So week 1 of studio 3 started with a bang! The world builders project was described as creating a environment that illustrate’s the visual style and mood of the passage from a book. This would mean capturing the look of the environment that the author described then also apply different compositions to the world to enhance the mood. Basically we would be building an environment and trying different shots to best show it off. Firstly we had to pick a book however it wasn’t easy, unable to start our brains from the holiday slumber we could not recall any book passages that had given us the sense of an environment. That’s when we stumbled upon one of the example books 20 000 leagues under the sea. This book largely revolves around the expedition of a crew in a submarine visiting a lot of fictitious but extremely interesting worlds under the sea. One world that struck us the most was Atlantis. So from there we begun to gather some references to get the mood of the project going then we could begin to concept.
At first we focused on just the traditional story of Atlantis sticking to the idea of a greek city sunken under the sea. This lead to a lot of typical blue imagery and almost gave off a mystical feel. Although the buildings were right the fell wasn’t quite to that of the book. We had a re read and decided to incorporate the things really highlighted in the book. One thing specifically the Volcano stood out. It was described in the book as being the only sort of lighting this coupled with the research fiona did on the actual reason the city was sunk (banishment) shifted our mood to a darker theme. We also wanted that cool look of the red and blue mixing in the colours. This forced us to rethink again what the time and age of the buildings would be so we looked above land to Pompeii. This settled our minds as exactly what the book described was kind of like and underwater Pompeii. The next step was setting up the map this would help us envision what items would be in our camera shot giving us a hint at what we would be modelling but also to begin concepting what our shots might look like.
I feel the map was essential in this process because before we had it, envisioning what our scenes might look like was a bit of a struggle. However as the picture became more and more realised it was time to begin concepting our shots. Using the map and also the main assets we hoped to create we started to concept. My shot would include the aqueduct asset and so when creating my concept i really wanted to give the effect of it being a grand structure that towers over the landscape. To do this i had the shot lower sort of looking up at the aqueduct the same as when you frame a person from below it gives you that intimidating feel and while the main shot and even location of the aqueduct would change i believe my image at least captured the feeling I was trying to create and was used in creating different better shots that create the same effect.
I feel like this shot also capture the red and blue colours clashing however the volcano defiantly drew to much attention away from the aqueduct. The next step in pre production was to create an animatic lucky for us we had a great storyboard artist in Mac, he nicely put all our proposed shots and more together to give us a feel for the flow of he story. Although it initially includes characters they were purely optional and due to time constraints we opted against them.
The animatic gave us many things to think about and even changed our mind about some of our own shots. The most stressed thing was timing, most shots were ether perfect or to fast. This as well as trimming the shots basically less shots but longer shots that tell more of a story.
petesanimationblog 