Project ACT: A Reflection / Wrap Up
Jon Sofo: A Brief History
Jon is an animator at heart with a passion for game design and animated film driving his gears of creativity. He has worked on a number of animations and games, hoping to one day acquire a job at an animated film or game design company.
About Project ACT
Project ACT is an animated short with the mechanics of a choose your own adventure book. The user is initially introduced to characters and a setting. From there, they are allowed to choose from three genre based paths (Action, Comedy, Tragedy). They are allowed to choose the path twice, which means there are nine unique endings.
About Senior Showcase 2016
The 2016 Senior Showcase is an exhibition created to give the Interactive Multimedia senior students a chance to display their year long projects in a formal fashion to the public. This allows for family, friends, and companies to see the work they have created. If the projects are spectacular enough, potential employers could give individual students a job opportunity. It’s a crowning moment for IMM students; they spend four years working up to this point.
December 2015
May 2016
How Project ACT was made
Through the use of Autodesk Maya, Adobe Premiere, and YouTube Annotations, Project ACT was brought together to be an interactive and fun experience that would wow audiences who want to control the story line of an animated narrative.
Significant Challenges
Project ACT experienced a bunch of roadblocks in it’s development stages. The biggest challenge involved me gaining a better understanding of Autodesk Maya. Character rigging was by far the most difficult thing to accomplish. I went through multiple renditions of Bruce and Alice before I finally liked what I saw and the rigging worked properly. Modelling also presented a challenge. I learned a lot of new things this year, and I kept editing the models to meet my expectations until I was happy.
The final roadblock was figuring out how I would present the project. I originally wanted to use interactive software, but it seemed like YouTube Annotations was the best option at the end of the day.
Alice
Bruce
Final Project
Advice to Future Students
There are a lot of things I learned from Senior Thesis. Here are 5 pieces of advice for someone tackling their Thesis.
1. Plan
The more you plan in the Fall, the better you’ll be in the future.
2. Work Work Work Work Work
Keep working on a weekly basis. It will keep you focused, and assures you won’t have too much to tackle the last week.
3. Backup your data!
Enough said.
4. Make sure it works
Make sure everything works well before the showcase, not five minutes before!
5. Be bold. Do something outside of your comfort zone
It will only make you stronger in the future!
By Jon Sofo
Linked In: http://bit.ly/1rXsTyR
