Curb Appeal Animation
Character Animator
Audition
Illustrator
Premier
Tumult Hype
Fellow students and I were asked to make a video for Orem City, UT. on “Curb Appeal.” We met with Kena, their Communications Leader, to discuss what direction they wanted to go.
She said the goal of this video would be to “help Orem residents clean up their yards to make their city more beautiful and to inspire them to help their neighbors do the same.” She mentioned that since there were already plenty of DIY and instructional videos on YouTube, that it might be easier to make a list of already existing videos to put at the end of our video. We liked that idea so we started to put together a list of possible instructional videos that we would not only list at the end, but that could inspire us for the video we would be creating.
After our meeting with Kena, we talked about possible topics and issues of filming, which included:
little to no filming experience for members in our group
access to filming equipment, locations, people to film, and other necessary equipment
We took these problems to our professor and he suggested thinking about doing an animation. We all liked that idea because there would be little need for equipment or access to locations. Although none of us had any animation experience, it did seem to lend itself best for this project.
We chose to do a simple, 2-D animation in Hype. Our test would focus on parallaxing houses. That is moving at slightly different speeds which would simulate walking or driving down the road.
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Satisfied with our results, we then focused on potential topics. Kena suggested listing the subtopics of Curb Appeal. The following diagram shows what potential subtopics we considered. CA is for “Curb appeal”. Each branch and sub-branch are all potential aspects that we could focus on. We chose the four main branches:
1. Pruning
2. Yard Junk
3. Lawn Care
4. General House Maintenance
Under each of those branches there are numerous other ones which could’ve led to being very specific with Curb Appeal. But we thought it best to briefly cover those 4 topics since many of Orem’s residents may not have even heard of it.
Orem City wanted this video to have a host. Kena said they used to have a “Farmer Pete” video series in the past for different things, and that we might want to use him as well. We talked as a group about continuing using Farmer Pete as the host, but we determined that Orem residents may not feel super connected to a farmer, seeing as there aren’t any farms in the city. We talked about making him “Gardener Pete” thinking that might connect with residents, but ultimately decided that wouldn’t be the most effective either.
We learned that Orem City celebrated their 100 year anniversary in 2019. We talked to Kena about our issue using “Farmer Pete” as the host of our video and she told us that Orem was named after Walter C. Orem and that they have a graphic we could use if we’d like.
We were planning on doing some kind of voiceover for our video, but we thought it would be really fun if could animate Walter. I did some digging and came across two Adobe programs. One was Adobe Animate and the other, Adobe Character Animator.
Adobe Animate seemed decent, but overly tedious and not very user-friendly. Next I looked at Adobe Character Animator. This is a really great, user-friendly program. One of the members in my group traced the .JPG image so Walter could scale up to the size we needed and would remain clear. Now it was time to dive into Character Animator.
A member of my group traced Walter in Illustrator so each individual part of him could be separate from the others which can help when being animated. Now began the task of trying to figure out how to animate Walter.
Learning how to animate Walter was the bulk of my work on this project.
Adobe Character Animator uses the camera and microphone on your computer as input and the character will match his facial and mouth movements to the user’s. Once within Animator, there are many parts to a character. There is a part or feature called <Head>. Inside the head, there are parts titled <Left Eyebrow>, <Right Eyebrow>, <Right Eye>, <Left Eye>,<Right Eye Pupil>, <Left Eye Pupil>, and other parts for the rest of the body. This allows total customization of the character’s animations.
It is very easy to misplace a feature. Some of the issues I had were: eyes not blinking, eye brows not moving up and down, and Walter having an elongated neck and a see-through neck. I went through each nested feature that I had dropped in and found some were misplaced. Another thing I had missed was making some of the animations independent from one another in Animator. In the end, I fixed all these issues.
Now that Walter was complete we worked together as a trio on a script and storyboards for the different scenes.
The sample assets pictured below were not created by me, but another member in my group
There were two final steps in completing this project. The first was creating animations in Hype for each aspect of curb appeal we chose to highlight. The second was layering all those animations in Adobe Premier along with the audio for Walter and the Walter animation.
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To watch our animation on Curb Appeal, visit Orem City’s YouTube Channel