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Conceptual Background

Vita(Latin-Life) features a female figure traveling through a series of rooms. Each room hones an emotion to overcome, Ira(Latin-Anger), Terror(Latin-Fear), and Maeror(Latin-Grief). She must traverse the room, overcome the negative feeling, and reach the door on the other side.
The white rooms, representing memory, is meant to introduce the idea of a cycle—she finishes where she began.
Vita is essentially an abstract animation using a combination of concrete movements such as stride, facial expressions, and metaphorical movements, such as hair, to express the idea of overcoming the hardships facing us in life.

Technical Aspects

Hair | An elaborate set-up using iK splines, controllers, soft bodies, and particles make up her cloud-like hair. (Due to costly rendering and crashing, the particles are ommited from the piece until further notice...) Her hair acts as its own character as it protects and provokes her throughout the piece. Inspiration is drawn from Clover Studio's Okami.

 Ira Room | Fluids make a raging wall of fire. Roarrrrr!
Terror Room | A combination of lightning made from lightning and fluid storm clouds blanket the top of the unrooofed sky. Targets were used to guide the lightning down the floor.
 Maeror Room | Delicate rain drops, particles, from the sky and a misty shroud of environment fog covers the bottom of the floor. There are also ambient light orbs.

Storyboards

Storyboard Alpha | Simran | View
Storyboard Beta | Simran, Susan, cK | View
The original featured Void, a mecha-type character. Additionally, Cura / Caution was a room in the sequence. Void's reactions were signifigantly action oriented. Critique questioned the main character design—would the audience be able to a life journey through a robot? The revision featured the redesigned main character. Hair and facial expressions were deemed important. Additionally, details of technical elements in each room were flushed out. The second Memory room was removed, but based on feedback, it was reintegrated.





 
 

Simran Koonjul Linus Li Susan Lin Kristin Siu Becky Scully
BS Chemistry, Art '09 BS Computer Science, Art '10 BHA Information Systems, Art, Human-Computer Interaction '11 BS Computer Science, Art '10 BCSA Computer Science, Art '10
@ | www @ @ | www @ @ | www





 
 

 

Soundtrack

00 | Title | Listen
01 | Memoria A | Listen
02 | Ira | Listen
03 | Ira with Flames | Listen
04 | Terror | Listen
05 | Maeror | Listen
06 | Memoria B | Listen
07 | Overcome | Listen
08 | Overcome (Harp) | Listen

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Alpha(2:59) | The very first animatic based on the finalized storyboard presented during the critique. Obviously, the major point of feedback we received was that it was too long. | View
Beta(2:30) | Our first cut which removed much of walking. | View
Gamma(2:05) | Our second cut which employed the use of clever camera angles. | View