Process

For the day care, we first drew the scenes on paper to organize our ideas. Then we moved to 3D Max, an animation software, and created our scenes in 3D. After we were don we the designing, we left it over night to render because rendering takes a long time. After the rendering was done, we moved to after effects to add text and make the scene more beautiful.

When we were thinking of potential things to animate, one that really stood out was the long distance driving one. With autonomous cars it would be much easier to drive long distances. There was really only one version of this animation because we always took our time and make sure it was as good as it could be before we rendered it. We started with sketching out a basic story with several difference scenes we would follow. The first of the scenes was just showing our driver sitting in his car. The next was a shot of the GPS and it showed where he was at the time (Boston, MA) and his destination (Los Angeles, CA). The GPS interface was made in Adobe After Effects and the rest everything else in the animation was made in AutoDesk 3DS Max. The third scene and the hardest to do (surprisingly) was just a top view of the car driving along a highway with cartoony "ZZZ" coming from the car to show that he is asleep but the car is still moving. There was some difficulty because we wanted the camera to follow the car for a certain time but then disconnect and the car would move off the screen. The camera was either linked to the car or not. There was no easy way to have it disconnect at a certain time. We spent a while trying to figure out any smooth way of getting the same effect. We eventually just decided to have the car and the camera move to the same point and then extend how far the car drives to give that same impression. It’s not perfect but it does give a good smooth way of ending that scene. The final scene was very easy because by that point I was feeling pretty confident with 3DS Max. I just put a Hollywood sign on a plane that was made to have a lot of peaks and made the car round a corner. The next step was adding music and other sound effects. Fairly simple. Only took about an hour or so. By the time I finished that there was still 4 days of the 2 week studio left I decided to start work on another scene. 

For my other scene I made a story of a blind person who was able to drive himself and was less dependent. The first scene was a bit difficult. I had to create a walking animation. It took a little but I was able to do and it looks semi-accurate. Unfortunately this scene was to fast so after it was rendered we slowed it down by reducing the playback frames per second from 30 to 20 and because of that it looks strange. The second scene was the car driving around. Pretty simple.