animating Brick in Washing Machine

Overview:

The idea I had in mind was to use original video footage of washing machines being destroyed by heavy objects (like bricks), load this into After Effects and then use this movement as a guide to animate our modelled washing machine. Here is some of the the video footage I looked at.

Examples:

1. Original idea that inspired the project:

What is good about this video is the smoke coming out, the panels coming off and the fact that it falls over.




2. This video is an edit of the previous video which anthropomorphises the washing machine through drawing on eyes and adding a speech bubble:

After some discussion our group were still undecided whether or not to use the effect of drawn on eyes. It comes down to a matter of how much personality can be expressed without eyes. My personal felling is that eyes communicate clear emotions that people connect with. Proof of this can be seen in the number of hits that these two videos received on YouTube. At the time of writing the original video without eyes had received 199,199 hits, while the video with eyes received had received an astounding 1,573,017 hits. For this reason I think we should include these.




3. This video has the internal bowl escape:

What makes this a good example is the way the bowl escapes from the chassis and jumps and rolls about the yard. To achieve this in animation we need to model this washing machine with individual panels that can explode off and distorted along with an internal cylinder that can break out and dance about.

4. This video has the washing machine hop about

One new idea that I can take from this example is unlike the previous video where the washing machine was fastened to a wooden pallet, this washing machine hops about on the ground.

Summary:

• Make the washing machine object using small flat panels that form the box.
• Include additional eyes that move and show emotion throughout the animation
• Have AE smoke particles coming out of the back of the washing machine
• Have the washing machine object bounce about the room
• Have the smaller panels fly off and the larger panels distort
• Have the washing machine fall over
• Include a cylinder inside the box that can come out and roll and hop