Oh No I've Been Impaled (Project 3)

"Oh No I've Been Impaled" is a short animation featuring a bouncing orange. Our protagonist attempts to escape certain death via kitchen knife... and ultimately fails.

Storyboard

Written Description

1. Orange bounces onto the kitchen table. He is ~*cute*~.

2. Knife magically floats into the scene. Orange notices Knife. Yikes!

3. Knife tries to kill Orange, but Orange is too fast. Orange dashes away, but reaches the end of the table and has no where else to go.

4. Knife is even more intimidating than ever, approaching our trapped Orange.

5. Knife looms above Orange as Orange awaits his untimely death.

6. Orange is finally stabbed. Goodbye, Orange, you were so young.

Animation Principles

Appeal - Orange has cute eyes. You therefore automatically like Orange and want him to survive. Imagine if Orange was just an orange. Not as appealing, right? Character design matters!

Squash and Stretch - Orange squashes and stretches when he bounces up and down on the table. Real oranges cannot squash and stretch as much as Orange can, but Orange is special, so he is allowed to deform himself like this.

Exaggeration - When Knife prepares to slice Orange, he literally gets bigger (I scaled him up). This is an exaggeration of Knife's intimidating personality and drills home the point that Knife is a threat to our poor little Orange. Audio is also used to exaggerate the scene even more. Furthermore, when Orange escapes from Knife, he doesn't simply bounce off to the side; no, the situation is more drastic than that, so he must DASH away. This is another example of exaggeration.

Anticipation - When Knife is about to slice Orange, he swings back first, letting the audience know that a big action is about to occur. Not only does he do that, he also grows in size to increase the anticipation factor. The audience is given time to absorb the scene before Knife actually swings down on Orange. Furthermore, Orange plays a role in increasing our anticipation, especially at the end. Orange SLOWLY turns and looks up, directing the audience's attention to the scary, looming Knife. Like Orange, we find ourselves anticipating what Knife will do next.

Still Images

Some keyframes from the animation. Scroll through the slideshow!

Animation

The final product. Thank you for watching!

Credits and Acknowledgements

The orange, knife, and table models were obtained from free3d.com. I constructed Orange's eyes and the room myself, using textures from Google Images. The audio effects were obtained from freesound.org.

In this project, I animated the choreography between Orange and Knife and worked with the Graph Editor to ensure that the timing of the bounces were as realistic as possible. I also played with the perspective/camera to give the animation movie-like qualities and added audio clips to bring it to life.