Re-storyboarding

After spending about a week solely working on modelling and vis dev we decided to have another look at the story with fresh eyes. After watching the film again on the bigscreen we decided to try and liven the whole story up and have some more fun with it. 

After writing down some important story notes we wanted to stick to we then grabbed the whiteboard markers and began storyboarding out the whole story again:

Thumbnailing out random ideas and gags we were able to boost different parts of the story. It seems obvious but this process of scribbling drawings out in the open so we can all see them was so useful. It made it obvious which parts dragged the pacing or which parts wouldn't cut together very well. This isn't to say we weren't drawing out the story before but having it on display like this and being able to change parts around instantly was very helpful and refreshing.

This draft of the story has ended up being our 10th draft of the film...STORY IS HARD

But by now we can see why big animation companies spend such a long time on story. Not only is it super hard to do but also everything hangs off the story so it requires an awful lot of time and effort. Hopefully we've made some progess....

New Robot Design

New robot design:

We decided to give the robot a square design in order to contrast the curvy dog and curvy environment. That way the robot really stands out and is seen as something that is not from this world. We'll be adding fridge magnets onto his body too, each one representing a planet from the solar system he's visited. Hopefully this will make him seem more like a tourist.

Colour

During last week we all had a sit down and looked through some books on colour. We did this to try and figure out what colour style we want our film to have. One of the best books we looked at was Maurice Noble's book "The Noble Approach" It refreshed our minds as we looked at how he builds a colour scheme for the Looney Tunes shorts.

The first aspect of colour Maurice Noble works on first is the colour scheme of the character, and then we can work on fitting the environment colour scheme around the character:

From here we plonked the characters in an environment and began messing around with some more colours:

Pre-production Seminar - Deadlines Approaching

Animated pre-vis due 25th November.......

Some colour and environment tests

Since we have early models of the robot and dog we decided to do some quick colour and environment tests in Maya.

We assigned basic lambert shaders to the models and environment and then just played around with the colours. We then changed the viewport to only show flat lighting and turned on ambient occlusion. The result was actually quite pleasing. We're thinking about keeping the environment as vibrant as possible without being too busy or overwhelming.

Robot Design - Update

We've made some changes to the robot design based on our feedback from the lecturers. We're much happier with the design at the moment. It's proportions will definitely be easier to animate too.


I began by drawing out the silhouette so it'd be easier to concentrate on the proportions of the design. We also wanted to get the size contrast looking nice between the dog and the robot too.

He basically has longer legs than before and a slimmer body, but still keeping that slightly overweight look.

From here I adjusted the model we had in Maya to represent the silhouette:

We also redesigned the robot's mouth so he'd be capable of more expressions. Previously the mouth would pivot open like a bin lid, which looked nice but he couldn't really hit some of the more subtle emotions. We ended up looking at the 2005 film Robots to see exactly how they managed it. Though i'm not a huge fan of the designs the way the mouths worked was pretty cool. 

There's a flexible cheek around the mouth opening which enables the animators to sculpt in some nice mouth shapes:

Using this as reference we redesigned our robot's face:

Using the cheek geo we can hit some nicer graphic shapes with the mouth

The shapes of the robot need some further refining but as a base we're much happier than before!

Pre-Production Review and Feedback

The previous week we had a large review session with our peers and lecturers. The entire process is hugely helpful as it gets a fresh pair of eyes on our film and design concepts.

Among some of the issues pointed out are as follows:


Robot Character Design:

The early concepts where there is a greater size contrast between the dog and the robot is more appealing. It's funnier to see such a large robot be scared by such a small dog. There were also concerns about being able to get a good enough acting performance out of the robot due to it's wide body shape and the number of facial expressions he could potentially make.


Environment Concepts:

It was widely agreed that the environment would make more sense if it was set in a park or a common instead of a redwood forest. The story would make more sense for dog to appear in that type of environment instead of a redwood forest in the middle of nowhere.


The Film Edit:

Overall the film edit is working okay. There are a few things we need to keep in mind as we keep working on it. I'll cover these changes next blog post.

Pre-Vis Review

A Pre-Vis review session on the big screen:

We filmed a rough live-action cut of our film based on the storyboards. The purpose is to help us figure out the pacing and editing as well as being easy to change depending on feedback from our peers and lecturers.

Watching Pre-Vis back on a big screen really helps us spot issues they we would otherwise miss when watching it on a computer screen.

Robot Design

Since our Robot is essentially a tourist from space, the design needs to reflect this story choice. The design also needs to reflect his personality traits, we're going for an American tourist (apologies to all Americans)

Up until we had decided exactly what personality traits the robot had such a wide range of designs for the robot which caused a lot of headaches. Some of the variety we had here:

Once we knew exactly what character design we wanted we started to dial in the design. A major design change was acknowledging the fact that robot was from space and therefore not built by humans, This meant that the design could not be overly mechanical as a mechanical design implies that it was built by humans.

Hopefully the american tourist look comes across well with the addition of robot fanny packs

Dog Progress

Dog modelling progress as sculpted by Toby our freelance character sculptor:

Some rough colour concepts for the dog below too:

Dog Design Progress

We've always pictured the dog in our film as a very low intelligent, impulsive type of creature. His only objective in mind is to chew and chase sticks. With that in mind we started scribbling out some dog designs to reflect this characteristic.

We began with a whole bunch of rough exploratory sketches without applying too many restrictions at first. This way it's easier to stumble upon funny designs i think. Such as:

We had review sessions trying to decide which design we all liked best then began to refine the design:

Now we're starting to get somewhere:

We refined some more and ended up with a design similar to the one shown below:

Team hard at work