Week 4

After Wednesday's classes, I worked on the thumbnail storyboards for the major project. I was assigned to do thumbnails for Scenes 01, 02 and 03. I tried my best to visualize the scenes based on the descriptions in the treatment, the descriptions in the shot list and making some use of the scene breakdown guide with some visual references. These were the descriptions in the treatment and the first series of thumbnails I did and before I waited for critiques by Elisa, the director.

EXT. CITY - NIGHT 

It is night. In the distance, lights make up an endlesscityscape. At ground level, the lights are moving, liketraffic, flowing a in structured line. From far back, lowerlevel lights begin to break away and join the end of thetraffic, and gradually higher and closer lights follow,causing the city to appear to be collapsing. As they movecloser, it becomes apparent that the lights are actuallyfireflies. The illusion of the cityscape is broken as thefireflies continue toward the camera, stirring up dust,before completely engulfing the camera in a flash of light.

EXT. DESERT BACKGROUND 1 (DUNE) - DUSK 

A whirlwind of spinning sand dissipates, leaving a lonefirefly in the dessert. The sand forms ridged spirals acrossthe ground that lead up high into a looming sand dune.MOVING CAMERAThe firefly flies up a natural path in the sand to the topof a dune.

EXT. DESERT BACKGROUND 2 (LARGE DUNES) - DUSK 

At the top of the dune, a sea of more dunes is revealed. The
firefly sees a blinding glint of light coming from the
horizon. The firefly battles gusts of wind and sand as it
moves higher and towards the glint of light, before
disappearing in the light.

I used the wrong angle for the first two panels and so I fixed those. In the third panel, I was supposed to create something that looked like roads leading to the city and the fireflies were supposed to resemble busy traffic and the fourth panel was supposed to be a copy of the third but with dust filling the screen. Elisa showed me an example of what she meant.

I used the wrong angle for the first two panels and so I fixed those. In the third panel, I was supposed to create something that looked like roads leading to the city and the fireflies were supposed to resemble busy traffic and the fourth panel was supposed to be a copy of the third but with dust filling the screen. I was also told to remove the colour from the thumbnails as they were supposed to mostly show line work and be in black and white or greyscaled.

Elisa gave me another example to show me more what she meant so I changed them again to look more like what she meant. Wednesday's tutorial class was about Advanced Lighting & Rendering. This was an optional tutorial and I decided that I would rather focus on getting the storyboards finished. After getting some feedback from Elisa, I made some changes based on what she said.

I needed to fill the first panel with dust. I needed to get rid of the whirlwind of sand and have a few dots of sand above the ground closer to the bottle of the frame. Also the direction arrows showing the firefly's movement in the original thumbnail was not clear enough. There also needed to be an extra frame to show the large sand dune from the single firefly's point of view and there needed to be another firefly in the background.

After changing scenes 01 and 02, she approved of these. She also told me to send her Scene 03 as it was but I realized I forgot to look at the scene breakdown guide for it and wanted to try visualizing it again. These are the changes I made based on that.
I took some notes from Edden about the rendering lesson and the work files if I had time to look at them to work on them later.

I didn't make the final storyboards as Elisa took over and decided to make them as she visualized them. These thumbnails were not included in the Art Bible that was submitted but I decided to post them here to show my contribution to it and meet the learning outcome for it.

Tien decided not to go ahead with his teaser trailer so I decided to look for another project to get involved in. During Thursday's class, there were pitch presentations for other projects. One of them was for a forest project. I tried to get involved in that by modeling some assets but they already had their project planned out and didn't need any more help.

I tried to get involved with the modelling for the major project but they had already planned it out so that everyone on the modelling team had something to do.

Sarah Balfour-Smith pitched an idea about a Voodoo doll in a house for a 2D animation roughly about 20 seconds. I tried to get involved with working on that. She wasn't planning to work on it solo and allowed me to help her work on it.  I realized I could meet the learning outcomes for making artworks and environmental art through working on this. We discussed the use of 3D models for the project. We figured that they be used as reference material for making the 2D backgrounds. This was a way of meeting the learning outcome for the 3D assets. It was also another project for me to work on for another experience.