So I have officially treaded lightly into the world of 3D animation. This very short intro was created for Netflix as an intro to be used in their online training for their employees. The end of the animation will be followed by onscreen questions and answers just like the TV game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” where the trainer and trainees will interact very much like the show, sans a million dollar reward. Instead, I’m guessing they will just be hired.

To create this piece of media involved almost all of the skills I’ve acquired over the years in terms of software knowledge. It all started with me trying to do an impersonation of the music from the show in Garageband. Once that was completed, I then started working in Illustrator where I created the logo artwork for the 1st half of the animation. That artwork was then brought into Maya 3D where I further created the shield and all it’s lights, colors and textures. Then I moved on to the gameshow floor room (this was the biggest task). There I created a close approximation of the gameshow floor room via watching clips on YouTube. Once the modeling of the room was finished, I selected images of people off of google and used Photoshop to create a transparancy around them and I imported them into the background (though I knew that they would be barely visible on purpose). Finally, all the shaders were applied to every surface in the room (glass, metal, plastic, rubber, neon lights, spotlights, fog, etc.).

After all this was finished, I discovered it would take 5 DAYS to render it on my laptop! A tip from a graphic designer friend pointed me in the direction of RenderRocket.com which is a cloud based rendering company. For a fairly acceptable fee, I was able to upload my Maya gameshow room file along with all it’s other attachement files and have it rendered in just under 30 minutes.

At the end, I brought in my animations, and my music and edited them together with some extra flashes and explosion sounds with Final Cut Pro.

Voila.

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