So my chosen movie scene was when Mulan makes her decision to go to war on behalf of his father. What I caught from the scene was her immense contemplation and the use of rain/thunder sounds to guide the entire scene. Hence, I thought that my machine will encapsulate these elements that were of significance to me.

Video of successful attempt below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qm9FTDp9XcLW6BP9hG7dD1N0c_Vp-TEE/view?usp=sharing

I realised that I have tendency to not express my thought processes accurately during critique sessions, so I guess this is the only platform left for me to explain the purpose behind some of my machine’s components.

So what I did to portray Mulan’s contemplation was to complicate the ramp downwards. I did not create a straight path for the marble to roll down. Instead I created triangular obstacles as well as  curved paths for the marble to roll.

And from the scene, it seems that every huge downpour or thunder heard signified the next course of action for Mulan. So I wanted to create that with the first see-saw which also act as a rain stick. However the force exerted on the rain stick was too quick, such that the raining sound was not captured fully.

The first see-saw (which also represents the downpour) triggers the next movement where the ball rolls down a straight and steeper path. The steeper ramp signifies how Mulan becomes more resolved and motivated to fight for his father. And I also made the marble hit some bells which represented the sounds of the thunder. This was an attempt to sort of fuse the effects of sound and Mulan’s behaviour together into one.

Like what Peter critiqued, it is true that my machine was lacking a key component of a dramatic move at the end. To be honest, I wanted to include the last act of the marble triggering a cutting act but couldn’t do it in the end. This is so because I went back to amend the 2nd tier of ramps to increase it’s level of complexity (where the sounds are heard). So I kinda lost stamina to create the last action which was indeed very crucial. So boo to me ):

As much as I get super uncomfortable with 3D briefs, I actually quite enjoyed the amount of problem solving this machine required of me. And it was quite a joy to have the opportunities to constantly resolve errors. But I guess I needed to put more thought into grounding my piece of work to the concept which was probably my biggest takeaway from the critique session.