Category: Final Project

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3D: Project 2 Final

My chosen object that was of importance to me is actually my yearly planner. A planner is very important to me because I hate not being organised, and not being able to keep track of what I’m expected to finish. Hence, the planner is actually my way of exerting control over time to ensure that I have what it takes to keep doing the things I love. This includes meeting the people I love and doing things I love and of course, to stay on task for school. The planner is like a little break down of small baby steps that I need to take for the life ahead of me.

So I wanted to create something that represented a protection of time and of my dreams. The first thing that came to my mind was actually a dream catcher and I did try to incorporate the dream catcher together with my work. However, the complementary addition to a dream catcher didn’t really come through which resulted in a new search of other items that were used to protect something.

I thought of the wind chime, where it’s use to ward off evil spirits. In a way, the planner is used as a way to prevent mess and chaos in my life which made a wind chime a possible representation.

Next up, was trying to include my desire to exert control over time. I thought of what kind of items required an action to protect something and I thought of an umbrella. An umbrella is used to shelter one from rainy days and a physical action is required to open an umbrella. Hence I thought of making an umbrella wind chime.

I made an origami umbrella which can be opened and closed. They were of varying sizes, with the biggest closest to the viewer. This is purposeful in showing how the current month I am in will always be a period of time that I exerted greatest amount of control. The smaller umbrellas then represented previous months that have passed, which also represented time that I have either exerted control over or failed to do so.

There are bells inside each umbrella to further enhance the idea of it being a wind chime (: The size of the wind chime was also portable and easily hand carried because my planner is one that can be brought anywhere and everywhere.

If the umbrellas I made could open and close to a greater degree, I think it would be better at communicating some of my ideas but yes, super happy that I managed to make an origami umbrella that could open and close HAHA.  Oh and I should have thought of the use of my colours as well, instead of it being  a random aesthetically pleasing element of my work.

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3D: Rube Goldberg Machine

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.