Hey, it's time for NATA again! After saying repeatedly for months that I wouldn't be able to do it again this year, I made time and tried to make this as worthwhile as possible by using NATA to learn 3d animation. This is phase 1 of the experiment.

Due to my incompetence in Blender, I'm not good enough yet to make characters with faces that work well enough to carry a story. It's less distracting to have no faces than bad ones, it turns out. While I aim to fix that as soon as possible, for my submission to the open round I couldn't try anything too ambitious so I had to work around that constraint.

That's also why the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense, so maybe this was a little too ambitious anyway. In case it wasn't completely apparent in the video (which is my fault), what's happening is the following: The moon has trouble dealing with its responsibilities and tries to run away. Being alone in space is lonely for both the moon and the sun. The moon realizes it made a bad decision, so it returns to try to work things out. It's not a complex story, and I guess it has a moral, so it sort of fits with the kinds of things I've been making this past year.

Where I think the video failed most is that the body language of the characters without any faces or dialogue wasn't enough to make the story clear, especially given the unnatural movement that they have. It's a little confusing to watch, and isn't thought-provoking or anything. However, I do think that this video fulfilled its initial purpose. I know my way around Blender better now. Since the start of this project, I've improved immensely at getting the characters to move correctly, and I'm more familiar with rigging and modeling characters. Basically, although I don't really think this is a very good video, making it was a necessary step towards hopefully making good videos.

- Dave