Character Stuff

 Some acting ideas/reference of frustration.

Character studies

Assignment List - Week of October 27, 2013

[ Group 1 : Assignment List ]Week of: October 27, 2013

Vis Dev

• * Light Bulb Ideations
• * Re-D Printer (Recycle Printer)
• * Character Ideations
• Title Screen (?)
• Office Ideations

*Work posted by Tuesday

Story

• Boards

 Modeling

• Toon Shader Pass 

Animation

•  Character Explorations

Tues

Stills from Surviving Progress, a documentary (on Netflix) on human "progress" since the industrial age may lead to our collapse.

How one studio simply handled the ending we discussed, with the lights illuminating in peoples heads.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0#t=1360

More Inspiration!!!!

Style reference!

And less relevant but still pretty cool:

Katie Sketches Round 1:

The spark:

TITLE/TITLE SEQUENCE HERE

 If we have "time" we could elaborate on CO2's journey between beats...

...as in he could destroy things along the way (forests, ice caps)

I am still working on some sketches for the end sequence.

Animation Inspiration

The Three Brothers

Jeff Sengali mentioned this short during the game project. What I love about this style is the clarity of its values and shapes and the neutral black, brown, and warm yellow-y palette that reminds me of old films. Also there are some very cool, very clear images that aren't explicitly what is exactly happening but still clearly tell the story. I also like the illuminated and paper-y texture to it. I like the idea of giving our animation a feeling of traditional materials (whether it be charcoal, like Gil suggested) or perhaps ink or watercolor, and keeping the palette simple.

Runaway

By contrast, although this cartoon is a lot sillier than what we are looking for, I like the energy of it and how playful they are with animation of certain events (like now the train is rushing so fast it flies off the tracks several times). I also like the attitudes of the people on board.  

PS: I have sketches which I will post soon.

Saturday Meeting Summary

Saturday Afternoon Meeting Summary:

Deciding to look past our original pitch, which was mostly comedic and involving the pine beetle, we decided to take some of Bunny and Courtney's critique and dig a little deeper into the emotional core of our story: the disastrous impact of global warming. We also talked about what is standing in the way of society being able to effectively doing something about it considering that we already have many of the technologies we need: Not believing its real, not being able to see its effects in a concrete way, and not caring. We want to create an emotional connection to the subject that will make people care, much like the short "Rise Above Plastics." 

(ALSO: A link to the short ABC news report on climate change):

Chasing Ice Report

We discussed Beasts of the Southern Wild as one inspiration. We liked that it was an allegorical story for a very real problem, told with images of things that weren't necessarily real. I found this image of the Orox frozen in the ice very striking. We discussed the possibility of our personification of climate change emerging from the ice, but Gil had a very cool idea of starting at the industrial revolution, essentially the beginning of some very cool technologies but also the beginning of our planets C02 problem.

The idea is to create a film which begins with small SPARK or CHANGE, which rapidly ESCALATES into a WORLD THREATENING PROBLEM. The solution is the same as the problem. A small SPARK or CHANGE of perception which will ESCALATE into a WORLD CHANGING SOLUTION.

We will follow the personification of CLIMATE CHANGE (or likewise you could see it as the personification of C02) as it evolves through three main beats: being "born" from a steam engine, growing rapidly through a jet engine, and ultimately growing enormously and dangerously through a factory smoke stack.  The idea is for this change to happen RAPIDLY and SEAMLESSLY, perhaps even in one "uncut" take. 

For the end, we discussed never EXPLICITLY showing the solutions (aka "Green Ninja" style of people turning off their sprinklers and recycling a bottle something. We know our film is for very intelligent adults and we want to give them some opportunities to draw their own conclusions).

The idea is just to show the SPARK, the very fist initial change in attitude. We discussed the idea of showing this by always having people in silhouette throughout the film, and having them "illuminate" when they are able to physically see the monstrous personification of climate change. 

Emotionally we like the feeling of this Wookid song "Run Boy Run." (There is a great instrumental version on spotify but I can't find it online). 

WHAT WE ARE WORKING ON:

- Sketches of what we envision these moments looking like

- Finding story "beats"

- Finding inspiration for art style and animation style

- Showing your ideas in a concrete visual way

NEXT MEETING:

Tuesday, October 22, 9:30pm, Room 243

Crit Fri 10/18

Here's what I extracted from the crits today. Let me know if I've misinterpreted anything.

 Be Smarter/More Intelligent.
 -Up the intelligence of jokes
 -Have sophisticated ideas and ways to treat them
 -Make the movie references great!
 -Don't let gags become stupid.

We have a huge concept and need to narrow it down to brass tacks.
Forest devastation is a huge deal and we need the audience to care; this can still presented in a comedic way

General notes:

Think of your target audience:
 -Who would care? Who are we selling to?
 -Is the problem/conflict international?

-Try to narrow down story to 30 seconds, think of it in terms of a T.V ad
-Have character go through a change
-Make us care!
-Real Emotion, we don't care about the privileged girl or rampant hobos but instead those who've experienced real tragedy or natural disasters that left them homeless.

A couple drawings

Hey guys, dont know if these are of any use, but maybe they can inspire.

Story Ideations, Boards