The Mind Altar was a project for a class of mine and one of the first animations I made with Autodesk Maya. I wanted practice rigging a character as well as using cartoon shaders that I really enjoy. I also edited together my own sound effects that I felt breathed life into the project as a whole and made it feel more complete in my eyes. Overall, I learned so much in the process of making this and I continue to apply these lessons in my work with animation and other projects today!
Here's some of the things that inspired me when I made this:
Timotainment is a youtube channel I frequented when I was younger that made, what can only be described as, high-quality shitposts. They would make animations using iconic internet memes as characters and many of the videos took place in this indescript, void-like space. While the humor employed in the videos is kind of dated, I admit the idea of a strange abstract world taking place in dark open space has never lost its charm on me.
Another youtuber I've enjoyed is TerminalMontage, who makes amazing animations parodying video games. But for the sake of my own stylistic choices for The Mind Altar, I drew inspiration from their series parodying changes to FTC regulations in 2019, effecting the content that is considered "for adults" and taking new regulations for their literal meaning and creating a soulless, colorless, angular animation that still manages to make me chuckle. The idea of being able to tell a story with only simple shapes like they did was appealing to me, so I channeled that into my own work with less emphasis on trying to make it as bland as possible (again, it was parody after all).
Lastly, I figured I should shill for myself. I post a lot of my work on my own youtube channel which can be found here.