AR Marching Band Show
An Iowa State Cyclone Football Varsity Marching Band experience made with Cinema 4D, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Aero.
Scientific Visualization Using 3D Animation (ARTIS 408), Professor Anson Call - Iowa State University
Task
For this project, I was tasked with modeling and animating a custom AR experience of my choosing using Cinema 4D and Adobe Aero. This was a very open-ended assignment, so our subject matter and methodology were completely up to us as students, but we had to incorporate at least one of Adobe Aero's AR triggers to create interactions in the scene we created. I was a member of the Iowa State University Cyclone Football Varsity Marching Band (ISUCF'V'MB), so I decided to create an animated AR version of one of our halftime shows that we marched at a football game. This halftime show was our "Choose Your Adventure" show, so I decided to animate our version of This is Berk from the movie How to Train Your Dragon. This animation is an exact replica of what we marched at halftime, so each dot in the animation represents a real person's spot in the band.
Challenges
Hand-placing each dot - There are over 300 members of the ISUCFVMB, and although I ultimately cut some sections due to some technical difficulties with their animations, I still had to individually animate a few hundred objects by manually placing them in each of their dots and keyframing their coordinates. This obviously took a long time, so I used the app we use to learn our marching band drill (Ultimate Drill Book) to help me quickly eyeball each dot.
Difficulty animating sections - For whatever reason, the dots for the tuba section did not want to animate properly. I never fully figured out why since I was on a time crunch to turn this final in, but I ended up having to cut them for this assignment; I do hope the ISU tuba section can forgive me. Maybe I'll have time to add them back in someday.
Final Result
Despite how long it took to manually keyframe every single dot individually, this assignment was pretty straightforward and easy to complete and I had a lot of fun bringing my marching band show to life in a different way. I was able to import the entire animation into Adobe Aero (again, other than the tuba section, for whatever reason), and I made the field clickable so the user could make sure they had everything angled the way they wanted to before starting the animation. Because this assignment was so flexible, I worked out the timeline and everything myself with no checkpoints or phases or anything in between, so I'm glad I was able to pitch an interesting, feasible idea and get it done within the timeframe given.
If you'd like to view this information for yourself on your phone, feel free to scan the QR code here and it should open Adobe Aero on your device (you do not need the app installed to do so):
