HOW EGG-CITING!
Visual Design • Character & Object Design • 2D Animation
— An interactive digital installation / The Centre for Digital Media / May - August 2019 —
A fun and interactive experience about cooking eggs.
"How egg-citing!” invites you to help two best friends cook their favourite dinner - eggs. Help them prepare the egg and participate in a fun and light-hearted experience! The installation intends to provide some comic relief from the stresses of daily life through animation, visual designs and quirky interactions.
HOW TO INTERACT WITH “HOW EGG-CITING!”
1. Draw on the egg template however you wish!
2. “Save” your drawing and watch the egg come to life!
3. Your egg will be taken and carried up into the scene above you.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS & THE ARTWORK
Meghan Ang, Annie Shen, and Silver Xu are students of the Masters of Digital Media program at the Centre for Digital Media and have backgrounds in animation (Meghan and Annie) and in computer sciences (Silver).
The inspiration behind “How egg-citing!” comes from their interests in anything weird, quirky, or unexpected, and is very much a product of their collective sense of humour. They have created this installation piece with the intention of giving audiences a fun and light-hearted digital experience for anyone to engage with.
IDEATION
— Left: Initial concept illustration by Annie Shen
— Right: Egg concept illustration by Meghan Ang
Inspiration was taken mainly from games as the weird and quirky visual style we aimed for mixed well with player engagement, thus inspiring the fun interactions we hoped to create. In this way, we would be able to create a fun and engaging atmosphere, where the cute art style would be able to balance the more "strange” elements.
— Above: Concepts for one of the monsters; Illustrations and design by Meghan Ang
The characters were designed in a way that was simple, round, and endearing, but with some slightly exaggerated or “out of place” elements (in this case, the extremely long arms, which would wiggle and move around the screen freely when the installation was idle).
ANIMATION
Simple and quirky 2D animations were used to bring the eggs to life!
The eggs would move around the tablet screen until the frog character’s hand grabs it and pulls it into the larger projection screen above.
— Below: Examples of other eggs drawn and designed by participants!
YOLK DIRECTORY
We created the Yolk Directory as a fun way to showcase all the possible objects (or “yolks”) that could appear in our installation, similar to the inventories that can be found in games.
Each object is given a caption of some sort, describing what / who it is.
— Above: A few objects that appear in “How Egg-citing!” ; Illustrated and designed by Meghan Ang
— Directory UI by Meghan Ang and Annie Shen; Created with Adobe XD
— An interactive installation made at The Centre for Digital Media —
Artist & Animator — Meghan Ang
Artist & Animator — Annie Shen
Developer — Silver Xu
