The Power of Obedience (2019)
This project was a collaboration between the Masters of Biomedical Communications (MScBMC) program at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the introductory psychology course at McMaster University, completed as part of MScBMC's Special Topics course in 2D animation. This animation is meant to be supplementary to an online module and textbook readings for the section of the MacIntroPsych course regarding the psychology of obedience; it aims to clarify the experimental set up of experiments discussed and summarize their findings in a fun and engaging way for students.
Co-Designers: Carmen Burroughs (Carmen Burroughs), Contessa Giontsis (Contessa Youssef), & Nitai Steinberg (Nitai Sci Visuals)
Supervisors: Nicholas Woolridge (BFA, BSCBMC, MSC, CMI, FAMI), Dr. Joe Kim (McMaster University), Dr. Michelle Cadieux (McMaster University)Michael Corrin (BFA, BA, Hons BSc, MScBMC, CMI)
Medium: Digital (Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects)
Date of Completion: Apr 2019
Process Work
1. Contacting Project Stakeholders
As the project manager, I took the lead of contacting the MacIntroPsych team to find out for which sections of the course they would like to have a short animation. Our team then reviewed their shortlist of psychology topics, and chose a topic for which the media of animation would be both helpful in making the concept clearer as well as feasible within the time frame. Once we onboarded the MacIntroPsych team, we had a team meeting where I lead the creation of a detailed production schedule via Trello.
Among our team, we divvyed up the work as such:
Carmen was responsible for look development and creating character animation.
Contessa focused on most of the non-character animation and motion graphics.
Nitai focused on supporting Contessa with non-character animation and motion graphics. He also compiled the compositions and added audio.
In addition to being the project manager and liaison with our content advisors, I also was responsible for creating character assets, creating character animation, and doing the narration.
A screenshot of the in-progress Trello board I created for our team to track work
2. Creating an Outline/Treatment
Within the social psychology topic of obedience taught within the course the animation was for, we further narrowed our scope by picking out 1-2 ideas that seemed of most importance and useful to have visualized. We wrote a brief treatment and sent it to the content advisors for approval before moving on.
Sample of the Treatment we created, showing the script alongside the planned visuals for the stakeholders to review
3. Writing a Script
Due to time constraints, we each wrote 1/4 of the script and then met as a team to review and edit the script so it was cohesive. This script included descriptions of the visuals that would potentially accompany this narration. This edited script was then sent to the content advisors again for any suggestions or feedback.
4. Storyboarding
We each created storyboards for the section of the script we wrote (e.g. I wrote the script discussing the Nurse case study, so I produced those storyboards). We presented these to each other for feedback and revisions and then sent these storyboards to our content advisors for final feedback before we moved into production.
5. Creating Assets
After Carmen finalized look development for our project, based on the finalized storyboards, our team created a list of assets--character and non-character--required for our animation. We determined which assets were used in key scenes or multiple scenes and denoted them as top priority by highlighting them. I created a google excel sheet with this information and separated it into non-character and character assets. I also created a naming convention for us to follow to keep all the assets easily found and organized. Carmen and I split the labour of creating character assets and updated the google sheet as we went.
Asset production tracker I created to help split work, track progress, and identify assets that can be leveraged more than once
Style guide for characters created by Carmen
Style guide for non-characters created by Carmen
6. 2D Animation Production
We recorded the final narration for our script in addition to several sfx sounds. We then animated the to the final narration in Adobe After Effects. Carmen and I took the lead on all the character animation, while Contessa and Nitai focused on any other animated elements. Due to the lack of access to the team/collaborative version of Adobe After Effects, I created a google drive system for us to share our compositions such that we could compile the character and motion-graphic/non-character animation we created. Once each scene was fully complete, the final scenes were sent to Nitai to compile with sound in Adobe Premiere. We received feedback from our faculty supervisor on our animation intermittently during this time.