Boy Skeleton Complete

Narrative: Starting To Fill Scene

Everything UV Mapped and ready to texture

Scene Lighting

Narrative: Male and Female Character Design Development

After getting together the four of us discussed what we wanted for the characters in our animation. My main idea for the male characters was a squarish design and for the female more circular (I looked at couples such as Carl and Ellie from Up for inspiration). 

Now that I had a decent idea of how I wanted these characters to look, I worked on them digitally to make it easier to adapt the style for the both of them.

Conveyor Belt Modeling

Basic Animatic

StoryBoards Revisted

Narrative: Male Character Designs

The main idea I've had for the male character is someone with very little presence, and quite bland since the girl character never notices him despite all his efforts. I also feel we could make him very expressive with the use of his eyebrows and mouth. 

Narrative: Environment Design

My Rough Factory Design

With Will's Characters

Another One With Will's Character Designs

I made a rough idea for our environment but still needs a lot of refining such as having the paper shredder and 'rejections' lever / trap door etc..  but think we should stick with the straight-on fixed camera throughout. I think the conveyor belt design I have here will be 3D modelled, along with the characters and then maybe we will just have a painted 2D background to suggest the rest of the factory world and keep focus on what's happening in the foreground. I've added a couple of Will's character designs in here as these were my favourite ones and I wanted to see how they would fit in with the factory space. Although I can't quite decide which I prefer at the moment, it's all work in progress!

Narrative: Origami Crane idea

I had a quick thought in regards to the whole origami crane sequence for our story. There's a legend about making 1000 origami cranes to make your wish come true (Senbazuru), so instead if it being one crane and getting picked up by a draft, maybe we could have origami cranes trickling down the conveyor belt to the girl? (We obviously won't do a thousand since that's a lot of work to do, but it would get the idea across?)

Here's a rough sketch of what I mean, and this would also make her finally look at the other character after all of his attempts?

Narrative: Initial Character Ideas

Since the three of us agreed that cardboard boxes would be a good idea to incorporate into our designs in some way I did few sketches.
I wasn't sure how literal we wanted to be so made a few cardboard characters:

I also did a quick stylized human character to go along with it, inspired by the Animal Crossing art style:

Scarlett, Megan and I all agreed that we wanted to work more on the stylized human style for our character rather than literally being a cardboard box. We plan to play around using cardboard textures on our characters/environment.

Cardboard Boxes

One thing I really liked about the factory is the boxes that we could have laying around. How our character could have aspects of his shape like a box. I had a look at the shapes and sizes of different boxes and tried to do some drawings from them.

I did a few drawings based on the images and research I found and come up with a few ideas. These are basic sketches. Felt good to sketch again after while. 

Factory Influence Map

 

 

The factory essence that I was looking for was one like a beat up old wooden workshop place. Messy but yet warm. I thought it would give a nice setting to where love can take place. I like the idea of lights hanging low from the celling's with old materials used to protect it.

I also like the idea of slashes of light filling the room from cracks in the windows or the walls?

 

Let me know what you think. I'm going to start thumb nailing now. 

Narrative: Environment Research

Since our narrative has gone down a different route, and we have a clearer idea of the type of factory we're going to have this animation centred around, I started doing some research of what to expect in a card printing factory.

This video is a very good reference of the type of machinery we would be expected to model. Its probably pretty helpful when it comes to where we want the two characters to be interacting.

Fig.1 Xerox igen4

Fig.2 UV Coater

Obviously we can modify these to suit our theme a bit more but its a good start to build this on. I hope you guys find this helpful??

Thoughts After Group Tutorials

 

After Tutorials

 

 

After our group tutorial with Alan we went away with an idea taken from all our ideas put together. A sad old man in a factory run down by routine finds himself working (Set in black and white) until he happens to do something that changes his actions and suddenly everything goes back into color and life gets put back into the factory.

 

 My thoughts...

 

 

 

New Idea

 

I like the idea but I feel like we still are missing something if that makes sense. Then I spoke to Phil today about the idea and he helped me a lot to clear my mind on the meaning of the quote "Actions Speak Louder Than Words" .

 

He believes that we should make our setting 'The Factory' work harder in our world to help really bring the meaning to life. Suggesting that maybe we use a card factory where two people are printing valentines cards. The girl  or boy character is completely bored and the boy likes her. Trying to send her messages through a conveyer belt. But how can actions speak louder than works when words are lost in a valentines card factory?

Its a story audiences could relate to it very easily and we could suggest that in 5 seconds of the beginning but showing the girl working, bored and the boy staring at her wide eyed. Then we could show funny ways the boy tries to show her how he feels. Revealing that he likes her at the end.

 

 

 

Romance is dead in a factory where romance is their everyday life and routine.

A story of unrequited love...

 

Megan we could use that whole walle showing Eve how he likes her by showing her his home and the things he collects?
Gemma the whole routine and life in a factory is systematic and the same routine is still there.

 

 

What do you all think?

 

 



Narrative: Post-Tutorial Feedback

So today we came to realise we all had some usable element  from all of our ideas but we just weren't fully there. Alan gave us a few ideas to push us along in the right direction and gave us some material to look at. As the character is working in a factory day in, day out, same routine etc... he is sort of, 'becoming the factory' and blending in with this robotic style of work so Alan mentioned ex-student Molly Bolder's 'Proportion' which is based on depression/anxiety which could link in with our idea (see below).

He also mentioned the film Mary and Max for us to watch as Max's character is similar to what we aim for our character to be, so we will be definitely be watching that soon for inspiration.   I really like the idea of the animation starting off with no visual but just the repetitive sound of our character in the factory process; either stamping something down or screwing something onto something else. So first the audience are curious but then cuts in to show the monotonous and dull space of what is going on. By the end of the animation, his actions will portray something contradicting his depressing factory environment and his initial boring routine, make light of his situation.   As a group we are now going start finalising the narrative and making some rough character designs.

Narrative Ideas and Style Inspiration

"In the Factory"
"Actions speak louder than words"

The first thing that came to mind for me was an indistinguishable type of environment. Factories have order, an unchanging routine. So if we were to go down this route, what type of narrative would we want to go with?

The few things I've thought of at this point are things like going against the system, breaking the cycle. 

This is just the basis of the type of idea I have for the narrative so it needs a lot more research and development on my end. For now I wanted to show some examples of the type of idea I have in regards to both an indistinguishable environment and going against the system.

This animation has been a favourite of mine for a few years now with how it addressed the monotony of school and its unbreakable routine. I thought it was a good example for my idea with its indistinguishable characters and breaking the cycle.

Another example of breaking the cycle and going against the system. She mentally beats her job which is centred around this statue, and literally beats it by finally walking away from it.