Samantha Nielsen

ANIMATION & VIDEO

Here you can view past animation, 3D design, and video projects I have made.

In a 3-D Design course at university, I took Green Day's American Idiot album logo and built a 3-D model using Autodesk Maya software. Using the album cover and pictures of my own hand as references, I constructed the model and colored it using toon shading and an outline.

3-D DESIGN

These studies were completed in my second 3-D design course, which focused a lot more on animation rather than just building and molding in Autodesk Maya. The two playblasts you see here are animated sacks of flour, rigs that I did not make, but were given to the class for the projects. The one on the left concentrates on motion and action. The red one on the right represents an emotion. Hopefully you can make a guess as to what that red sack of flour is feeling??

The point of these studies is to know that both motion and emotion play a critical role in the process of animation, no matter the style and no matter the character. Although it was a tedious process with a lot of trial and error, I had a lot of fun animating these rigs and I was pleased with the outcome.

This is a build of one of my first assignments in Maya. There's no real reason as to why I chose a Puffin, I just thought it would look cool in the software. In this project, I learned the basics of molding and building, as well as adding color and presenting projects on a turntable and creating a playblast.

Taking a look at this project compared to my final, the heart-shaped hand grenade Green Day logo up above, you can see how much progress and skill I acquired just in one semester.

Product Advertisement Project

A couple of different facets went into creating this project in my Graphics Effects course. The video to the left is one that advertises Lays barbeque chips using stop motion. Once this element was created I then went on to make an interactive online advertisement that includes a loading screen and the main page that features this video and social media links to Lays company. I created this interactive interface using Hype, an Apple software that allows you to create HTML 5 animations.