Avatar Bending (Animation)

The Four Elements: Water, Earth, Fire, Air.

   
     Some of you may know where this post is leading to and for some of you, you may be wondering what the title above represents. This title describes the animation/green screen avatar bending project that me and my group created. The project was a good way to end the school year and used all of our knowledge on animation that we had.

    The goals of this project was to firstly, find a group that you felt comfortable working with, discuss our ideas, create a story board, and figure out a way to film with the green screen and incorporate animation into it in some way. The theme my group chose was "Avatar the Air Bender" theme. 

Process of creation:

Using After Effects to key out green screen video and add background.

Using Maya to create rock and rock animation.

 
     The process of this project was somewhat long and required patience. In order to make this theme come to life, we knew that each group member would need an element. My group creatively came up with an idea to take an online bending test which would assign us our elements. Of course, I got Earth. After that we had to look at the movements for each bending style and practice the movements for the green screen shooting. We shot our green screen shots using key lights, spotlights, and LED lights so the green screen was well and lit up. After filming our every movement, we then needed to create elements accessories using Maya. For example, Earth needs a rock by their side that they can bend and Water needs water by their side that they can also bend. Since I was the "Earth bender", I had the job of creating my rock and the "Water bender" got to create their water. After using Maya to create those items each individual group member took their green screen video, keyed it out, and put a background in replace of the green screen to make themselves appear as if they were in a different area. We each also made a silhouette of ourselves to add a cool effect to the video. After completing the green screen video and rock, I had to then combine them by putting the After Effects rendered out video into Maya. I could then move the rock around and add key frames to make a animation of the rock moving with my movements. I got help with adding directional, key and ambient light to my scene to make the rock light up with the background color. Finally after completing all of these steps, I then rendered out the final product and handed it over to a group member to combine all of our clips into one and add in the recorded voice overs for each element.

What to pull from experience:

     

Rendered Earth Bending video (Not finished group project).

     I pulled a lot from this project, I learned how to work a green screen and correctly key it out. I also  learned how to import After Effect movies or images into Maya. I was shown how to make ambient, directional and key lights reflection on an object change color to match the color of the background so it has a comparison feel with the surroundings. But most importantly, I learned that cooperation is important in any group project. I also learned that the help from others are extremely important because you wouldn't be anywhere without the help of others.

Things to improve on / things liked:

     
     If I had to improve on something or do it differently, I would probably choose different backgrounds to go off of in our video and use moving ones if possible. I'd also use less key frames in the animating part of the rock because too many key frames caused the rock to sort of shake around and seem loose. Overall, I thought the project went well and had a unique theme to it. I wouldn't change anything else about the project if i could.

     This project was a fun opportunity and showed that you can really do anything if you set your mind to it. I hope to do more projects like this in the future and maybe even more complex projects.

Finished group "Elements" Project.