rus233: Russian revolution, Betsy Ehlers

This animation uses a series of authentic political propaganda posters and photographs to illustrate moments from the history surrounding them. The goal was to help students keep track of a lot of different players, groups, and complicated events which took place in a short time line. We also hoped to bring in some of the exciting and dramatic realities involved in the history, without derailing from the bigger picture.

While the original goal was to use projection map textures onto crude geometries in Autodesk Maya, like the end credits of Captain American The First Avenger (by Method Design (formerly Rok!t Studio)(more : http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/captain-america-the-first-avenger/ ), we ran out of time and ended up just keeping everything 2D (with very limited animation). The original idea was also to deliver the voice over in rapid fire style of a 1940s news reel, but we decided to just let the instructor use their real voice and personality. In the end we also thought that it might help to repeatedly go back to a literal timeline covering all the events to help the viewer keep track of where they were as events played out. The opening planet was animated in Maya, and the image of soldiers running was animated in Adobe Flash, while the rest was edited together in Adobe Premiere and Adobe Audition (along with extensive photo editing and drawing in Adobe Photoshop).