Initially Nathanael and I experimented with a simple text illustration that would trigger an annoyed reaction. This attracts the viewer(albeit in a negative way) to interact with the wall.

Even as a test, Ina mentioned that it might be going too far, since it looks too corporate and will incite the wrong response from NTU itself. She suggested that either the visuals have to change, or the message has to be reworded.

After some discussion, we decided to go back to our original direction of a more positive playful interaction. We’ve decided to personify the wall and giving it a name Wally. The wall will be a shy person who is trying to make a speech for the first time. The viewer will be asked to help Wally complete his sentence because his stage fright makes him forget words.

After a second round of consultation, Ina suggested an improvement to the visuals to backup the interactive part. She told us about the text being in a fluid state, emerging from the background. When needed, this visual style allows the text to mask itself when it doesn’t want to be shown.

After some rethinking, we decided to try using depth of field as a way to translate this style into an animated form. I’ve made an attempt at jumping ship from After Effects to Cinema 4D, which is essentially a 3D version of After Effects. Putting in Wally’s speech in an extremely shallow depth of field, the text can hide itself from the viewer when it is not the focus, conveying a sense of shyness. The render times for this style was expected to be long, so I sought out a rendering application that could make use of the graphics card in addition to the CPU to increase render speeds. This led me to a plugin called Nvidia iRay. It allowed for increased image quality in the same amount of time. Since it is still a 4K resolution animation a 15 second clip took 12 hours to render, but it was worth it.