Since I have completed the entire character modelling process for my short film, I have started thinking about poster concepts in which all the characters can be placed together to best advertise the film. This also gave me a good indication that I will need to rescale some models later on as some proved to be much bigger and much smaller than their counterparts, and some of them are incorporated in the same scene. This is important to do before the rigging process, as scaling characters after the skin-binding process can effectively mess up the entire rig.
Music Tests
While a majority of the film is based around multiple dialogues conversations, there is an introductory section which I feel needs some musical addition to help set the tonality and theme. Exploring this sound, due to the child-like, stylised intended aesthetic of the film, I decided to play around with sounds that are associated with children’s television shows. I wanted to emphasise this by using instruments such as a glockenspiel and piano, which add a light and simplistic feel to the melody. This ‘happy’ introductory theme and the toy-like children’s aesthetic feels purposely contradictory to the spoken content in a way I feel works as an animated short.
Previsulatiation
As stated in prior blog posts, previsualization is a key and essential step in the filmmaking process to place everything into the correct spacing and see if it works. Since I am behind In the environmental modelling section of my film at the moment, this process provided me with a perfect base to start this process scale-wise and gave me an indication of object placement and overall setting depth. This also made several things very clear to me, as a few ideas did not translate well from the 2D animatic to the 3D Previs. One of these is the idea of having a humanoid character have a silhouette in the light of the window. While this conceptually works quite well and is more visually interesting for viewers, I predict I will not be able to include it going forward as I feel adding a human into the setting while also having a house within a house throws off the world balance. I also think this effect will prove to be very difficult without modelling a character that would make the right kind of silhouette to match the overall aesthetic.
During this process, I also found that using the shutters to make character 5 blink actually appeared slightly strange and uncanny due to its sideways motion of it.
The previs also indicated some issues that I may have regarding the Ncloth attached to character 3, and it may not follow the rig in the way I am expecting and key massively between keyframes. While this is something I would want to research in a more extensive way, I will add it as an additional feature If I have time in order to stay on schedule.
Next week’s Goals:
- Character rigging (priority)
- Environmental modelling