by Avila Armstrong
Screenshot from the process of creating the AR Experience
Thought Process
So, when I was looking through the rubric, “birthday card” stuck out to me for some reason. Although I think from a mix of me being really into Halloween during October and me being sleep deprived, I thought it would be fun to make it a creepy, “ghost story”-style birthday card. This was further reinforced by my finding of the default “balloon kid” model being a bit creepy to me, especially when animated.
I think there are inspirations from various spooky stories I’ve seen online throughout the years, but it’s not very original. In fact, just now that I am writing this, I realize that the story of “kid chases balloon and disappears” is even present in Pokemon of all things, although that was not in the slightest intentional at any point during the creation of this.
When I placed the plant and added the fade-in, I debated even keeping it in because, for a school project, it’s a bit dark considering it’s a pretty solid confirmation that, well, the kid’s some kind of ghost. Overall though, I decided that it fits the spooky season so I kept it.
The letter “D” in “HBD” being off-style and inverted, overall not together with the rest of the text was made to further increase the creepiness factor, since it’s off-middle. I find slight alterations in things such as text a bit jarring, so on top of this I also made the text very non-uniform.
When debating on my transitions and actions, I decided a delayed “jumpscare” was very fitting to set the tone, and fade-ins/outs for everything afterward would make sense considering the ghost theme.
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Problems
The process was surprisingly smooth considering this is a new program to me, although I think my small bit of experience in Blender helped me out a ton as camera movement and sizing/positioning/rotating objects and setting parameters was very intuitive. Plus, the universal Adobe shortcuts (especially ctrl+shift+z instead of ctrl+y) made me feel right at home.
I had some problems during the initial tutorial in class, but I remembered those issues throughout the creation of the homework and was lucky enough to dodge any bugs. That being said, I really wanted to animate the curtain in some way, and the lack of animation presets for it left me stumped as to what I could do with it – I wish I could do more but with my current toolkit there was not much I could do but redo my mental storyboard a bit – this is where the introduction of the plant came from, actually, as well as the balloon kid fading/disappearing into the floor.