Project Details

Awards & Nominations

Mooncake has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

The Challenge | The Art Side of the Moon

Fifty years ago, generations were inspired when humans made a giant leap and walked on the moon. Today, NASA is committed to returning to the moon and beyond! Your challenge is to create an artistic work to communicate, inform, or inspire others about humanity’s return to the moon.

Bunnies on the Moon

A child asks for a bedtime story about the moon.

Mooncake

Summary:

We created a short animation about a child who is told a bedtime story about the moon and its residents. We wanted to incorporate recent events into our project such as the first all-female spacewalk on Friday and the plan for the first woman on the moon by 2024. Our target audience is children, because they are the next generation, and we also wanted to spark imagination by referring to the many myths and legends about the moon.


Background:

We chose this challenge because we wanted to make something artistic as a break from work and thought that Art Side of the Moon was a very broad challenge to spark creativity. Since it's the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, we thought it would be nice to honor that. We developed "Bunnies on the Moon" because we were inspired by legends about the moon we heard about as a child. For example moon gods and goddesses, werewolves, and Chang'o. While doing research, we found a voice clip from the Apollo 11 mission that asked them to keep an eye out for "bunny girl", in reference in the Chinese legend about Chang'o. This fit in well so we built a story on that concept.


What it does:

Our goal with this short animation was to inspire children about the wonders of the moon. The child in our animation likes animals, especially bunnies. We used the "bunny on the moon" story to relate to the real animals that may actually be on the moon (any surviving water bears from the Beresheet lunar lander). We hope that children will become interested in learning more about the moon and be involved in the field of astronomy.


Challenges included:
  • Forgetting to bring a drawing tablet so we had to use pen tool...
  • Not having a proper microphone to record audio with
  • The computers in the lab we were using kept having "scratch disk full"
  • We're a small team of 2 people!

Next steps:

  • Face and mouth animations for the characters
  • More animated movements (i.e. we were originally going to show the moon cycle and some myths displayed over the moon, like the Greek moon goddess Selene with her chariot)
  • Improve sound quality of our own voice recordings
  • Make our own background music
  • If we had endless time and resources, it would be cool to see this as an animated series for children with each episode telling a different story!

Resources used:


Software used:

  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Adobe Audition
  • Google Docs and Drive for sharing files

Our final animation can be viewed here:


Our slide deck can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QBz0ltJZGL...


Thanks for visiting our project page and we hope you enjoy our animation! :)