Semester 2 Animation Narratives Easter Break

Easter Break

We had a solid Animatic down by the end of last week, but we didn't really have solid designs for the characters or the world, so we decided to spend the first part of Easter break working on that. I did some more research on the design of forests, specifically in video games, and I found a few designs that I liked. I also looked at Gary Larson's work, as recommended by Mike. 

I also looked at a few ways to model and create trees in Maya.

Zelda: Breath of The Wild has a few interesting ways to design trees. The one that matched the most with the style of forest we wanted was the following:

Zelda: Breath of The Wild (2017) - Nintendo

The trees have simple designs: They don't have many branches, and the leaves are just images that rustle in the wind. I think this is generally the design we'll go for in the Over Canopy trees, since they look old and solid.

The other designs I looked at are below:

Proteus (2013) - David Kanaga & Ed Key

Alternatively, I looked at Gary Larson and Bill Waterson for a mroe comical style. I was also suggested this comic, which was surprisingly similar to our idea:

Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson)

In terms of narrative and comical timing, I think that our best route forwards is to craft a world that's believable, but not incredibly realistic, and to have Deer that are comical, but not unbelievably so. That way, the design compliments the story and the joke we're trying to tell. 

I also came up with these basic tonal sketches:

In reflection, I was trying to nail down the tonal imagery of the scene more than anything else. I think I managed to figure out how the lighting would work in our scene, and also how things will look under that lighting. I am slightly concerned that this style we're going for requires a lot of work and modelling time, and that we'll get behind.

Our group work is starting to fall behind. We'd originally set a schedule for the project, which had us finishing our concepts to Wednesday this week, leaving us the rest of Easter to get ahead of modelling. This has now been pushed to Friday, and I'm a little concerned that we'll fall even farther behind. I would really like to have a lot of this done by the end of Easter break, because it will give us some time to breathe, as well as do our 3D Digital Literacy Task.

For now, though, I'll start modelling, and hope we keep on track.