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.