#mice3

Today we spent the morning assembling all our research together onto the wall. A lot of the images were from the google slides that we were working on throughout the week.

Before we get into that, the animatic was finished. Before it was 4 seconds per shot but this was adjusted to match the pacing better. We realised that the length of the animatic went to only 2 minutes 26 seconds, which meant we had more room to add to our story than what we originally thought.

We sectioned off different subjects of research to their own areas for clarity and this helped us figure out where we were lacking in research. One of these areas were style/aesthetic, in which Paul wanted us to have figured out by the afternoon. After taping all or stuff to the wall we started researching different styles.

We started looking at animated cartoons in the 60s and came across the star trek animated series. We thought we could use this style on our characters faces.

We also liked the style of Jonny Quest and Georges Méliès for the characters and the shading and folds of clothes from Akira.

We thought we'd take a more painterly approach to the background art as well, reminiscent to 60s retro posters and playing with an overall greyscale tone with pops of colour to add emphasis or interest.

This is the collection of research we've achieved thus far.

Reinvention in story telling

Three Blind Mice, Epic/Historical, Space Age (1957-present)

Week 2, 15-19/04/24

Monday

Monday morning we did a short presentation on our project and our current concept, which was successful, and our official concept. Once that was done we went back to the studio to start storyboarding. While the rest of my team started storyboarding, I rewrote and edited our Frankenstein script into a proper finalised one.

Frankenstein script:

As you can see it was a bit messy.

Edited Script:

Tuesday

We were told our storyboards needed to be done by 12:30, so it was a race against the clock, we went through everyone's storyboards and picked out the compositions we liked and drew up some new ones to fill in the gaps.

As we went storyboarding we ended up editing bits of the script to make the storyboard more cohesive, like removing bits of dialogue and the mechanism of the door.

During the evening split again to do our visual research. We assigned ourselves different topics, I went off and researched astronaut suits, cave formations, and architecture.

After a bit of research we started sticking our research on the wall.

Thursday/Friday:

I looked at Gothic and Romanesque architecture to further aid our visual research.

I also looked at Antoni Gaudi's works for their pointed towers and organic shapes.

I also put together a quick mood board for how we want our aesthetic.

As a team we then had to agree on an art style for our animation, and we knew we wanted a style that commemorated the 70's, which is when we set our time period for the narrative, 3 years after the moon landing.

After some consideration we decided to combine Star trek the animated series and Akira together. We want to use the star trek face designs as our base and apply Akira's Cel shading, clothing folds onto the characters, and the cityscapes as a reference for how endless we want the metropolis to be. We think we can achieve some interesting results with it.

We split up again to focus on our individual tasks, mine being the space suits, metropolis designs, and figuring out cell shading.

I did some simple sketches of the astronaut suits and then simplified them even further on tracing paper to get the basic shapes. I did this to make whoever is doing the animatics life easier as they'll have a reference point.

As part of our group project, we decided to each write a script and review them together, noting what we liked about each person's script and what we wanted to include in the final one

Today we edited the script we formed yesterday to flow better and portray our ideas more clearly.

This is our finalised script that we'll be following as we continue working. We also began to explore storyboarding, looking at shots and composition and ways to construct them.

Today we spent our morning going through our storyboarding shots. We stuck our shots onto a larger piece of paper so that we could visually see the animation.

We made some edits and were cautious of the time constraints we had of 3 minutes.

We put our storyboard up onto the wall and planned to research different subjects we saw in the storyboard. We divided up this work amongst ourselves.

Mikayla was assigned to creating an animatic using the storyboard shots. This will help to time our animation and pace our shots so that the story is told smoothly.

We all went off to our own research and added them onto a shared google slides so that we could see what we're all doing.

James

I found two books that I found were interesting. One was a book of DreamWorks background artists and the other was about all things of the moon. I took some photos of pages I found were interesting.

Over the weekend we all wrote our own scripts and came together on a call to read and discuss our stories. These were the new scripts.

Ryan

James

Mikayla

Liberty

The character names of the astronauts (Latimer, Cranmer and Ridley) are based off the three bishops that Queen Mary I burned at the stake because of their blindness in religion with their Protestant faith.

In the morning, different groups were having online meetings with Paul as he wasn't available to come in. With our different scripts and new idea we had a meeting with Paul.

These are the scripts we had come up with.

Ryan

Mikayla

Liberty

Unfortunately, he didn't feel as though the scale was nearly as large enough to fit the Epic genre. After our talk with Paul we decided to change our story idea again. Instead of encountering a mouse creature the three astronauts would stumble upon an ancient civilization shrouded in mystery.

We also wanted to explore this idea of Blind beliefs within our characters, such as blind ambition or blind faith.

We spent more time discussing this idea and dotting down our main story beats. these included

Introduce Characters

Establish Setting

Exploring Cave

Falling Moment (astronauts falls down a hole)

Inclusion of mice (creature)

Wide shot

Today we got our final brief in animation for the year.

For this brief we were randomly assigned to groups of mostly 4, with absentees lumped into their own groups.

I was put into Group 6 which consists of;

James @k00297230

Ryan @k00295632

Liberty @k00296662

Mikayla @k00293579

We would have a team leader that would rotate every 2 days starting with Ryan. We also made a group chat so that we could communicate with each other and share ideas outside of college more efficiently.

In this group we were randomly assigned the following for the project:

Nursery Rhyme - Three Blind Mice

Genre - Epic/Historical

Setting - Space Age (1957 - Present)

We then started coming up with ideas for the project. We started by writing out the nursery rhyme.

Three blind mice.

Three blind mice.

See how they run.

See how they run.

They all ran after the farmer's wife,

Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.

Did you ever see such a sight in your life

As three blind mice?

We took the prompt quite literally and started exploring the idea of three blind mice going on a space adventure.

We settled on an idea of three blind incompetent mice accidently launching into space instead of the other three competent mice. a lot of our ideas were written down below.

We particularly liked the idea of naming the ship the Farmer's Wife to match the rhyme and having their tails being cut off as the door closes on them after they enter the ship, or something along those lines.

We felt pretty confident in our original concept until we had a chat with Paul who brought up two points

There was only so much suspension of disbelief had before realising that the story was flawed. For example, the mice would run on a wheel to power the ship.

It wasn't quite fitting the large and broader scale of what the Epic genre encapsulates.

We realised our idea wasn't going to work so we went back to the drawing board after lunch.

We decided to not make the story so literal and casted humans as our protagonists. The new idea was essentially astronauts exploring a cave on the moon until a mouse like creature chases them out until it's stopped by falling stalactites.