Open gallery
My work consists of several short storylines involving various sci-fi adventures created by myself and transformed into 3D animations. I have always been interested in how different mediums can convey stories and in the past my medium of choice has been in the form of graphic novels. However, animations are basically a step beyond the still images. I wanted to tell stories in a similar fashion to how I approach writing comics, but instead of translating moving scenes from my thoughts into still images on paper, I would translate them in their purest form, realistic animations in a 3D space. I was recently inspired by the animation style of the upcoming film “Into the Spider-verse.” It combines the common graphic novel devices of conveying sounds as words alongside the actual sound, as well as providing the viewer extra context to scenes through the use of floating text boxes. My initial ideas were, ironically, very one-dimensional. Seeing two mediums being combined into a singular format infers that 3D animation can be much more versatile than it usually presents itself on the surface. This combination has been hailed as revolutionary because it successfully makes the viewer feel like they are reading a comic book and watching a movie at the same time. According to the animation team at Sony Pictures Animation “every single frame of the 116-minute film has a computer-generated image as its foundation that was followed by an overlay of hand-drawn art.” Now, obviously I don’t have access to the software the studio created in order to directly replicate their style with my own twist. However, I realized I could try and recreate it using two different programs. Cinema 4D could be used for the animations themselves, but After Effects could serve as the way to superimpose the written form of sound effects, text boxes, halftones, and action effects on top of the renders.