Maya Motion

I created a quick scene with a ball. I added a key then moved the ball around adding more key frames to get the movement that I wanted. I added a lambert to the ball and put a color on it then set a key to the color and adjusted it so that the color would change with the movement.


Setting Keys on Maya from catlin lundeen on Vimeo.

After Effects Final Project

For my final project in after effects I was hoping to create an animation using construction paper to tell my story. I want to make a short 1-2 minute project telling a story about a cute animal and the things that that animal has to say about the world around it. I did a construction paper comic strip in French for a high school competition using jokes about idiomatic expressions. My life has clearly been affected by Amelia Bedelia http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/kids/gamesandcontests/features/amelia/   I was thinking about doing something like that but with creatures. I'm not the most skilled at construction paper animals because their dimensions are a bit tricky but I'm thinking it'll definitely be some sort of creature. Once I have created the creatures and backdrops I would like to import them into After Effects on different layers so that I can animate the various pieces of the animation. The facial expressions will be animated as well.

Here is my estimated schedule

Week 1-
   Planning. Creating a vision for the creature and the world that he will interact with. The script should be written during this week.
Week 2-
   Creating. The script should be finalized and the creature and environments should be in the initial stages of construction. This will be very time consuming.
Week 3-
    Integrating. Finishing creation of the construction paper. Eat Thanksgiving Dinner. Begin taking the project into after effects and animating
Week 4-
    Animating. Completion of the interaction and animation of the construction paper creatures and worlds. And finally rendering.

This may seem like not very much time spent in after effects for an after effects project, but completing a construction paper animation has been a dream of mine and this is a great platform to complete it in. The weeks prior to week 4 will be completed with thought of how the creatures will be able to work in the after affects program. Also week 4 will be a very busy week as I will be devoting a lot of my time to completing the project. I will have more time to work on it then and will have thought a great deal about how to ring the animation together before then.

Motion Tracking in Maya

I took this short clip from Alias and exported it as a targa sequence so that I could use match movie and get a good motion capture on it. From there I took it into Maya. I created the two spheres and added the lightning effect to follow along with the motion tracking. Sydney Bristow is so fond of the Rambaldi Artifact that she found in Italy it really goes well with the stylings of her front hallway. That Rambaldi really could decorate.


Alias Lightning Motion Capture from Caitlin Lundin on Vimeo.

Green Screen Ben Bays Wizard Training

Ben Bays acted out the scene on a green screen. I took the video into After Effects and used a keylight to get rid of the green in the footage. From there, I added two foam emitters that were designated each with either the puppy or the heart. I attached the emitter to a location tracked on Ben Bay's hands. The cartoon look was an effect that I put on the footage with Ben Bays in it to add to the story. There's really no reason for it other than spicing it up a bit.


Ben Bays Wizard Training from catlin lundeen on Vimeo.

Making Soft bodies and Hard Bodies collide into One...Animation

In order to make the video that follows I created a scene using several polygons. I created the track for the ball to follow by creating a torus and then duplicating that torus and booleaned one into to the other to create the dipped track. I intersected the two and deleted some faces so that the ball could fall through. The torus was designated a passive rigid body so that the ball would not fall through it. The ball was designated an active rigid body and given gravity so that it would fall onto the track and follow the track to the bottom.


An Animated Image Sequence from Maya from Ben Kullerd on Vimeo.