3d Duolingo. Coming soon. Very soon...

A while back I found myself sitting in a small coffee shop in Florence surrounded by people casually chatting in all possible languages - Polish, French, Chinese, you name it. It was my first time abroad as well as my first time in a truly multilingual setting, and I was greedily breathing in every single word I could grasp on.

I remember thinking how great it would be to have a simple fun way to get to know a new language - just like that, no strings attached, a nightstand of language learning. So you can feel the taste of it on your tongue, see how it moves, or whether it leaves its stuff all around the sentence, and decide if you have any future together.

That same very evening I ran into Duolingo and got instantly hooked - it was fun and it was free. My life got filled with bella-s and ragazza-s, and later with "el perro no come arroz"-s, until 10 attempts later my heart was lost to the language of love itself.

Fast forward to now and I am back to Duo. This time though in a completely different way - I'm making a 3d motion video for it (wait, what?).

I've been casually fiddling with 3d for the past couple of months and finally decided that the time has come for a more serious project. Picking the subject was my first major hurdle but through a long intricate process of elimination, I though of the good old friend Duo, the owl and it all clicked.

Right now, I would love to share some of my first baby steps and see what you guys and gals think about the whole endeavor.

I started off with gathering my thoughts into one big pile to get the general idea where I'm headed. I knew that I wanted to preserve by all cost the overall aesthetic of the app and its playful mood, so the original colors were going to stay (I did adapt them slightly to my needs but nothing drastic).

Next I collected some 3d examples to draw inspiration from. Here are just some of them:

I also asked around in the communities for some suggestions to get a fresher perspective and most of my fellow Duolingoers insisted that I include some memes into the video (we all know and love Duo for its memes). So now I'm thinking how I could portray them in my work. If you have any ideas, please let me know!

Below, I'm including a couple of rough sketches I've made so far. Please, keep in mind that it's just a draft and I'll be filling it with details and colors a little later.

This first scene took me forever to make, it was extremely tough to figure out how to make all those cylindrical things move:

This one was the easiest so far. Probably because there's basically only one thing really moving:

Here is my owl prototype and the final scene:

The next step will be to create and add to these (and a few other) scenes some details, after which I can start filling them with light and color. I'm super excited and really hope it'll turn out great in the end. I'll keep you all posted.

Take care!