Treatment!

Treatment

Visuals

            The visuals for my animation are going to be focusing on my style very heavily but its something that I have never looked at before and this is low poly basically what this means is that you would either model you designs with as low a polygon count as you possibly could which may work if you have a good idea of exactly how you want something to look but you can also just model it normally and then apply some techniques to lower the polygon count and disrupt the symmetry of the points you can do this by using Cinema 4D and gives you the same and possibly better effect that what you would get from just modeling it straight up. This will give my wok a much more stylized look than if I just did it in the normal poly or used something like hypernerbs that just smooth’s out everything to give it that organic look even though I’m going for this edge look I still want it to resemble the real life thing and this is even more true for the environments and this is something that I am going to really concentrate on in this animation I want the environment to look great and really have the feel that I’m going for and that the outdoors hand made building that’s been crafted out of the things that are to hand and available and because my character is going to live in the forest and I mean deep in the forest a lot of what he owns is going to be made out of wood and or sheet metal.

            Also the type of character that mine is really helps with the types of things that he is going to have around his land just to list a few of these for examples like a American style letterbox with the little flag that they put up if you have mail, the house with the wooden slats painted red mixed with some stone archways and maybe windows things that you would be able to find around possible laying on the ground. I want my environments to be filled I don’t just want one house and letter box I want it to be filled with things to look at like buckets, chairs, pig trough, fences, rocks, snow, water tanks, table, benches, guitars, patio, brick path and walls and many more things but in contrast to this I want the environment to seem empty of all human things and what I men by this is that I just want it to be natural forest for miles rows upon rows or trees and then behind this mountain really tall snow capped mountain with his house nestled directly in the middle almost like its in the shadow of the mountain.

            Because I will be creating so many assets for this animation I want to make them as detailed as possible most of all the house I have a very strong idea of what I want it to look like in my head I know that will change but I know the style I want the house to be in and the other things around his house will also be detailed for instance if I’m going to make something out of wood and its attached to something I don’t just want it to look like it floating there somehow I am going to put nails where you would actually expect them to be fixing it to the wall or whatever its on.

            The color’s that I’m going to be using in my animation is probably the only part that I’m not really sure about I’m torn between two different styles that I like a lot for different reasons the first being similar to the Pivot animation I watched a while back which was also in low poly but it had some really nice lighting and colour pallet that made the characters stand out more and that was basically just making all the environment black and white or greyscale I can’t  honestly remember which one it was but this is something I don’t want to do for my work because he is in a natural environment unlike Pivot’s animation that was in a very industrial area so it fitted really well but I want mine to have rather a lot of colour like greens browns and reds but this is where I’m not to sure because I want it to be colourfull but then again I don’t want it to go to far and loose that feeling or it being post apocalyptic which I think it will with the style I’m trying to do if push comes to shove I can probably try and render out two versions of the animation one in each of the different styles.

            On top of this I will be adding visual effects to my animation the first one that I want to cover which you might not see as a visual effect because it sort of comes straight from the 3D render and is already there really with just a few tweaks to it but I would say it is a visual effect, anyway what I’m talking about is sketch and toon coupled with hard shadows casted from a light this is something that was also used in Pivot’s animation and worked really well but again in my case I’m torn between the two because I do really like the way that it looks but it does also take away a lot of the detail that has been put into the modeling because you sketch and toon only allows a few shades of any colour so you are limited to the depth of things you may only see something a one flat colour. But this does make it look very spooky which is really what I’m looking for this will be something I will have to make my mind up on soon! Some of the final visual effects that I will be adding to my animation will most likely be done outside of cinema 4D and in After Effects these would the normal things that you would expect like colour correcting just to make certain colours pop or give the whole things a different vibe all together this may work to my advantage if I need to make some scenes darker to get a more ere feel. Other effects will include motion blur, Gaussian blur which I think has to be on every single animation made since it was put into the program. 

Sound

            Sound for my animation is going to be rather lacking in that area not because I cant be bothered with it or want to put the time in its just because I want mine to be mainly about the visuals and not so much about the sound. It is still going to have sound though I’m not making a silent film or anything but the sound will me limited to basic background sounds like birds and environmental noises like bushes rustling and other wildlife that may be in the area making noise. But other than that there isn’t really any other sound the characters themselves will be making basic noises again probably just groans and chirps so in the sound department this animation may be lacking but this is mainly due to the fact that it will have not real backing track or music per say to go along with it but the sound effects will work well to help the story along.

            I will be have multilayered sounds in my animation what this means is that I wont just have one tack playing over the entire thing I will be adding in ambient sounds from things you would normally expect to hear in those surrounding then possibly adding in some of my own live recording to get the noises of the characters a good example of this would be getting the various grunts and moans that main character will be making I could simply record myself. Along with this I could also record some birds if I wont to a forest of a zoo maybe just to get some samples for the bird noises, all of these will be stacked up on top of each other to give a much fuller sounding environment that just having s generic nature soundtrack playing over the whole thing. 

Proposal

 Proposal.

My work and me!

            The main idea behind my character and script it really loosely based around trying to make it a sort of comedy sketch, making the audience laugh but just using visuals and no real dialog of any kind. My first thought’s of what I could do for the story of my short animation was make it about red necks those stereotyped Americans that apparently all live in shacks and generally break follow that feel for my stylization. So at fist I was just going to base my story around this I designed a character much like what you would think of when imagining a red neck but then I started to think about what could make this funnier that just your stereotypical red neck and more interesting that just a red neck messing around in his own environment, after thinking about this and watching a zombie film it got me thinking people always imagine a zombie film the same way basically the world is fine then a outbreak of some new disease the dead start coming to life and eating the humans gradually building in numbers to overrun the whole world just because of there numbers and how unprepared the world is for such a attack but then as always a small group hold up somewhere until there is a cure found or they move somewhere that the infection either can survive like extreme climates or a island. My idea has changed in a few different ways since my original in a rather short amount of time after speaking with different people and getting there views and impressions about my first initial idea and then also getting some of there own input and ideas about what things I could possibly add or tweak about.

I found this really helpful developing my story and character in many different ways probably the biggest changes will take a lot of doing but will definitely help define the back story behind what is actually going in is having the fist scenes of the animation set out almost like a motion graphic illustration basically what I mean by this is when you see some animations that are generally used to example a much more complex problem or even in the simplest of ways using facts, stats and simple imagery. A good example of this would be ‘The Crisis Of Credit Visualized” By Jonathan Jarvis this video depicts how the credit issue today has managed to get so bad but it shows it in a very visual way that is much easier to understand than just being given lots of text or numbers about how money has been borrowed and passed through different people.  I would incorporate this into my work in a few different ways one of the first is the style I really like the simple imagery the images he uses to depict certain things aren’t overly complex but they give you the exact amount of information you need without distracting you with the actual images themselves this is something I want. I want to be able to quickly push out information on what happened quickly and smoothly without getting bogged down with creating the complex assets this will also save me lots of time for something that is just going to be a intro into the animation. This leads me to my second reason for using this motion graphic style and that because I want to show how the whole world has been taken over by this infection I want it to look bad worse than anything you can think of that has ever happened before. I’m going to do this by researching all kinds of natural disasters and viruses that have devastated the world and I don’t mean made up ones.

I want to include things like the small pox and Black Death showing how many people they infected and possible how the disease spread over the time it spent incurable, other things that I want to include are huge world events like World Wars and natural disasters like tsunamis and things of that nature just so I can compare these to my virus that I am still yet to name but I’m sure ill think of something or have a vote. After all this I will start talking about my virus and how it spread this is where the graphic style may incorporate some simple 3D renders just layered over the top just to give a distinction and make it stand out more, these will be things like cemeteries rendered out in white and then red slowly seeping into them to show they have started the infection then hospitals rendered out in the same way this will go along side the motion graphics that will be spewing out information on death tole and pace of infection and deaths from infection, cities, countries that are infected human attacks, sighting of zombies and so on. I also really want to make a 3D model of the globe that is spherical so I can show the spread of the virus with either little red pins or dots this will show the infection spread then these dots or pins will turn black when they are zombies!

            From here I would go into the full 3D animation with my character and his surroundings I really want to show off his environment the most I’m going to work really hard on that isolated feel I want it to seem like he is alone even for a zombie like most other zombies still have lots of other undead around but he is literally on his own. I want there be trees lots of wood and hand made things, things that look like they have been made by his own two hands. The style of my animation is again something that I’m really trying to narrow down to be exactly what I want the main idea behind the whole thing is going for a low poly look this is a style that I have been looking at for a while ever since I did some of it with a small sound animation I did where I used low poly objects and just loved the way it looked. But there is lots of different ways low poly can look I mean you could go really heavy and have the original shape being almost completely changed when these techniques have been applied or you could only use it a little and give you objects or character a little more edge I haven’t decided how I want my to look exactly yet but I know I want it to be noticeably low poly.

Budget.

The budget for mine will be fairly small if anything at all the only thing that I can possibly see myself paying for is the use of a render farm this is where you would send of the file you need rendered in my case a cinema 4d one with all files needed to fully render my work off in a fraction of the time, but even this will come at a very low cost. Other than that I can’t think of anything else that I could possibly have to account for in my budget.

            Probably one of the biggest inspirations that I had was a animation called Pivot that had this low poly look that I loved.

Another possibility would be getting involved in events this could be anything from something small like showing you work at a local school or something similar where you don’t really have to apply you can just go and ask, after this you could apply for smaller galleries to show your work or even pay for 

it to be advertised if you have that kind of money in your budget, you could also enter competitions and festivals there are loads out there and if you get into any of them your are sure to boost the audience of you work massively. You could put a add in your local paper I’m sure these things wouldn’t cost to much like the advertiser or something like that someone will read it and even if they aren’t interested in it personally they may no somebody who is what brings it back round to work of mouth get people talking about it and its sure to grow and larger following. Go to a local printing company and get some good quality well designed flyers or door hangers to go around dropping though letterboxes and hanging on door handles yes most will get thrown in the trash but most people will read it on the way over to the bin. Another way of using the already highlighted social networking sites would be to get your ads put on there it cost under £10 a day to have a small short advertisement which is sure to bring you more traffic to your page or website. On top of this there is good ad words that you run on a pay per click service, which is again sure to get you more traffic. Above all try and be creative with your advertisement don’t just stick to the same boring large letter crap that you see all over get your audience involve be that literally like some of PlayStations advertisement that consisted of the square, triangle, circle and x being put inside bubble wrap inside bus stops that people could pop I mean who doesn’t like popping bubble wrap never mind being encouraged to do it. Here are a few more examples of some really smart advertisement.

Benefits:

                The main benefits for me will be getting my work recognized having the chance to work on something that is completely my own thing I designed and created it starting from the initial idea all the way through to a finished product, from doing this I will be learning new skills all the time and also getting to know the program cinema 4d even better because this is the main program that I will be using to create my animation. I also want to do it to prove to myself that I can do something on a much larger scaled compared with anything that I have done in the past this will be by far the most challenging and difficult thing I will have done in my time working with animation. My time management will be critical,

            The other possibilities that this could my far are much larger than most people may think if it was to get noticed become popular or be picked by a festival and shown to hundreds if not thousands of people my notoriety would increase experientially I would go from not being know by any one other that the people I know on my course to possible being known by thousands of people within the industry and if some of those see potential in me the possibilities could be endless from job offers to contracts to make new animations based on a client demands but in my style of work which is most peoples idea of a good thing.

            One of the last things that could come of this if my work was to be put thought to production would be better acknowledgment of the college I studied at this isn’t so much something that I would benefit from my work but it would give my tutors and college a big shove to being moticed as somewhere that I producing some really talented and creative individuals which would in turn maybe make them take more interest in the facilities that could be improved or looking at other pupils with potential in the future without having to be picked for a festival or win some competition they would be noticed just because the people in the industry are keeping a eye on people coming from that college.

Marketing.

There are many possibilities when it comes to marketing actually they are almost endless depending on how far you are willing to take it and the amount of time you have to put into promoting and marketing your product well. A few examples of this would be firstly social networking sites as many as you can like setting up a twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Myspace and many more to add to those few, on top of this you could blog about it and if you can manage to get a fairly substantial on any of these things you could really get the world about your project or work another thing that would go along with this would be you friends they will have access to there own personal profiles on most of the sites you will be advertising you product of project on so you could ask them if they could put a post a tweet or a blog about what you doing so then all of there friends will see it. After this there is youtube another very powerful site that can be used to market something you could set up a channel with videos of how the work is progressing and what’s coming next. 

Been a While!!

Its Been while since i last logged anything so i thought i would start of by getting a rough time plan together for the next couple of weeks!

26/01/2013: Write up my proposal for this piece of animation, make suer it had good detail.

27/01/2013: Write up my treatment same again have lots of detailed information.

30/01/2013: Start working on my Backgrounds and environments i want these to be really detailed so this will probably go on for long than i put here just tweaking and stuff.

10/02/2013: Have the rest of my Assets done like the building and items that will be scattered around the different shots all have to be modelled and then made to look low poly this could take some time!

18/02/2013: Put everything together in the scene and get the different panning shots done because i want to show the environment a lot because i will have worked on it so much.

19/02/2013 - 22/02/2013 RENDER RENDER RENDER everything must be rendered and handed in before deadline at 4PM

Lots of work to do lets get cracking!