SUMMARY
For my Computer Animation class' final project, I decided to collaborate with The Daily Pennsylvanian (The DP) and discuss the historical (and sometimes heated) relationship between the University of Pennsylvania, world-renowned Ivy League university with a $9.6 billion endowment, and West Philadelphia, a "tough" section of Philadelphia with one of the worst poverty and crime rates in the country. This topic has always interested me since I arrived at Penn in 2012 and saw for myself the striking inequality of privilege, wealth and education.
My inspiration for this type of long-form feature was The New York Time's Snow Fall piece. I worked with The DP's Director of Online Projects, City News Editor, and the reporter to make this idea come to fruition.
Unfortunately, due to time restraints and the fact that I was using Autodesk Maya's student version, I was unable to publish the piece on The DP's site with the article. However, I'm still glad that the idea behind the animation sparked the telling of this story between Penn and West Philly and thus was able to start the much-needed discussion around the topic.
You can read the finished article, sans animation, here.
A great deal of putting together the animation involved research and data. For each of the more than 200 buildings on campus, I had to find the height of the building, year it was built, and its relative location on the map I was using.
Improvements that I didn't realize until final rendering: I should've slowed down the frame rate. I also would have loved to make this into an interactive slider piece. Alas, maybe in the future there will be the opportunity and time to.
You can read the finished article, sans animation, here.
