Kira Hutchinson Portfolio

For this assignment, I wanted to use the character Jango from One Piece. For future assignments I knew better than to use other IP.

The blue ball is the bouncy ball and is a little monkey. The red ball is the heavy ball and is a little armadillo.

I got really into the lore of these very simple characters to create some backstory to their duel. The orange ball, The West, must defeat his evil blue brother, The North, to avenge his wife, The South.

The final assignment Fundamentals of Animation was to use video reference, combined with an original character design to create a looping animation. My theme for the semester was cowboys, so I settled on a cowboy design for the character. For the action, I came across some great sword fighting animation, so thus the Sword Cowboy was born.

For this assignment, we had to create a short storyboard of a character exploring a scene and finding something shocking. In my story, the character walks into an abandoned classroom and seemingly paranormal things happen, like a lamp flying off of a table, or spooky glowing eyes, but upon closer inspection, it was just a cat the whole time.

This assignment was to storyboard the exposition of a story using montage. For the subjects, I chose two original characters and the inciting incident of their story- witnessing a gruesome death at a monstrous cult meeting. The montage is in the third page as we see how each character decides to pass the time as they film the suspicious alleyway.

Our assignment was first to create a suspense story inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s idea of the “bomb under the table” where the audience knows the danger from the very start of the scene, and it becomes more suspenseful as the story progresses and approaches the “bomb” moment. In the story I came up with, it is two separate scenes of a mom driving her kid somewhere and on the other side, a drunk man getting in his car to drive. Seeing these two situations together would make the audience worry that the two would get into an accident because of the hazard of driving under the influence of alcohol. The “bomb” in this case would be the drunk driver crashing into the mother’s car. Grim I know, but a PSA is meant to shock you and realize the true weight of wrong actions.

This animatic was our first visual and time-based project from Intro to Digital Narrative. The objective of this assignment was to create an animatic with an original story, which could be one moment, or the beginning of a larger story. The animatic had to be 30 seconds.

My idea for this animatic was to use a story I had been working on. I had a very loose plot, so it was nice to use this assignment to explore my own personal ideas further. I thought that the moment when the inciting incident occurs would be best for this assignment. I wanted to introduce both characters and show their personality within the 30 seconds. The engineering student is very driven to succeed, but has very volatile emotions, switching very quickly from frustrated to giddy. The ghost is very curious and clumsy. I also wanted the idea that this character is a ghost and can’t be seen to be very clear, so I gave her a blue outline to contrast the standard black lines of the rest of the scene.

This animatic was the final project from Intro to Digital Narrative. The objective of this assignment was to create an animatic using original or outsourced sound effects with an original story and concise plot. The animatic had to stay between 1 and 3 minutes.

My idea for the animatic was to mash up the genres of Sci-Fi and cooking shows in a comedic way. I had to design some non-threatening, silly, and easy to draw aliens. The plot surrounds one alien preparing a meal out of scraps collected by the spaceship that they inhabit for the other alien on board. I developed the humor in the human attributes of the aliens in the way they enjoy music and use human appliances. To make it clear that they were still aliens, I thought it would be interesting to imagine what odd things these aliens would eat, because they didn’t understand the tastes of normal humans. I also wanted to add the classic jokes that Nokia phones can survive anything, whether that be space, or a blender and how hard it is to make the Japanese-style omelette omurice.

Final project for 3D Modeling and Animation I. I modeled the monkey robot and the rest of the scene. The assignment was to create a unique robot to do a specialized task. I thought it would be interesting to design a robot after an animal, as most animals physically adapted to do certain tasks. I chose the stereotypical (and perhaps inaccurate) idea that monkeys collect coconuts.

From back to front- heavy ball, light ball, and bouncy ball

Collaborative animation with another student in the class. This is only my section of the animation. We worked together to create the scene.

Character walk assignment. The reference I chose for this animation was https://youtu.be/8EjsQtx4xtc?si=b8dnj9AfILxk-EoF

3D animal model I created for 3D Modeling Organics that we then rigged and made a simple test animation for. The higher quality version of this model can be found in the Design Classwork section.

A group project for Digital Sound Studio. We had to create foley, source other sounds from online, and edit together a lush soundscape. Visuals were not required, but there were two animation students in our group, so we thought it would be nice to accompany the sound with video. I animated the second half sequence from the vacuum wipe transition.