Our final vignette depicts a person going through their and realizing how much food is wasted every day. Our first scene is of a television advertisement which tells the viewer some facts about food waste. We then zoom out of the screen to and see a person sitting on their couch, living a normal life. They then get in their car and drive to work. We decided that lights should flash in his building to add spice and keep the viewer interested. He then drive to lunch where we see a chef throwing out perfectly fresh tomatoes because one was rotten. The main character then leaves, see the tomatoes and gets an idea. Later he goes back to the restaurant and picks the fresh tomatoes out of the trash. The camera zooms into the tomato where the word Fin! is now visible on the skin. After that credits appear on the screen.

We created a video depicting how many water bottles the world wastes and how bad they are for the environment. We showcase a reasonable solution that has the potential to end this problem and greatly reduce the number of water bottles ending up in land fills and the ocean. This issue should be addressed more prominently and we hope to inspire people with this video.

The video asks a clear rhetorical question: why would anyone would buy plastic water bottles when a reusable water is not only environmentally friendly, but far more cost effective? The video speaks for itself: what's your excuse?

The Process

The first days, we watched a bunch of movies in order to spark inspiration. Then we brainstormed on what we wanted to research and make a skit about. After we decided on waste we had to come up with a story and a style of art we wanted to use.

The rest of the first week we primarily did Illustrator, and making the characters and objects that we needed to actually create the animated film. I was terrible at Illustrator, and this was mainly because of the choice I had made on the first day, which was to make all of our drawing in perspective. We chose the angle to be 140 degrees, because that was the angle that Biscous les Copains the artist who’s style we took used. Although it looked much cleaner than just a flat picture, it was much harder. Another hard part about doing it in perspective was that every scene had to have the same perspective, because even if the line was off by mere millimeters, the illustration would look off. At first we usually did not get the perspective right, and then Amro would come around and say “this is not good”. Luckily Sam really liked illustrator, so he made most of the pictures. I managed to make a couple of buildings and objects Illustrator, but I did not like it much.

    On Friday of the first week I began to do After Effects, which is where you animate the people and objects. The first scene was basically the introduction where we show how much we waste, and then he gets up and drives off to work. I had a lot of problems with this part because, it was my first one, and I could not figure out how to change opacity and other basic things like that. After Effects is really tricky in the beginning because you have to figure out which icons do what, and how to use them correctly. Also in the first days, I kept forgetting that I had to move in time, so I kept having to redo parts of a scene.

    To me After Effects was not that hard, you just had to have will to finish the scene, because there were so aspects to each scene, like walking, or fading in and out. The only place I had problems in After Effects was the restaurant scene, because I had to make the Chef throw away tomatoes and was really hard to get that throwing motion down and look realistic. Luckily I had Amro, and he helped me, but then I had to repeat that motion. My problem after that was when I added a part to the scene before the throwing, I had to retime everything.

    After Effects is mainly about timing, because if you leave a part out or add a part, its a real pain to do it over again.

I had a particular trouble with the dumpster because I wanted to make it playful looking, but also look like a dumpster. I had a dumpster that I was pleased with it, but I, unfortunately, forgot to save. I wish I could have done slightly more before the final. One thing I enjoyed was putting details into objects that I made. While the viewer might not be able to see the order that is on a notepad, I think it added something special. One thing I was really proud of was the credits which I made, albeit with a little help. It is a wonderful experience seeing all you hard work coming together.

After beginning work in After Effects, we kept the storyboard and screenshots from a video by BP which we've based our styles on pinned up close by, and scrap paper to make notes of important settings for objects in After Effects.

We created separate AE Projects for each of us, so we can work on each scene as separate compositions at the same time. While we were editing, someone moved the entire Visualizing Food studio folder and caused an error in AE for every single asset we were using. We recovered the files, but we were still glad we'd saved backups.

"Know What You Eat" is 2.5 minute animated film that combines digital drawings and low-poly 3D models to educate viewers about obesity, nutrition, and the risks and preventions of heart disease — created by Max Ingersoll and Sam Ingersoll during the Visualizing Food studio at NuVu.

We were inspired by Thrive, Brendan Brazier’s book about optimal nutrition, health, and fitness, having tried this approach, noticing how much better we felt. We wanted to convey Thrive’s key ideas in a short animation. The key ideas are that the leading cause of death in America, heart disease, is completely preventable through better nutrition and increased physical activity.

The film has two parts: the problem and the solution. The first part links poor nutrition and the lack of exercise as the causes of heart disease using graphic transitions. Here we used data on heart disease from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. After laying out the problem, the background, which was red becomes a more positive blue and a question “What can we do about it?” appears. At this point the film illustrates positive diet and lifestyle changes that can help prevent heart disease.

To achieve a simple and playful look we used a low-poly style for our 3D models. Low-poly(gon) refers to simplified 3-D models which have fewer faces. To create the 3D models we used Autodesk 3DS Max. We usedAdobe After Effects to animate the film.