Candyland

Project

This project was made in Maya for ART529 at UW-Madison, with sound added in Adobe Premiere Pro. The focus of this project was camera movement. You can view this video on YouTube, or for better quality, download the mp4 file.

Statement of Goals

Title:

Candyland

What:

I wanted to create an emotional scene in a usually lighthearted world. So, I decided that candyland (usually a fun place) would be the setting, and gummybears would lose their home to a chocolate volcano before finding refuge with other gummybears. The volcano’s lava would be made of red hots, the gummybears living near the volcano would have homes made of wafers, and the gummybears living away from the volcano would have homes made of ice cream cones. In the center of this world is a candy cane path, inspired by Lover’s Lane from Anne of Green Gables (a path framed by trees as the candy cane path is framed by candy canes).

Why:

I wanted to explore despair, uncertainty, and hope. To create a distinction between despair and hope, I created two regions within the candyland world: the chocolate region that is destroyed by the volcano and the ice cream region that is safe. Additionally, one region is dark and hot while the other region is bright and cold—contrasts that help distinguish the regions. There is a candy cane path between these regions that symbolizes the uncertain path between despair and hope. At first, I had planned to keep the candy cane path undamaged so that it represented safety. However, I ultimately decided that having this path destroyed conveyed the urgency of the situation better. Moreover, the path could still convey safety by being undamaged in the ice cream region. The gummybear’s animations also changed from my initial plan. Originally, the gummybears were going to just run from the volcano. However, I thought that the struggle needed to be clearer, so I added an animation of two of them struggling to pull out a third from rubble.

There are also a few important choices for the camera movement. For a while, I had the camera start at the volcano. However, I changed the beginning to look at the destruction of the candy cane path to build curiosity and anticipation—I wanted viewers to wonder what caused the destruction before seeing the cause. I knew from the start that I wanted a pause where the viewers looked inside the raging volcano and that the camera needed to climb up and down the volcano. When the gummybears became important actors, I lowered the camera to their eye level. When the first two gummybears finally pull the third from the rubble, the camera flinches backwards along with them. I hoped this would help the audience empathize with the gummybears. At the end, the camera moves away from the celebrating gummybears, encouraging the audience to reflect. Ultimately, I decided to have the animation done in a single shot, because I wanted the audience to feel like invisible onlookers. My audio choices were also important. The volcano has two sounds: the sound of a real volcano that felt dangerous and the sound of popcorn popping that better reflected the movements of the red hots and also reminded the viewers that this is candyland, an odd world. The gummybear voices sound young and high-pitched, because this is a typical choice for innocent creatures. The music comes from two songs of the videogame Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. When I was thinking of the feeling of uncertain hope, the theme song of this game came to mind. This theme song is used in the last half of the video. I adjusted the timing of this song so that the sequence with more instrumentation started when the gummybears found each other—the section with fewer instruments felt lonelier and the section with more instruments felt, to me, exactly like finding support in someone else. I decided to look for a song that embodied despair in the same videogame, because I wanted to find similar instrumentation that could be blended into the theme song.