My Role in Ocean Aid Experience

My experience working on Ocean Aid Experience was interesting because I started off with a role in charge of interactivity and user experience. This meant that I would be doing the coding and designing the set up for the installation that would provide the best user experience. As we started to work on the development of the project, we decided it would be best to remove the aspect of interactivity because it was not realistic for us to achieve with limited coding experience.

Therefore, my role changed to Scriptwriter, Animator and Compositing. In the preproduction stage, I wrote the script for

our 5 minute visual and I broke it down by the minute. I wrote what colour the background should be, what the animals would be doing, what the coral/seaweed is doing, etc. This was a necessary step for the project, so this role was important.

My second role as animator was the one that required the most work. This was also my most successful contribution to the project. I animated all of the coral, seaweed, fish and plastic in the visual. This was very time consuming as I had to get the timing right and make it look realistic. For this role I used OpenToonz to animate the coral and seaweed because this program allowed me to use a technique where I could create a mesh and skeleton for these assets. I also had to make all loopable animations so for the 4 different types of seaweed/coral I created a 100 frame loopable animation. The fish and plastic I decided to animate in After Effects. This was the most time consuming task I had to do and I believe this was my most successful contribution to the project because it is the most eyecatching visual in the project. In my opinion, it also plays the biggest part in conveying the message to our audience which is to take care of our ocean. When the audience watches the fish get caught in plastic and die from it, emotions are brought out that will make them feel sympathetic and also responsible at the same time.

My final role for Ocean Aid Experience is compositing. This means that I am taking all of the assets (animations, background, etc.) and layering them all together into one final video that we will be projecting. This role is essential for the project and it was also very tricky because things things had to be changed and matched to look like they belong together. These things should all have the same settings (quality, width, height, etc.) but they do not because things get stretched to look good for the projection mapping and I have to adapt all the assets to suit this. For this role I ended up being the one fixing all the little details (missing frames, adapting settings, etc.), which was a pain, but it had to be done. I believe that this too, was also my most successful contribution to the work because it brought it all together to create a nice piece. Everyone can do their separate work but it all needs to fit together well in the end for it to work well and I was the one who made this happen.