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Senior Thesis: The Big Idea

Last semester I had a talk with John Kuiphoff and he gave me great advice. John told me about one of his friends that does animation. The friend chose one element of animation to focus on in his career. This gave me great inspiration to focus on facial expressions. The part of me that is greatly enraptured with psychology was drawn to the idea of expressions in animation. In this project, I want to dip into the world of facial expression.

My first big idea is to incorporate music into my project. I want to have a close up of a face that reacts to different genres of music. I want to really focus on smoothness and the realness of the facial reaction of music. For the face, I would have the 3D model to be a female in her late teens or early 20’s. I am a bit conflicted on what my time duration would be. I would love to have it on loop. So maybe having 30-50 seconds of animation would be great to present. The music that I will choose will be royalty free. The genres would most likely be: Pop, Emo, Alternative, Country and Screamo. I am hoping that this will be my project. However, I do have an alternative project just in case.

My alternative idea would be to animate a mermaid captured in an aquarium. I would focus on her sad expression through the glass aquarium. However, with this idea, I would animate her swimming around in the glass water filled cage. This could help me work on the smoothness of my animations as well. I would include music in this idea too. However, it would not be the focal point like in my main idea. The music should be more incorporated in the background. I would want the music to be somber in mood, as you see the mermaid locked away for the entertainment of others. This animation I would also love to have on loop. This animation length would be about 45 seconds long.

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Project SYNC

For my senior thesis project, I’m interested in creating a series of motion graphics inspired by music. I’m inspired by graphics that both accompany live musical performances and smaller scale looping graphics that accompany tracks on Spotify Mobile. I’d like to create motion/video graphics that will accompany a song and add more depth and elements of storytelling when paired with the music.

This past summer I interned for a marketing company doing motion graphics and video editing, gaining more experience using After Effects and video editing software. I really enjoyed it, so I’d like to strengthen my motion graphic skills and create some work for myself. I was inspired by the looping motion graphics which accompany many songs on Spotify Mobile, and would love to try my hand at creating my own.

Over the summer I also went to a Billie Eilish Concert where I was captivated by the background visuals which spanned 3 huge screens and the stage itself, and the ways which they accompanied her performance so well. With my thesis I’d love to create a variety of visuals that tell a story when paired with pieces of music.

I’ll likely have to reach out to the artists who’s work I’m interested in using for permission, but I guess it’s all part of the process. I’m hoping to create some looping, formatted for mobile, “spotify-esque” graphics as well as some longer, standard video format graphics that may change throughout a songs entire duration, and possibly even some graphics designed to span a series of screens, perhaps to accompany a live performance.

I’ve always been interested in combining my love of music, performance, visual art and animation, and I feel like this is a great opportunity to do so.