Week 4: Modelling a Draft Version of the Street 26/10/07

I just made this in half an hour to see how many extra windows, doors, balconys I need to make to make it look more varied.

The images have come out alright- I put a directional light behind the camera to see how well the light falls on the buildings and whether it looked too clattered. Im pretty pleased with the lighting to be honest. :) Its all temporary as I rushed most of it just to get a general idea of how it will possibly look.

Here's the shot of the alley we're thinking of using. Will have to talk with Harvey to see how this will work with his model of the alley.

Week 4: Let The Modelling Commence! 25/10/07

While Sam, Kanika and Harvey got on with building huge chunks of the environment, I thought I would help us out by modelling things which we could all use in our own sections as well as my own. I.e. I started modelling various windows, doors, etc.. This would be my aim for over the weekend so that when the others come to building their buildigns I would have built up a library of things they could import- I did this for a few reasons.
1. It would make life alot easier when it comes to building various buildings- You would jus tbuild a plane and import what i'e built for quick buildings.
2.Continuity (spell?) similar windows to show its in the same place
3.I could be flexible and vary in what my buildigns look like.
4.Easier to texture single objects such as windowswhen they aren't attatched to walls.

Here are a slection of stuff I've built during the day and also the stages they were built:

week 4: Finalise Storyboard sections 25/10/07

Well, the storyboards are finally in place! Here is the storyboard from my section (section 2) where the cat comes out of the dead lady's house and walks down the narrow street into the alley.

Week 3:Finalise Narrative 25/10/07

Well after coming back from Barcelona, we were all pretty fired up to crack on with the work :D
We NEEDED to finalise our narrative this week. This was pretty easy... although there were a few ups and downs and a couple of disagreement (to be expected), but we all managed to sort things out and come up with a pretty cool idea.

(pls excuse my poor explanation of our idea)=

After our meeting with Jared (tutor), we were pretty happy with our idea. We decided to go for the Global Warming explanation of why the world has been destroyed... : yeah sounds pretty boring dont it eh? no spaceships... no guns... no bombs... whats the point of doing it at all!! well, we wanted a really strong narrative but also very simple. Having global warming as our theme, we could focus so much more on experimenting with animated buildings- windows blowing open and then closing, curtains just flapping in the wind, after effects such as dust and heat hazes, strong lighting effects such as sun lens flare etc... we really wanted to push a desolate and barren environment that still had this energy in it- this of course demanded moretime, by trying to push ourselves with a really complex theme would only set us up for more problems later on.

We wanted this idea that due to global warming, the earths surface had dried up (all pretty cool textures) which cause earthquakes. We can really play with the idea of having huge chasms through the environment, and buildigns collapsing.
We weren;t too happy with having just a fly-through camera, so we came up with an idea that we'll have a guide- we went round in circles over this one- we weren't too sure if we wanted a person, an animal or whatever. In the end we went for a playful cat. The cat starts off by chasing a ball of wool down this hill and through an alley until it reaches this huge chasm where the ball of wool falls over the edge and the cat is left bemused and a little sad that he's just lost his only bit of fun *chuckle*... I can still imagine this cat peaking over the edge with his little face looking all sad and confused.
The cat is completely oblivious to the fact that the enivironment he's playing in is barren and desolate. Hopefully we'll have a lot of fun with this.

I probably didn't explain that as best as I could but you get the general idea. :)

BARCELONA!!!

AwesomO!! "Boyfriendo!"

Here are just a selection of photos to share our experiences of Barcelona. I'll comment on them to clearly show which ones are personal, and ones that are project related ;)

Heres a really cool building that I thought had loads of features on that I could use in the environment- The balcony, the window and the door way. The texture on building is amazin too!
The colour palette may work too, so all round, this building is near perfect for what we're looking for! :D We can tweak it to make it work but I think i will get most my influence from this building.




Heres a image I took that we could possibly use as a texture. It woudl save us painting it i photoshop- but it would also be a nice idea if we were able to use real grafitti in our environment to add to the authenticity of it all.
Group photo of us all (except me cos i'm taking the photo!) Harvey (left),Kanika,Sam, Matt.
Matt is actually lookin at the camera, hes got wonky eyes yo usee...
We told Harvey to keep an eye on our bags, hey... hes good at his job is all i can say!
Kanika... dam u, why are u just takin a normal picture!?
Sam is of course tryin to get me into bed... and its only the first day...




I had to put this photo up! Me and Sam completely owned this bear every day! It was a gift Sam won Kanika on the first day but we terrorised it so much. LOL











sorry one of the images is upside lol.. I suggest you take your head off and hold it upside down to see the image.

Week 2: Initial StoryBoard Ideas 16/10/07

I shall just explain the storyboards; well this is completely seperate from the stroyboard below- thats the first thing you need to know. The image above is more of a concept drawing more than anything. I wanted to explore more of the contrast between light and dark and what images would be really cool to exaggerate that.He I have the entrance to the alley and the entrance to the courtyard. Wide shots but really dramatic! This is the actual storyboard so far- what we initially tried to capture. The cat 'somehow' knocks the ball of wall out of the ladys hand (who is in fact very much deaded). the ball bounces out the door and then out into the main street with the cat follow. zooms out to show that the place is destroyed. Its obviously not finished and has no Barcalona signature architecture yet but it was more of a case to have the ideas on paper as quick as we could. See how it's working, if it is that is, and go from there. Are the angle working? are the zooms too fast etc.. all stuff liek that we were tryin to think of now so we could work out how muc hwe needed to model.

Week 2: Narrative_Ways to End the World 16/10/07

Firstly, We made a brainstorm of all the possible ways we thought we would be able to destroy the world. We came up wit hvarious ideas, examples are; global warming, alien attack, huge earthquakes, natural disasters, world wars etc..

(brainstorm image)

Sci-Fi:

As were all talking in our group meeting, most of us had a growing interest in a 'sci-fi' approach. Although our ideas were fairly farfetched, we kept throwing ideas out there and the rest were adding to it. Perhaps we got a bit too carried away with the sci-fi genre but the we had to exhaust ourselves of all early ideas because most of the were very cliche.

(scifi image)

I tried to take the sci fi idea down all possible routes keeping in mind that the animation still had to be within our capabilities. Unfortunately I wasn't convinced that we would be able to succesfully pull off a beautiful sci-fi environment, (within the time limit) and also spend time focussing on the narrative of the animation too. This was something I was struggling to over come.
We could get so carried away with trying to make the environment look stunning that we resort to having a fly-through camera and don't leave ourselves time to progress with the narrative at all.
The general group mentality was to create an original film rather than just an environment. Narrative would have to be extremely important. I just couldn't find a strong narrative in a sci-fi envionment that wasn't cliche.

Conclusion: We met again at the end of week 2, before Barcelona, to discuss the final idea. We all agreed that having a more natural disaster situation gave us enough opportunity to focus on the narrative- Global warming idea was still being played with here, and it wasn't set in stone.