Liberty Mort

19//She/They//First Year Art Student Brief: Storytelling Discipline: Animation As part of my group, we are exploring the nursery ryhme of the three blind mice set in the space age under the genre of Epic

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Final Brief

I had a great time on this project, and while I feel I could’ve done a bit more, particularly in terms of background art, I’m very happy with where this project ended up. It took us a while to get a solid idea, but once we had that we were ready to go. It was nice to have a group that valued everyone’s input.

I think the hardest part of this project was figuring out our story and script, at least for me. We went through a couple different ideas, some were too silly or needlessly complicated, but I’m happy with the story we landed on, even though it wasn’t my own idea. Splitting the group to come up with our own scripts based on the idea and deciding on the elements of each script we liked best was a really interesting experience. It gave the group a chance to see everyone’s vision, and thus I feel we had a stronger base when making our final script.

From there we each went and researched our assigned areas. While I looked at previous moon missions and the vehicles(the Lunar Module and the Lunar Roving Vehicle), I took notes on what i felt what relevant to the project. I also looked at a few books on filmmaking and the composition of shots, which I found helped me in the story boarding process.

Storyboarding would have to be my favourite part of this project. I really enjoyed getting the chance to take a script and visualise it. There were some areas that I didn’t know what to do with initially, but it was nice as different members of my group had different ideas, and together our storyboards made a, in my opinion, cohesive and interesting storyboard. That was nice to adapt in the style we chose when I was remaking the storyboard.

Concept work was also very enjoyable. I focused on the design of the character’s faces, the LRV/buggy and the mural in the cave. I really appreciated my teammates for all their hard work in their own areas, and especially enjoyed to see what they were coming up with. With slightly more time I would’ve loved to have worked on more backgrounds, but as it is, I’m happy with what I’ve produced.

The presentation was an area I feel I could’ve improved on, at least with myself. I was nervous and while I tried not to let that affect me, I feel I could’ve been more confident in my words and had more to say in my sections.

Overall though, I really couldn’t have asked for a better group to work with and I’m very happy with the project we’ve ended up with.

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Final Brief 10

Today we prepared ourselves for the pitch we're having on Monday. Our group divided the topics of discussion amongst ourselves and spaced the order of us saying things so it felt like there was an even distribution of speaking.

Ryan would do the introduction.

Liberty would briefly introduce the characters.

We all contributed to the animatic sequence.

James talked about the tone atmosphere and style/aesthetic.

Liberty expanded on the research for the previous subjects.

Mik also expanded on the research and concept art.

Ryan concluded our talk by discussing future plans.

We were pretty drained by the end of the week so we briefly practiced reading out the animatic script in character.

Mik would narrate what was happening.

James would play as Bennett Ridley .

Liberty would play as Claude Latimer.

Ryan would play as Philip Cranmer.

we spent some time practising later and we had some trouble getting the timing right but figured it was because we had an online practise and it would be easier in person. We proceeded to practise our individual parts until Monday.

We also worked on our master shots to put in our presentation and ended up with 6.

Liberty

Ryan

James

Mik

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For the presentation, I wrote down a rough draft of what I wanted to say, trying to include as much as I could while being somewhat concise. From there I timed each of my sections individually, and cut out more unnecessary information when I went over time, boiling the sections down to the base elements.

As far as my master shot, I had trouble figuring out how much detail was too little and how much was too much. I tried to go for a happy medium and ultimately I’m happy with what I have.

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Final Brief 9

Today we went through the different things we wanted to get done by Monday and discussed our pitch a little. We then went on to continue our concept art further as this is the official last college day for the development of our work.

We discussed our master shots and decided which ones we'll try and get done by Monday.

James:

Exterior of Ship on Moon

Interior of Ship (rendering)

Ryan:

End shot of city

Astronaut helmet reflection

Liberty:

Buggy scene of astronauts

Interior of Ship (sketch)

Mikayla:

Buggy lighting up hall of pillars

Mural

Paul also had us thinking about sound and using it in our pitch to help sell the atmosphere and tone of our project. We started thinking about it with a list of things that might need sound.

Buggy engine

Wheels on ground

breathing of astronauts

radio static as they talk

stone shifting against stone (mural opening)

rumble of cave

cave ambience sounds (scratches to indicate mice?)

clicking of torches turning on

crash sound of buggy hitting rock

When we were thinking up of sounds we immediately thought of the infamous Minecraft cave sounds that are both creepy and ominous to straight terrifying.

This is some of the work we got done today.

James

(work of carvings and pillar designs)

Mikayla

(cave mural painted)

Ryan

(still in progress)

Liberty

(Interior of ship and cave mural above)

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I decided on my master shot mostly as it was one of the more character-focused scenes in the animatic, and I had been focusing primarily on character design in my work on the project. This particular shot also featured all three astronauts very clearly.

The cave mural design I did was based on the Rat King, a phenomenon when a group of rats get tied together at the tail. I took this concept and tried to make it a symmetrical design. I had imagined this as a relief sculpture, carved in to the stone, 8 large rats surrounded by a swarm of smaller rodents, strange writing carved into the wall surrounding it. I had also have a version of the door open.

The interior of the ship I drew on a wide canvas, with the idea of a panning shot in mind. I sketched out a rough interior, the actual ship being sketched in a dark purple, with personal objects sketched out roughly in yellow. James would later render this sketch.

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Final Brief 8

Today we all did some concept art in our respective areas.

James continued working on the ship trying to fit it into the Akira style more than before and although the bottom is incomplete it gives a better idea of the desired look.

Liberty continued on character design work, and finished the three main characters. We also finally named them fully, whether or not this will have an effect on the pitch or project remains to be seen. They also continued on the final storyboard.

Bennett Ridley, Claude Latimer (yellow), Philip Cranmer

Ryan worked further on the city, developing individual structures to help differentiate the architecture and make it more visually interesting. They did this digitally with air brush with the Akira style in mind.

Mikayla also spent more time doing cave work.

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When working on my character designs, I focused heavily on the face, trying to emulate the style of the animated Star Trek while making each face unique. I had a pretty clear idea of what each character would look like, so I just focused on developing that idea and experimenting with different facial expressions, primarily expressions that would appear in the animatic. I tried also to express a basic idea of their personality through their expressions and possible colour schemes for the characters, stemming originally from wanting to tell each character apart easily, beginning with giving each of them a primary colour.

Ridley was red, typically associated with passion and anger. From there I tried to choose some colour that would go well with a warm, brick red colour, so I used a tan skin tone with a reddish undertone and a slightly desaturated dark reddish-brown.

Cranmer was blue, typically associated with calm. I only really needed his skin tone, for which I chose a darker skin tone, a warm brown.

Latimer was yellow, associated with optimism. I tried to keep their colours bright, giving them pale skin and darker blonde hair, as to keep distinction between the hair and the cap.

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Final Brief 7

Today we did a Zine Workshop with the Print students and a few others. The purpose of this workshop would be to create a zine to aid our presentations and help sell our pitch to Yvonne and Paul.

A zine is a self published, low cost booklet that can help display ideas, poems or short stories. We went through ideas of what to include in it including; a concept art book, newspaper to help sell the story and or a mission document explaining the details of the story, background information and worldbuilding.

We decided to keep it simple and decided on just including concept art but we haven't ruled out the other ideas perhaps in a different format. We just started printing the work we'd done and collaging it on the page and Paul suggested we mess around with the shape of the actual zine and composition.

This is some of the work we'd done and the process.

Here are some of the pages we came up with at the moment.

Ryan worked on their own idea of a comic based zine, using paper only and some scissors.

We then spent the afternoon continuing on our concept art.

Ryan worked on developing the undiscovered civilization and playing with colour and vector shading with Akira influence. They had also done the complicated space suits for the astronauts and simplified them to suit better in an animated medium.

The architecture for the city was inspired partly by the Spanish Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, who plays with natural motifs and shapes.

Liberty spent more time doing character work and continuing on making the storyboard look cleaner and better visually. The character work will be shown next post.

Mikayla worked on the cave interiors more, playing with colour, composition and dimension.

James went on to develop the moon landscape more and played with colour while briefly looking at the lunar module exterior and playing with its' composition in the landscape.

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I will admit that I had no ideas regarding a zine about our project, so I was very thankful for the members of my group brainstorming an idea for a zine we could make. I did enjoy making a page of the LRV sketches I had done and placing those in James’ moon backgrounds that he digitally painted.

I decided to clean up our storyboard and do my best to keep the storyboard in the style that we had chosen as a group. I really enjoyed this particular element of the project, especially interpreting the scenes the other group members had drawn for our initial storyboard. I also tried to include more background detail and some lighting, all whilst trying to keep the action in the scene clear. While there are certain elements I would do differently now, I’m happy with the storyboard for our project. Once that was done, I sent pictures of the storyboard onto Mik, who had volunteered to do the animatic.

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Final Brief 6

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.

We've started looking at design from the different references we now have to grab from and we are going to make mood boards to help solidify these ideas tomorrow.

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I decided to focus on the character design, particularly in regard to their faces and how they would look in a style similar to that of the Star Trek Animated series. We have 3 characters in our project, Benjamin Ridley, Phillip Cranmer, and Claude Latimer. I decided to give each character an association with one of the primary colours, with Ridley being red, Cranmer being blue and Latimer being yellow, which all helped inform their characters, Ridley being quick to anger, Cranmer being quiet and cautious and Latimer being the most driven. Latimer is also meant to be the youngest, the character who desperately wants to discover something new and make a name for themselves. I tried also to give each of them distinct facial features so that they all looked distinctly different from each other, as their faces would be their unique feature, since the rest of their bodies would be in spacesuits, all the same apart from an arm band on each of their right arms

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Final Brief 5

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.

Mik 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.

It talked a lot about the previous Apollo missions and how they stopped because of a lack of funding due to less public interest and the geography of the moon, particularly the rock types present on different altitudes on the moo.

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While I did do research on the Lunar Roving Vehicle and Apollo 17, the last moon landing mission in 1972, I found myself focusing on the visuals of the shots. I borrowed the books “The Grammar of the Edit” by Roy Thompson and “Exploring Digital Cinematography” by Jason Donati, both of which helped inform me further on shots and cuts, as well as tips on storytelling.

In regards to the vehicles though, I found the NASA website extremely helpful in providing information about the several Apollo moon missions, particularly in how long they typically took and what was required. I dove further into Lunar Roving Vehicle as it would feature more prominently, looking at its construction and drawing from images of the LRV

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Final Brief 4

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.

We would continue to work on the storyboarding process for tomorrow.

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We each went out to create a storyboard of what we had in mind based on the script that we put together. I really enjoyed drawing up the storyboard and visualising the different shots, including a long take of the interior of the lunar module that pushed through one of the windows to show the lunar roving vehicle. I thought this shot in particular would allow us time to quickly establish the characters through the items in the lunar module, as well as a shot that would fit into a historical/epic movie. Epics are typically defined by their length and scale of story, which we found could be difficult to fit into our planned 3 minute project. Keeping that in mind, I tried to emphasise these aspects, at least in my storyboarding, though I felt I wasn’t as successful with dialogue scenes.

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Final Brief 3

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.

We talked for a while and decided to merge different parts of peoples scripts into one single rough script that we will edit tomorrow.

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When approaching my own script, I wanted to focus on technical terms and a sense of mystery, though I got stumped in some areas and wasn’t sure how to make the transition between certain scenes or make the dialogue feel natural.

After we shared our scripts, we each read our script aloud and noted what we liked from our different scripts, as well as how we would’ve changed certain things. I found this particularly helpful as it helped me to figure out what I hadn’t done or could’ve done in my own script. As James mentioned, we decided to merge different parts of our scripts together to form one script that we would then rewrite in order to make it flow naturally.

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Final Brief 2

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

We took these and went our separate ways to write our own scripts again to see how each of our stories differ and what aspects of them we like and dislike.

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Through my script, I tried to make each character distinct through dialogue and actions, coming up with a loose idea for the character of the 3 unnamed astronauts, while trying to convey a sense of grandness. As James said, we had to write another script, though I was able to use some of this one, with a bit of tweaking to fit it into the new narrative. I also tried to expand more onto the characters in the next script, taking inspiration from some of my group member’s ideas

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Final Brief

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.

We decided to make rough scripts for tomorrow around this base storyline and reconvene tomorrow to discuss our ideas and have a meeting with Paul again.

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After our initial idea but before writing our scripts, we also separate to create an entirely new concept to present to the group, just to see what each of us came up with. I leaned into the historical element of our genre, creating a story about 3 men who sabotage the take-off of a rocket ship, following orders blindly. We didn’t end up going with this idea, which I was fine with as it got more muddled in my mind.

The writing of the script went very well, I took inspiration from different scripts I read, including Gladiator, which was a film in the epic genre. The experience taught me a lot.

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Fota Island

Prior to going to FOTA Island to draw from life, I watched one of the videos sent by Yvonne, one that covered the animation of CGI animals in media, including that of the daemons in His Dark Materials, the BBC TV adaptation. I found this incredibly helpful, as it ran through the general structure of animals and the general rules of how the different animals (prey/predator) are built, like predators typically being more flexible(like a cheetah) and prey being more structured(horse).

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Story Development Brief

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

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iJKKx54D-7Me-nNmsIwoYMpXtBXPTxWdbKfwF7-ltZs/edit?usp=sharing

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My mini-me, lip-synced to the sentence "Are we not all silly geese here?" While I'm pretty happy with the way its come together, I should have made more mouths to use.

For some reason, the audio is not in this video, a problem I will try to resolve

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A screenshot from the process of making my Mini-Me lip-sync. We were using Adobe Animate, which I personally found difficult to use, primarily because I'm not familiar with the program. I aim to learn this program better, as I began to understand it more towards the end of the making of this and with help from my lecturer.

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My background and the foreground elements(pillars). I chose the park as my background as I really enjoyed my time in the park and I felt it fit best with the style I was attempting to emulate.

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My mini-me with the mouth shapes and background I made