This story begins with how I came up with the story for my story. I was walking to the library to return two books. One was on Knot theory, and the other was on basic point set topology. I was thinking about how everyone always talks about how weird high(er?) level topology is, in that many shapes are considered to be the same thing, because they can be continuously transformed into one another..

The canonical example of this is the coffee cup to torus, take a look at this animation from wikipedia:

So at this point I took a little liberty with the narrative, and decided transforming them into cubes and not toruses would be more interesting for the story, and thus the idea was born. As I walked over the Eagle Bridge, I thought of how I could have a whole family of coffee cups… It just got better and better, as I walked I planed out the entire story, and then when I got back to my room I set to work for like five hours.. hah

As for actually creating all of the media, it really wasn’t too difficult, for the coffee cups themselves I used Flash. I like using flash, because it is vector based so it is really easy to change things up quickly. I wanted to use Blender to make some 3d models, however I really failed hard at that so I decided on doing the gif of the coffee cup dreaming instead. I used flash for that one also. It took quite awhile to get it to look like he was dreaming, I based that on this gif (which is hilarious in my opinion):

Next I set to work on actually making the sounds, that was probably the easiest portion of everything I did, however I spent a lot of time on getting it to the place I liked. The main effect I used was simply just changing the pitch, I had to remove a lot of popping sounds though, and also fade in and out each track as to make it sound nicer. So the work wasn’t hard there, but it took awhile to make sure everything was good enough.

Finally the video, this was my cherry on top. I started working on the stop motion first. I simply used my phone to take pictures for each frame and then move each object ever so slightly, it didn’t take too long, but I did have to redo it a few times. There was also a part where the coffee cup jumped, but it didn’t look good at all so I had to take that part out, which was a big shame in my opinion. After getting the stop motion into video, I noticed that it was like 1 second lol (duh stop motion). So I thought of the idea of adding real video to the video also. I thought it would be cool to blend those things together. I thought the life action footage turned out pretty good actually, it felt like something out of the predator.

Overall I really enjoyed doing this project! It was really fun to put together this funny little story, and to connect it to math! Very fun!