Senior Design Group Project
ATHENA
2D & 3D animated teaser trailer
Project Summary
Our project, Athena, is a teaser trailer that portrays our own original hero character. The trailer is animated in both two dimensional and three-dimensional sequences with a music score and narration, using the Adobe Creative Cloud software, as well as, Blender, ZBrush, Fusion 360, Maya, Substance Painter, and Logic Pro X. The 2D animation serves to represent our character's backstory, and the 3D animation represents the present.
Project Description
Our story takes place in the year 2891, in a dystopian world where most of the Earth’s resources are depleted. Our main character, Athena, is a young soldier who was artificially cloned in a military facility. She spends her whole life fighting wars in order to obtain scarce resources for her faction. But at some point, after seeing her fellow sisters fall, after constantly seeing a new clone in her squad, after seeing the victims of her war cower in fear of her presence, she begins to question if what she is fighting for is really worth it. She doubts her cause and contemplates an alternative to war, a world where all factions could unite together against the impending extinction of humanity. But when she calls upon her Creators, her plea falls on deaf ears. The Creators instead punish her for questioning their absolute authority. Distraught and furious, she realizes that the Creators only see her and her sister clones as pawns in their war. Suddenly everything she fought for felt meaningless. Athena now sought purpose for her life, wherein purpose was previously placed upon her. She realizes she could no longer stay with the Creators and looked for a way to escape the endless hell of their pointless wars. However, knowing the ruthless truth also plagues her with worry for her fellow sisters. She would be leaving her companions to die in conflicts of which they see no benefit.
“I will come back and liberate you, my sisters.” Athena vouches as she plans her escape. Her distress becomes fury. She is the first cog to break away from the wicked machine.
Our Team
Danialle Vongsamphanh
Music and Sound Designer
Created all the music and sounds for our teaser trailer and scored each scene. She also took the role of the narrator for our video and edited her voice in order to set the right tone for our character.
Kevin Huynh
3D Artist and Animator
Created and sculpted our hero Athena in 3D. Also animated all the 3D part of the project
Sarah El-Zein
2D Artist and Animator
2D Artist and Animator
Developed all the 2D art for our video and took the task of animating each scene. She also animated the end credits.
Caleb Barnes
3D Artist
Sculpted, textured, and retopologized all the prop art used in our 3D animation scene.
Process & Progress
2D Art and Animation - Sarah
The 2D part of the project started off with creating our story. Our team sat together and generated ideas on what type of story we would like to convey in this project. After coming to an agreement, we all liked the idea of animating a short hero teaser trailer that will introduce an original hero that we came up with. Afterward, we sketched out a general storyboard for the main 2D animated scenes. See the image below.
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After establishing our story, I began digitally drawing out each panel using Photoshop. The first iteration of these panels was very simple and not a lot of detail was put into them. This served as a good base for animating, where I can then add in all the details needed to make my art stand out. Below is an example of my first iteration panels versus my second iteration:
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After drawing out all the scenes that my team had in mind, I decided to compile all the panels together and make subtle animations to each. This was mostly done in order to see how the scenes would work with the narration and music draft before diving deeply into animating.
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This part of the process was very helpful in bringing attention to the fact that I needed to draw a lot more panels in order to really make my animation come to life and elicit an emotional response for my viewers. After this step, I dived deeper into the animation and polished all my previous artwork by adding backgrounds and more details (facial features, effects...). I added new panels to the 2D part of the project and enhanced the animation of the whole video throughout.
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The final version of my work can be seen at the top of my website. Here is a screenshot of my workspace animating in After Effects:
Audio and Music - Danialle
After creating our story, the first step to creating the sound design for our project was to decide what needed to be heard and what that should sound like. I began my process by creating a bubble map to help myself and the rest of the team understand the path we were taking for the sound. The main things I focused on was the music, sound effects, and voice of our narrator. I continued planning through a cue sheet that I based on our initial storyboard.
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For the music, we wanted a futuristic soundscape that blended in with contemporary orchestral music of a film score you'd hear in popular movies today.
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The first draft was all orchestral because it's where my skills in music creation lie. After much research and feedback, I was able to warp my composition into a more futuristic tone. Eventually, I began to add narration once I got a hold of some animation. Initially, I had a voice actress that perfectly fit the voice characteristics of our protagonist, Athena. However, I was unable to keep her committed to this project, so I did the narration myself. Below, you can hear the music drafts and music & narration put together for the first times:
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As each piece of the animation came out, I continued to add more sounds to reflect what we see visually. Ultimately, the synchronization of the animation and music worked effectively, and I'm really proud of what this team came up with, especially in just one semester. I've gained so much experience through this project. Along with collaborating with creatives outside of the sound field, this was my first time working with voice production outside of a musical setting and the freedom I had with creating the sound design was both apprehensive yet stimulating.
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3D Art and Animation - Kevin & Caleb
After deciding on how our character is going to look like in 2D, we had to recreate the same character in 3D form. The two main 3D models that we needed to sculpt in Zbrush were Athena and her escape vehicle. These models were then taken into Substance Painter in order to be textured. Here are some progress pictures of the 3D character:
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The 3D Vehicle was sculpted in Zbrush as well. We designed this vehicle using a reference image of a vehicle we found online that suites the mood of this animation. Here are some progress pictures of the vehicle:
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After modeling everything, we took our character and vehicle into Blender in order to start animating. We had decided on how what was going to happen in the 3D part of our video, however, we decided to animate an untextured rough draft of the animation in order to get a feel of what it will be like when we render it completely, and whether or not we need to fix video pacing in order to fit the narration and music. Here is the animated rough draft with Kevin narrating:
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At last, we added all the textures on the models and environment. The environment models were procedurally generated in Blender which made our job much easier. We then polished the animation and adjusted the lighting. The final product can be viewed at the top of this page.
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Future Implications
For future development of our project, we will be creating a full length 2d/3D animated film where we can go deeper into Athena's origin story and explain the story's setting and timeline even more clearly. We will also show the audience what happens to Athena after she escapes and provide an exciting ending to her story.
Accumulated Research
Although most of our research done for our projects was done by asking our professors for advice. We also found use in researching 3D sculpting techniques and various music genres and styles in order to choose what approach fits best for our trailer. Below are some links for reference to our research:
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Music and Audio:
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https://flypaper.soundfly.com/tips/sounds-future-history-primer-synths-sci-fi-movies/
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http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.845.9158&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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Sound Effects used from:
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3D Research (Helpful Youtube channels we used for video tutorials):
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https://www.youtube.com/user/Pavlovich2005
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https://www.youtube.com/user/isaacimposter
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