Small Art Direction Re-Think

Don't wait with bated breath for the next AO-shaded model post. We've had a small change of art direction. As we develop the concept a bit more, we'll start throwing up some reference images and, eventually, some tests of the new look.

The reasons behind this change are myriad, some purely practical, some aesthetic. I don't have a full-blown post in me right now but I imagine that one of us will explain our new choices before too long.

Stay tuned.

Don Ho Loves Tiny, Tiny Bubbles...

...and I apparently love tiny, tiny updates to the clocktower.




I'm officially making the decision to move on. The clocktower isn't done but right now I feel like it's as done as it needs to be, given how "undone" so many other parts of the scene are.

A quick to-do list for me when I return to this is as follows:

• Add more steam engine elements to the top of the train car.
• Add tubes plugging this whole assemblage into the pavement surrounding it.
  
• Add detail to the body of the train car.
  
• Remove polys that no one's ever gonna see.
  

Those refinements are all well and good and I'm happy to do them but I've spent enough time working on this and I've been away from the scene proper for far too long. I need to spend a little bit of time with the big picture, to make sure that all this modeling has someplace to live.

Cheers.

The GUI saga continues

This week has been just as busy as the last, meaning work on this thing is lots of little fits and starts and very, very little sustained attention. I'm really ready to get this GUI nailed down and move onto the next part of the shot, especially as I did have a little bit of a breakthrough while doing sketches for the central clocktower. Hopefully I'll have the chance to scan my drawings and post them up before too long. I wouldn't call them final concept art or anything, but they've got me excited about the tower. I'd been feeling lost on it for a while now.

As ready as I am to move past the camera GUI, one thing about it is really nice, and it's that I'm taking the time to build this thing correctly, right from the start. One of the difficult things about working in production, on "one-off" sort of spots, is that so many of the elements we build feel like hacks. They're built just for one shot, or to be used at only one angle - fake 3d stuff, for example. These hacks are fine most of the time, but they come back to bite you when the client wants your 2d ribbon, faked to look 3d, to wrap around the star of the show, or push in a completely different direction. Had it been 3d in the first place, no sweat, but it was built in 2d by the designer and used that way in animation.

Often enough to be frustrating, the hacks used because someone felt like there wasn't enough time to do it all-the-way, end up costing the same amount of time on the backend.

All that's a long way of saying that it's fun to put the time into this GUI right at the start and build it a bit more fully than it really needs to be for the shots we have in mind. I'll try to post a new screen of it soon, but this weekend looks very rough in terms of free time.

Changing Direction

Why change course now?

Well, it's not a huge change of direction but it is a definite change. Previously, this project was a narrative short. 3, maybe 5 minutes in length, telling a story about a girl who ventures into a surrealistic, tin-toy themepark that's laid abandoned for many years. She's chasing a lost pet. X, Y and Z happen and the high point of the drama is that she gets turned into a tin toy herself. She's reunited with her lost pet, now a tin toy as well and the film ends, all bittersweet 'n' stuff.

It's a fine enough story, as far as it goes, but at the end of the day, it wasn't serving our needs. Because when it's a narrative, it's all about the story. Everything serves the story - art direction, wardrobe, camera angles, pacing, etc. The decisions being made are storytelling decisions and a great story can rise above less-than-great execution.

But I'm not a storyteller. Nor am I an aspiring director.

If I'm aspiring to anything, it's to be a better technical artist. At the end of this project, I'm not hoping to get calls from people wanting me to direct the next Cars. But if they called wanting me to be a TD on the next Cars, well, now we're talking.

What I'm excited about with this project is becoming a stronger modeler, a better lighter and a kick-ass texture artist. The problems I'm looking forward to working through aren't whether this one shot should be framed from over the protagonist's shoulder or from directly overhead. I'm looking forward to breaking down each shot and figuring out how to build it so that it renders in a reasonable amount of time. I want to come up with a bunch of great, technically challenging shots and see them all the way through the pipeline. That's exciting to me.

And that's why the project's changing course somewhat. Now it's more of a trailer than an actual short. We're cutting down the narrative elements to the absolute bare bones and keeping only the coolest shots. We're shortening to trailer length, circa 30 sec.

At the end of the day, it's gonna look cool. It's not gonna leave you wondering what happens to the girl, as much as it'll leave you wondering who the hell made that and can I get them to make my next project?

Rethinking The Project

Not a serious, start-from-scratch thing, but a subtle redirection that I think is for the best.

Notes on this will follow along with more WIP's.