I really enjoyed this project. It has been one of the most explorative and exciting projects I have ever worked on, right up there with my self-lead exploration within Blender last year for my final project in my access course, which I really liked for the independent direction and various tools and methods I had to learn and how we had more choice over what we made and felt less restricted. I felt this really gave me a confident and great start at getting to grips with the features within Maya this time as this was where I got to experiment with plenty of features such as particle and smoke simulations, blend shapes, and a various amount of render settings all learnt independently from online from places such as YouTube, showing determination in the field of animation, and such areas were not covered by our tutors as of yet. it has also solidified my understanding of various other aspects within the software such as referencing objects, and parenting objects. and texturing objects. all of which were also briefly covered in our other lessons but I now have much more confidence in using and moving forward.

This project has also opened up my mind to the idea of creating not just animated parts in films such as SFX movies like Transformers, which I initially was led towards by this field as it was the initial reason for my interest in animation. But has now also given me much interest in having a place in the audio-visual departments. such as visuals made for music videos on YouTube, adverts, or all the way to animated visuals shown at music concerts on the big-screen displays.

I feel I have addressed the brief well, sticking to ideas given by the tutors such as getting images we have previously made, like the drawings of the lips I did from my access course last year, and manipulating them, or in my case warping them to create an actual pair of 3D lips and manipulating them more with blend shapes along with the music. this shows high creativity and initiative with this instruction. alongside using simplistic shapes such as cylinders, spheres, diamonds, rings, and cubes, all to display abstract and interesting visuals to the listener to complement the experience.
I feel I demonstrated good skills within the software After Effects last semester with my Short Film project, in which I heavily delved into motion-tracking, masking, and rotoscoping. But I feel I have also demonstrated competent skills within this project by not only combining my footage within this software but also by creating pumps (small zoom-ins to create an impact on drum hits), I also used light flashes to help blend my colours in between shots (The light flare in the middle of the screen to help blend the colours of the disco ball more smoothly as it changes from white glare at the start to the yellow gold towards the end).
I feel I have succeeded in creating a piece that very accurately responds to the music, in possibly one of the most accurate ways of having it respond to the music in certain places, using a direct sound linkage technique for the drums and bass, alongside manual animation for moments of lip syncing and the changing of coloured lights.

I have tried to keep coloured also fitting the theme, This felt like a song about love, mostly due to the lyrics, I felt the colours of red was a must in areas of this project, alongside keeping in mind the suggestion of blue from my music student, which he found in his previous game, Fuser, in which the drums were consistently blue.  I felt this colour could also fit well contrasting the red in my animation, so blue and red hues were my frequent colours, using minimal green colours apart from small reflections on the elegant golden rings to give a chromatic aberration effect making it feel as if it is wanting to be 3D and pop out of the screen.

I feel this project let me embrace my technical side of creativity and approach animation in one of the most enjoyable and explorative ways.


To improve on aspects of my animation for next time I would or if I had extra time to work on this I would spend more time perfecting the impact hits as the timing of some of the screen pumps and drum kicks are slightly off, maybe by only a frame or two, I feel this area needs more attention to detail.

Another aspect and great addition I felt is if I wanted to step away from the simplistic shapes recommendation our tutor gave and if I wanted to make it more immersive and interesting I would lean towards making the red simulated cubes into petal shapes and have them drift around slightly more. I feel this idea of rose petals would give the ideas of beauty and compliment the audio more.

In future, I would also give myself more time to play with Maya's in-built features, specifically smoke simulation, as they are pretty outdated and can be quite buggy sometimes and I would likely need to work out some of the kinks in this part of the software to work around. I did not get to include the smoke I created for this project which was unfortunate.

Another aspect I would improve would be the lip syncing, as after rendering I realised the middle of the top lips are actually slightly phasing, or 'clipping' through the bottom lip, making it look quite fake and less real or immersive.

I feel I have progressed as an animator and am now more confident creating animations within different mediums, applications and styles.