Overview:
This project breakdown discusses the development and progress’ of the world builders assignment, That focused on making a short cinematic teaser trailer of a world/story.
With a project that required myself to create a world from scratch, I was drawn to the fantasy world which meant I could do anything I put my mind to. However, I only thought of 2 main ideas.
Idea 1: Cyborg dragon -future and fairytale- western culture - maybe 2d?
The main character, villain, is porched in the distance on the king's castle while the kingdom below is burning to the ground since this world has highly advanced tech, it has holograms of a distress signal or a ‘Leave the city’ news report, while the dragon roars in victory.
Idea 2: underwater mythical forest with a sea dragon -subnautica concept
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A seahorse-shaped as a unicorn- would have gills of the side of the neck- walks on the ground and
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Would use the structure of a forest but make the textures coral-like, and seaweed for long grass
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Normal sea horses are like birds
With any project that gives me freedom, my heart was set on doing another dragon-themed project.
The synopsis 1st draft; Cydra, or Cyborg Dragon is the main character of this world, he is represented as the villain as he is perched in the distance on the king's castle in Esterdon while the kingdom below him is burning to the ground. Since this world has highly advanced technology, it has holograms of a distress signal or a ‘Leave the city’ news report, while the dragon roars in victory to claim the kingdom out of revenge as the king stole his glass eye.
Synopsis final: Cydra, or ‘Cyborg Dragon’ is the main character of this world, he is represented as the villain as he is perched on a Chinese Pagoda (Tower) while the city surroundings are on fire.
This world has highly advanced technology, it has holograms of a distress signal or a ‘Leave the city’ news report, while the dragon sits and rests in victory to claim the city out of revenge as the king had stolen his glass eye.
Although this was the final synopsis the final turned out quite differently due to time management going wrong. The final trailer had the elements included in it but lacked some of the details I initially wanted.
For my working process, I started with writing down notes on what I was hoping for and went on developing the world from that starting point. Once I had my idea I had drawn quick thumbnail sketches of what I wanted my composition to look like.
At this stage I was wanting more of a western futuristic castle type of world, I also was hoping to make it look somewhat like 2.5 animation which is where this side project came from.
I ended up really liking the way Haku (from spirited away) turned out so I decided to do a 2.5 animation test on him based of this tutorial. It was a quick job and I eventually put it aside to work on the character silhouettes and designs.
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During the preproduction stage I often found myself skipping ahead of steps in what I needed to do, it wasn’t just one straight line. After the characters were somewhat done I jumped a step back to the 3D Blockouts.
At this stage I wasn’t 100% on which dragon type to use for the final, it was either a western dragon or a Chinese dragon which was based on the Haku drawing I did earlier. Still indecisive I drew up a storyboard.
This I ended up scrapping because I fell in love with the style and idea of a Chinese dragon and town. So this was the updated storyboard, still keeping the basic idea of “destroyed futuristic town”.
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Updated storyboard + Animatic
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My next step was the Colour keys, in which I had trouble doing. My mind was heavily set on a particular colour for the dragon which was red. So in this first round of colour keys, there wasn’t much difference between them, this included the background colours.
From there I began working on what the city would look like, with these I had some trouble with perspective as some of them didn’t have the same impact as the 3D block outs I’ve done earlier.
After I gained some feedback on my colour keys, I had to restart them again and do them in this way.
I was still drawn for a more red look rather then the blue and I ended up really liking the last one on the right and continued to develop the city with the new colour key. I based the overall design off a background from avatar the last Airbender, which was located in the fire nation.
Something that drew me to liking this image was the way that the fence/pathway directed your eye towards the building, which in my trailer I wanted it to be main focal point along with the dragon, so I tried out a few things. The second one I ended up refining with neater line art.
And eventually coloured with the palette. At this point in time I felt like it could have been the final and I could have started the animation but, to me it felt like it just needed a little extra push and the way the fence lined up together really irritated me and I just had to become a perfectionist for a second and fix it.
This is where I started to use these lines to help.
Once I was happy with the look I began to rig and animate the dragon and lanterns in after effects With this I ended up having a lot of drafts exported out as when the animation played it played not in real-time.
Something I also struggled with a lot was animating the fire. I had watched some after effects tutorials on how to make it but they all seemed too complicated to me and I went back and forth with them eventually, leading me to animate the fire in photoshop which I ended up not liking.
However, while I researching how to animate/create animated fire I came across an aftereffects plugin, which included multiple versions of pre-made animated fire and smoke which I took to my advantage and used to complete the trailer.
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The only thing left was the logo at the end, I had draw up a few titles but I ended up just using the font and colours based off the world as I was running out of time to complete the project by the due date.
Production Roles
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Production roles if this was a larger project:
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Reference; https://squeezedmedia.com/want-to-work-in-animation-production/
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The roles I would find most difficult is script writer, Sound designer and possibly director. I think with script writer and sound designer I wouldn’t be the best simply because I wouldn’t know where to start and how to do the job properly, of course unless I had a lot of time to learn the skills I needed then I think I would be able to do a somewhat decent job. I think as a director I’d struggle the most wiht as when working on an individual project I tend to struggle with time management and sticking to whats written on lists ect.
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Frequent meetings, online group channels: Discord, Slack, phone calls, Trello boards, google drive folders. Sticking to the team contract, effective communication.
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Post-mortem
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The things that I thought went well was the overall art style of the trailer. Before this trimester started I worked on my art styled and its changed a lot in a few weeks and with this project I got to push it a little bit by adding simple animation But the one thing I liked doing the most was experimenting with the background as I gained interest in drawing backgrounds for another project.
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Time management for this project was a big struggle and a lot of the time I was still trying to figure out what I actually wanted for the final version. I also went back and forth when it came to following a pipeline and the character designs were rushed, especially when I finally came to the inclusion of having the world of Chinese culture.
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For the future, I definitely need to start a working schedule instead of working when I feel like it, keep my tasks on track and plan earlier ahead of the possibilities of the project rather then changing the idea slightly.For this project I didn’t learn anything about other discipline workflows as I skipped the chance to work with someone because of the many changes I went through with this.
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Appraisal
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My thoughts on the final are that I'm happy with the overall look I just wish I gave myself enough time to refine the animation a bit more and time to figure out how to animate fire and smoke rather than relying on an after effects plugin. The most thing I'm happy about this project is that I can see the improvement that I've made in my 2D work from previous semesters.
