Culture and Connection Through Dance
Worked with AAPI Voices to create an animation to go along with an interview.
Summary of Contributions
During one of our animation classes, we had a portion of the semester focused on creating an animation for a client. For us that was AAPI Voices of St. Louis.
They had told us that they interviewed some AAPI individuals. We were tasked to creating some visual animations for those audios.
This was a really interesting and informative project. I learned a lot about Indian culture from this project and genuinely enjoyed creating the beautifully complex poses from Indian dance.
This project goals and missions align deeply with mine so I wanted to really create a nice animation.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
I worked as the team lead for majority of the project.
Using a faceless character rig by Ramon Arango and Sari outfit created by Sahar Khazeni. Using those two I researched a ton about the Indian dance the mother and daughter duo focused on, Bharatanatyam. I even used performances they had done as reference. From there, found out that the hand poses and due to that I put a lot of focus on the hand positions. I focused on making sure that the few dance poses I created were accurate, then tried to go from pose to pose.
There was one big roadblock I had faced during the production of this. As of this point, most of my experience using close physics was with still objects, but this wasn't a still object. I spent a few days and nights trying to get a cloth simulation to work, but to no avail. It was to big of a challenge to render such a complex animation along with close simulations.
I want to return to this project someday and rig parts of the clothing that wouldn't flow as much, but keep only parts like the skirt and headwear to be cloth simulated.
