An animated film about all of humanity on the back of a giant, who walks on clouds despite his enormous weight. The compact space causes social clash. The film hopes to provoke young people to not only THINK about modern conflicts, but to take action.
Our animation is about the arcs of civilization. The giant never stops walking (even while he sleeps), symbolizing the continuity of their
civilization. In our world there are two social classes: the miners and the wealthy. The lower class (the miners) gather gems and ore from the giant's body to sell to the upper class.
Predominantly, the lower class inhabits the buildings farther down the giant's back (and vice versa) because they feel the giant's walking the most; it makes buildings shake, causing the value of the buildings to drop.
Yet, social classes gather in the marketplace: a piece of land in between the residential areas, mid way up the giant's back dedicated to trade. It is packed, crowded, and sweaty, causing tension in the air. While one miner, a young boy, mines away behind a stall, a wealthy man shows off a coin. The kid immediately begs for the coin, and the man throws the coin off of the giant. The kid is shocked; that shock turns to rage as he throws a rock at the wealthy man. Everyone in the marketplace is shocked on both sides. This turns to a larger scale conflict.  At one point, the marketplace tents are lit on fire, causing chaos all over the city. The surrounding buildings collapse into the giant, who then falls down. This represents the collapse of civilization. Hours later, there is nothing left of the city. Survivors on both sides decide to work in harmony to rebuild their home: something they both need. They, together, build a new city, and the giant opens his eyes.
We chose to make the first city steampunk-like because we could play with interesting movements when the buildings collapse; some buildings are made of accordions so they can condense very neatly. Additionally, metal is the only resource these people have. Meanwhile, the city the people build at the end of the film is made of stone, looking much more natural. The steampunk's evolution into stone could represent the change in the society's enviornmentalism.
Social class conflict is an example of a modern conflict: it connects to divided communities/peoples; similar to the Syrian War.
Our style uses lots of sillouettes and shadows to force the viewer's eye to focus on the action in each scene. To personalize our marks, we used Photoshop to draw the scenes because we could create our own brushes. We then used After Effects to move the objects around on screen by scale, position, rotat‭ion, and more. The program even allowed us to move our two dimensional objects in the third dimension, allowing us to distort images, making shots with hands' many moving parts easy.
We hope people enjoy our film and it stays with them for a long time.

Song of the Sea Precedent Source:
http://press.optimumreleasing.net/press/?id=1748

Our animated film revolves around a stone giant which serves as humanity's home who marches without stop on clouds, symbolizing society's continuing growth. The human-human conflicts in our story represent modern events happening in the world around us. We hope to provoke young people to not only think about modern conflicts, but to take action in the world today. 

Our story opens with a steam punk city on the giant's back, followed by a shot of the marketplace. In our world there are two social classes: the lower class, who mines minerals out of the giant; and the upper class, who buys those minerals from the lower class. Since there is no other resource to barter, the price of gems has decreased exponentially. The marketplace is a series of stalls where the lower class sells to the wealthy. One day, a boy is mining behind a stall. A wealthy man who shows off a coin catches the boy's attention. The boy kneels down and begs for it. The upper classmen flings the coin off the side of the giant. He turns his back on the boy and starts to laugh. The boy is initially shocked by what has happened; this turns to anger. He hurls a rock at the wealthy man's head. The entire crowd stops in their tracks with an enormous gasp; the silence is broken by more class on class violence. This turns into a riot. One rioter lights a stall on fire, setting the marketplace ablaze. At this point, the giant stops walking forward. The entire city is on fire while it folds up neatly like a machine; it looks like a natural function of the contraption. These buildings slide off of the giant or are absorbed into him. He then falls over, out cold. A few days later, on the giant's back, people gather from both classes to help each other build a new city from the old materials, representing a new era for society. Our animation ends with the giant's right eye opening after the city is built.

Our precedents include the Iron Giant, Theo Ellsworth's art, and the Game of Thrones intro visuals. First, the Iron Giant is a young and excitable version of our character: they are both very careful and thoughtful beings that, despite their massive size, would never hurt a fly. Next, Theo Ellsworth's art is very similar to our style: there is a lot of detail, uses negative space in an interesting way, and has a lot of funky shapes. The Game of Thrones theme is super similar to the scene where the buildings collapse neatly like a contraption.

Instead of the final Russian-like stone city, we were thinking about splitting up the city buildings into a couple circular platforms. Each platform would be on top of carved stone faces, which together form an aqueduct flowing through the city. Each of the faces would represent each social class, showing that all are equal. We decided to go with the stone pillars instead because the faces felt like it segregated the population into different sections of the giant: how could this be better then the previous system if they are still socially segregated? With the pillars, humanity looks like they are in one city, not two.

We were also going to add the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to symbolize the negative events in the story, rather then creating a conflict. We decided that the animation would be more concise and interesting if the conflict was human-based. Also, near the beginning of our process, we wanted a single carver to fix the giant after he had fallen instead of humanity coming together to help each other. The second option is by far clearer and makes the story more cohesive.

At first, our story was to be about a giant who wakes up from a nap to find windmills all over his body. He had been asleep for 150 years. He is confused and runs from humanity, as they continue to try to use him as a elevated place to collect wind power. Since the giant takes one step per day (he is very slow) humanity can catch up with him by building contraptions in front of him. However, in the end, the giant escapes into the ocean. We decided to flesh out the story more and give it more meaning with the final product.

My idea had rather peculiar beginnings, to say the least. I personally have an extreme love of trench coats(irrelevant I know, but it'll make sense later.) and one day, I was talking with some fellow NuVu students, when I had a rather silly idea of creating a NuVu trench coat, using the pink and white color scheme of NuVu. While I thought of it as a sort of joke then, I began thinking upon it later, considering what a NuVu trench coat would be like, wondering what I would do if I wanted to create something specifically to help out at NuVu. Once pondering it for a while, I decided that tool organization was a big problem, as well as being approachable in creating a solution. I almost immediately fell in love with the idea.(both for using the project during my time at NuVu, as well as my bias towards trench coats) When beginning open innovation, I was still planning to create a NuVu trench coat. I began by doing a lot of research into how trench coats are made, planning to create a coat according to normal methods before creating one from the ground up with NuVu in mind. Soon, one of my coaches led me to  the realization that not many people would be as eager as me to dawn a bright pink trench coat, weighing about 20 pounds filled with tools. Having come upon that point, I decided to split into a table mount, chair mount, and a garment. (I still wanted to try to incorporate a trench coat somehow.) After planning what I was to create, I promptly made a list of tools that were most commonly used at NuVu. While in this early stage of development, I was also introduced to a similar project done last year, which was a table mount, (again) holding tools. Seeing that a table mount had been done before, I decided to begin with the chair mount, creating a simple cardboard mount going around the side (for ease of access) with simple holding devices. From there, I realized that having a big piece of cardboard sticking out from the side of your chair got really annoying, and whipped up another version, with a tape hinge to get it out of the way. From there, I moved to the lower segment of the chair, making a sketchbook, ruler, and pen/pencil holder. using simple hooks to mount it on. Moving on from that, I changed the mounting mechanism to pegs, helping stability, and optimizing the sketchbook section for better space management. At that point, I began zooming out, designing, and arranging the tool holders for later iterations of the top mounts. After that, it was primarily just tweaking the holders to be best suited for their tool, as well as changing where they're placed. In the process (as you may have noticed) I decided to do a more comprehensive chair mount exclusively rather than my bigger original plan. When developing my product, I didn't go through many major design changes, with most things being merely improved versions of the original prototype. While this is very different from the way most projects go, it was a conscious choice. With this project, I wanted to focus on creating the best possible experience, rather than trying to go with the coolest sounding idea, and constantly changing everything. As a result, most of my time was spent carefully moving things around, making sure the tools fit, and are appropriately placed. All trying to create a smoother, more intuitive, and easier to use experience. Additionally, one of the most important steps was thoroughly testing each change that had been made, to find what can be improved. In the end I didn't make multiple prototypes exploring completely different avenues, and I didn't try to make some "super innovative creation that will change the world as you know it", it's not terribly innovative, and it's not a ground shaking step forward for mankind. However, I didn't create this to be that, I am not trying to make something spanning across headlines. I created this project to help the people at NuVu, make their process of building a little more efficient, and help them to create these amazing contraptions that are changing the world. In conclusion, this was not created to wow crowds, this was made to help make the process a little easier at NuVu, or other places like it. I enjoyed this project, it was refreshing to solve a relatively small problem, and being able to directly see the results of my creation, rather than trying to make a solution to some big world problem, where you have to put yourself in someone else's shoes.

When you need a tool at NuVu, usually one of two things happen, either they waste time looking for tools in the shop, (where finding a tool can be very confusing) or are searching on their desk (wasting more time in some cases). My solution to this predicament, is to create a chair mount that will hold all the tools you need, reducing time wasted looking for tools, as well as helping desk organization.

There are many, many wonderful things that happen at NuVu, and many great systems to help those happen. However, not every system is fantastic. Currently one of the biggest problems at NuVu is that desks are unorganized, with people not being able to find the tools they need. Although all our tools are stored in the shop, allowing you to grab a new set, this system ends up wasting a lot of transition time, as well as being very confusing at times. In the past there have been a few attempts to solve this problem, like the tool wall at the underground, as well as a similar project done last year. However, these solutions left a lot to be desired, the tool wall, although organizing the tools very well, can make it difficult to find a specific tool, as well as still requiring a trip over to the shop for grabbing the tools. The previous project did improve on this some, mounting to two tables, and holding tools via two flat wood planes with holes for the tools. While this does save trips to the shop, unfortunately the way it was designed made it difficult to put the tools in, as well as making it impossible to move the two tables without removing and reattaching the device.

With all of this in mind, I realized that there were a few things that I had to focus on: that the tools were easy to remove and re-insert, that the tools need to be near the work space, not to put too many things in one general place(to avoid getting cluttered/confusing), that the mount needed to be removable, as well as not getting in the way when moving it around with the mount. In my design, I took advantage of the hole-filled design of the chair, using pegs to attach all the components. I primarily used specifically sized boxes to hold the tools (primarily due to ease of use, and preventing confusion for where things go). The design features a sketchbook/laptop holster on the bottom left side of the chair, holding 15+ pens/pencils, a sketchbook(obviously), as well as a slot for a ruler. On the top of the chair, I have panels vertical panels with boxes for holding the tools. When not using the top panels, they can be folded back to fit the approximate dimensions of the chair. In total, the top panels can hold: a caliper, wire cutters, pliers, scissors, a tape measurer, an allan key set, and a box cutter.

We created wearable sculpture that explores the strength and beauty in a left arm affected by cerebral palsy, as well as how it creates 2 different hemispheres of motion on the body. We created this piece for a dancer named Jerron in the show On Display, a fashion show in New York which showcases four dancers with different disabilities. Jerron is a professional dancer and has cerebral palsy in his left arm. 

Our project was started by Ben and Acacia, but they decided not to continue it so we took over. When Skyping with Jerron, Ben and Acacia learned that he wanted a fashion piece that would show his strength. He also told them about his fascination with the visual of two different hemispheres. They came up with an idea to use a low-poly design to create two shoulder pads for Jerron. To make them into two different hemispheres, they wanted one side to move while the other stayed still. When we took over the project, we took those two ideas and started from scratch. We Skyped with Jerron multiple times and got to know him and used his feedback on our project. We used a computer-aided design software, Rhino, to design the shoulder pads. We then laser cut the triangular pieces that we had created and assembled them using 3D printed hinges. We made a set of straps with a waistband to attach the pieces to. We laser cut all of the adjustability clips in clear acrylic. We used dowels to support the shoulder pads and designed 3D printed pieces to attach them to the straps. In order to create the effect of two hemispheres, we decided to keep the right side still while the left side would have moving pieces. We wanted to show the beauty in Jerron's disability and how it can affect the motion of his left hand and arm. We decided to make four of the triangles on the left shoulder pad open up whenever he moved his fingers. To do this, we attached a string to each of the four triangles and tied those to 3D printed rings on his four left fingers. Whenever he or his disability moves his left fingers, the triangles will flutter open, highlighting his disabiliy in an alluring way.