STEM Coding Lab

Overview

Beginning July 2024 I began working on a collaborative project with Big eMotion Technology to create educating yet engaging videos for under-resourced schools around Pittsburgh. The main goal was to make computer science education more accessible for children who are interested in this area.

Applications used: Clip Studio Paint, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects

Pre-Production

For re-usable 3D animations like transitions and intros, we created storyboard thumbnails to explore creative ways we could flow from 2D art to 3D animations.

Character sheet I made for our rigger to show how much we wanted to push Codey's expressions

Storyboard Animatics

Before finalizing the 2D visuals, I would create storyboard animatics to show my team to get their feedback on what to change or where we could potentially swap out the 2D art for 3D animation. I found that instead of creating storyboard thumbnails, jumping straight into the animatics helped me to brainstorm quicker since I could get a better understanding of the timing and spacing with the audio.

S7_storyboard.mp4
Example of storyboard animatic for one of our videos
s7_movie.001.mp4
Example of the final video

2D Art/Assets

I created over hundreds of graphics across 8 videos, with each video ranging from 50 to 100 visuals. It was an enjoyable experience as I got to experiment with different styles to match STEM Coding Lab's previous videos.

Combining 2D Art with 3D Animation

With STEM Coding Lab I had the opportunity to figure out how to combine 2D visuals seamlessly with 3D animations, and that started with figuring out how to overlay 3D animations onto my 2D visuals. Because I needed the 3D animations to have transparent backgrounds, I realized I needed to combine them in After Effects since the 3D animation TIFF files were still transparent at this stage of the pipeline. My workflow went as follows:

SCL_2Dand3D.mp4
Examples of the 2D and 3D animations