Synaesthesia

Who?
Nikko Hull – Technical Director, Producer, Renderer, Director
Leo Chida – Character Modeler, Animator, Post Production
Kasumi Saito – Environment Designer and Modeler, Animator
Tien Hee – Illustrator, Texture artist, Storyboard artist, Character Design

What?
Synaesthesia a phenomonon involving the blending of the senses. This short follows a character throughout his life and his experiences of being a synaesthete.

Why?
We did this animation as a final year project at Massey University and in the first semester, we had to research into a topic to base our piece on. We stumbled across information on synaesthesia and found it very interesting so that’s what we decided on.

How?
We used Maya, After Effects and Photoshop mainly and was heavily influenced by the works of Team Cerf (Meet Buck and Salesman Pete), Studio 4c (Tekkon Kinkreet) and Mcbess. Our animation ended up having a very distinctive look thanks to our illustrator Tien Hee but also as a result of using low poly characters with selective hardening of normals.

Next Project?
We are meeting up soon to discuss our next animation with the possibility of working with a client this time – very exciting indeed 🙂

Character Turntable

Making Of

Let us know what you think of Synaesthesia in the comments below…