Working With a Team

This quarter at SCAD, I've been taking an advanced Computer Arts class. In this class, we've worked with programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Maya (!!!!), as well as a few others. Maya, the three dimensional rendering software, certainly threw me for a loop. The class has been challenging, but I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to explore programs that, as a photographer, I otherwise may not have.

This is background I created while using Illustrator for the first time.

In this class, I've also had the opportunity to work with a great team of people: Jade Lotz, Drew Stadler, Brittany Whitmore, and Danni Arevalos. Throughout the quarter, we were tasked with collaborating on a project that incorporated elements from all of the programs we used during the course. The final product was a rotoscope line art animation that featured all five of us. Here's a little bit about the process:

We began with a portion of the song "This is Me" from The Greatest Showman. We then filmed ourselves catching and tossing an object with some significance to us. We took that footage, imported it into Photoshop, and created a rotoscope over top of it. For this, I broke down each second of the song into six frames, traced myself in each frame, added color, and then animated it.

Process from line art to color to a frame from the final piece (with Maya rendered objects and the Illustraor background).

Then came Maya. We created four objects that could fit into our scene, in a 3D space. For mine, I rendered the entire board walk, a piece of driftwood (which I was especially proud of), three birds (they took an incredible amount of time and ended up way in the background), and a plethora of reeds.

(This scene looks better in a 3D space, but since this is a blog, this is the best you're going to get- sorry!)

After that, we placed the Maya background behind our Photoshop rotoscope. We then took that rendered file, imported it into After Effects, and animated the text from our portion of the song on top of it. Below, you can watch our combined video/ final product!

It's been a very interesting experience to watch one final product come together from multiple projects and multiple contributors. There were many challenges along the way, but the opportunity to work with my peers through the tribulations proved to be successful, and even fun.