As some of you may know, I closed down my business at the end of 2016 so that I could take a few classes at WSU Vancouver to expand my skillset.

"Teach Me" is my capstone project for the DTC335 Digital Animation; Story, Narration, and Production class at WSU Vancouver, professor Brenda Grell.  My brief was to model, animate, and produce a 3D animation of a chess set.  My two sons were my inspiration for this piece.  My oldest son loves playing chess and he tries to teach his little bro how to play on a regular basis… and this is pretty much how their interaction goes!

This is my first hand at 3D animation.  It was definitely a challenge.  At one point I had to re-render 120 frames (a good eight hours of my life) due to a glitch in Maya… only to have it happen a second time later in the process.  You can see the floor "twitch" at three points during the animation, but due to time restraints I couldn't go back and re-render those extra frames.  At some point I will revisit this project and iron these issues out.

Software used in for this project included Adobe Illustrator, Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Premiere Pro.  All files were regularly bounced around between both Mac OSX and Windows machines without a problem.  It took roughly seven days to render this piece.