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