The Wizard’s Study
Project Summary
The Wizard’s Study was a short animation created as part of a small animation jam. The goal was to develop a scene that told a story in under 2 minutes. Created in 2 weeks, the project tested my ability to ideate, produce assets, animate, and render out a scene in a short period of time.
cLIENT
N/A
TIMELINE
2 weeks
PROJECT TYPE
3D Animation
TOOLS
Photoshop, Premier Pro, Maya
Project Goals
Conceptualize, plan, and execute a cohesive visual narrative in two minutes
Prove capability to manage an ongoing project that includes many assets across multiple programs
My Role
3D asset creation and assembly
Animation
Video editing and sound design
Initial Planning
The danger of a blank canvas isn’t having to create new ideas from nothing, it’s knowing how to weed out the bad ones.
That is the idea I had to keep in mind as I begun planning. I settled on Maya as my primary program for the project due to my familiarity with it and began to brainstorm potential ideas for how to tell a story with no words and limited animation.
I had initially wanted to do a full walk-through of a tiny house that would give a peek into the life of a small family of mice that lived there. This was one of those aforementioned bad ideas. Not because the story was bad, but because it was far too complicated for the time-frame given. So, a new approach was needed.
I eventually settled on this idea of a wizard’s study. This is because a study–the place where you choose to seclude yourself for your own personal work and hobbies–is a deeply personal area. Anything placed within that room, and even how it was arranged, would be its own little look into the life of whoever used it; it’s own little story.
The wizard aspect is just because I think wizard’s are cool.
Asset Creation
Alongside Maya, I used Adobe Photoshop to create the various textures needed to breathe life into the models. I decided to keep things simple with the textures, drawing some inspiration from old RPGmaker games and the like. This complimented the slightly low-poly style I had chosen to go for; another decision born from needing to scale the project back. I think it compliments the quirky, fantasy feeling of the scene.
Using Maya’s robust modeling capabilities, I was able to easily create my objects for the room. Creating them each in their own individual files before later importing them all into one scene for assembly allowed me to keep a clean project structure and make easy adjustments to each model without picking through the entire scene.
Scene Assembly
When conceptualizing the camera setup, my goal was to immerse the viewer in a captivating first-person perspective, allowing them to experience the room as if they were physically present. To achieve this, meticulous attention was dedicated to crafting the camera movements, ensuring they authentically mimicked the organic sways and readjustments one might make while exploring a space.
Afterwards, I was satisfied. I rendered the scene out before assembling it with audio inside of Adobe Premier.
Final Deliverable
Reflections
Working under a tight time constraint forced me to make fast, deliberate decisions and prioritize clarity over excess. From blocking the scene to fully modeling, lighting, rendering, and animating the camera, I learned how important it is to balance ambition with execution. This project strengthened my ability to scope work realistically, tell a complete story through environmental design, and maintain visual cohesion even when time is limited.
This project challenged me to think like a storyteller and a technical artist under pressure. With only two minutes to work in, I had to distill a narrative down to its essentials and communicate it entirely through environment, composition, and camera movement rather than dialogue or character animation. The wizard’s study became a visual shorthand for its owner—layered props, lighting, and spatial choices were all intentional, meant to imply history, habits, and quiet tension within a single room.