"Maker" 3D Animation

This was an animation I did in about 2003 for a class project at Indiana University. Looking back a lot of it looks cheesy and poorly executed but it was a decent amount of effort. I made it using Cinema 4D. The music is "Undenied" by Portishead. Apologies for the quality of the last scene, I was running out of time and that was one thing I didn't get a chance to properly execute. It did manage to win the MultiVisions Communications Conference 2004 Media Showcase award for Outstanding Achievement In Graphics & Animation for Video.

In case it's not clear (and it's probably not), the story is something like this: the main character, Fritz II (named after "Fritz", one of the first real-life robots I made, which also looks super-cheesy in now) lives in a robotics lab. During the day he has the company of the engineers, but at night he's left all by himself, and it gets lonely. The lab had been planning on building another robot, "Tina", but the project was canceled. One night he digs up the discarded plans and puts Tina together himself, but when he attempts to start her up, something goes wrong and she is destroyed.

My favorite part of it was the fish ("Ted the Tilapia"), which was a tilapia that I bought (dead) from a Chinese market. I tried taking photographs of him for the texture but I just couldn't get it to come out. So finally I took a sheet of clear plastic to keep the fish goo off, and laid him right down on my flatbed scanner. Turned out awesome.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• robot
• computer
• animation