1920s project - Animation for the creative industries

For our main group project in the 2021 2nd year semester, we had to do an animation related project for Ulster Museum. I ended up in a group with Rheanna, James, Laura and Emma. At first we considered the 1920s dress brief, and the Spanish Armada brief, brainstorming for the first week, before settling on the 1920s. We started by looking at contextual material, 1920s photos, cartoons, and modern media inspired by the 1920s, such as King Kong (2005) and I also looked at the video game Mafia Definitive Edition (2020) is in part set in 1930.

I started thinking about recreating a little bit of old Belfast as well, to create some background shots for our animation, and that ended up becoming my main job in the project. I looked at old photos of Belfast, from the 20s and 30s, piecing together where the old buildings would have been located, recognizing some areas, some key features of streets and buildings that still exist today. This was a similar process as my personal project, where I am recreating my home town in the late 1930s, before it got destroyed in the second world war.

We used the popular app 'Discord' for communication, as well as Facebook's 'Messenger' for causally chatting about what we are up to in regards to the project. Here I have started piecing together the different areas of the city,

Sent some photos to the group chat, letting people know the areas I am thinking of for potentially recreating for our project.

I ended up settling on this view of High Street, as viewed from Castle Junction, with the Albert memorial clock in view in the distance, and the tram line down the center of the street.

Since we were doing a more cartoony/stylized look on our animation, I thought I should keep the scene simple. Texture only a few of the buildings to give them some detail and prominence, to draw the viewer's attention, and make it more recognizable as Belfast, and not oversaturate the shot with small details on every building. Think of old cartoons where the background is nicely painted, but any prop that will be actively used in the scene, is sticking out like a sore thumb.

After looking at some contextual art and photographs, and settling on a scene to recreate, I got to work modelling some simple buildings. Just elongating some cubes, extruding some ledges, adding loop cuts, extruding rectangles inwards to create some windows. Standard stuff by now for me, after my personal project, and after the previous team task where we created the western town. Here was the first draft I sent to my team.

Next I decided to work on the trams. Since we would never look at the inside, I thought I would do a simple low-poly model of the exterior. I essentially started by mirroring a cube on X and Y axis, and shaping it into a simple prism shape and started extruding some windows and seams in the construction.

Added sign and number, more detail in the window frames.

Next I brought in some props I made for my personal project, recreating a van sign for the 3D scene, while keeping it simple for the animation.

After adding in the props, I modelled some simple tram cable poles, rails, used the Blender curve system to make some overhead cables, Used a photograph of the Albert Memorial Clock to create a simple background prop of it to sit in the back of the scene.

I then only had one major job left at that point, as the deadline for our 3D background shots was approaching, my team sent over a 3D model of a shop front, so I could integrate it into one of the buildings on the street, and texture it to match the building. I chose one of the more detailed textured buildings to do this.

And this was the scene mostly done. I now could send it over to my team to use in Unreal Engine, as my computer can no longer handle that program, and I was free to focus on my 2nd assignment, as well as making some renders of the scene on my end to present as stills.

And finally, the final animation can be seen on Emma's youtube channel, you can watch it here below!

Some final thoughts This semester probably has been the weirdest and toughest one yet since I started my course at Ulster University. The pandemic became too much to deal with on my own while living alone in my room in Belfast, I decided to come home just before the semester started As I knew the semester would be taught remotely in its entirety. And just as I left Belfast, we start up a project where I would be working on Belfast. But thanks to the powers of the internet, I was able to source materials remotely, without having to go out into the streets of Belfast and photographing actual buildings. I think I got on well with my team, I had worked with some of them before on the Western Town project. I signed up to do the 3D work as that is my strength I feel like, even though a year and a half ago I still couldn't make a 3D model to save my life. I ended up being quite happy with my contribution to this project, but even still there is this voice in the back of my head going 'But what if I should have done more'. But the way I calm myself is, that quality work is preferred over a large quantity, and at the end of the day, I really enjoy working on this sort of thing. I obsess with the old world outside of university, and ultimately the 1920s project was perfect for me, as it is so closely related to my own passion project. If I had to look back and think about what I would have done differently, I would probably try to do less of the small details on certain things, such as the van sign, the clock tower, the signs on the trams, And I would lend my hand more to creating other 3D backgrounds as well, so Rheanna can focus on just filming inside Unreal Engine and Emma can focus on just 2D animation. But given the schedule, the time AND the time difference, with me now being in Latvia, I struggled to voice my concerns about the 3D workload, but I we all did our best on our assigned tasks and I am very proud of my team overall. Thank you as always for reading, Stay tuned for the next post that is coming up in just a couple days!