My project is an aesthetic-driven hybrid media Animation film titled "Loss", which aims to answer my research question, "To what extent can I integrate 2D Characters to interact with 3D objects through an aesthetic that integrates 2D and 3D Animation?". This shows the story of a boy named Jack mourning over his brother Kevin's passing and escaping into their favourite video game finding out Kevin's chosen character is still active. Through this I explored this approach with the aid of 2D and 3D animation and seeing whether or not these two mediums can work together to express a story.
Loss is an animation short film that is expressed/explored through two main mediums 2D and 3D animation. With this story I created for this project I wanted to see if stories can be expressed and enforced without any irregularities or errors by using an aesthetic called Hybrid Animation. This allows me to use 2D characters to interact with 3D objects made in separate programmes (due to incompatibilities amongst animation programs) to give the illusion that these mediums are interacting with each other. Through academic research I gathered a basis and found guidelines on how to work with multiple programs at the same time for each of the two mediums to create a single scene or shot more efficiently. By utilizing both contrasting styles together in the same scene enables more creativity to the story, providing the animator(s) additional tools allowing for a more diverse approach and unique design combinations. This allows to expand upon ones own unique styles in 2D and 3D and expressing their own worlds to a much wider extent with less limitations.
I first stumbled upon this concept from the Disney film 'Treasure Planet' (Conli, 2002) and saw how they were able to achieve a mixture of these two mediums throughout the film, giving 2D characters extra room to be more dynamic and mobile in a smooth 3D moving world. I wanted to look more into this aesthetic by executing tricks to combine two existing mediums into thinking they are working together to become one animation form.
With my Capstone project I focused the 2D characters in Adobe Animate and the 3D environments in Maya using certain processes within these individual programs to create guides and references to help overlap each other for the final.
Interesting considerations involved the use of 3D rigs within Maya as references for the 2D characters later on, using 3D to aid the 2D characters situated in those areas, this allowed me to be more accurate with my character proportions. Another consideration was to make sure my final test for 3D was established or I would need to adjust the 3D and 2D work to match the desired shot.
