All credits to Øyvind for drawing all of these frames.
Progress update incoming. Here's our final storyboard iteration. Well... some things is likely to change as we get further into the development. It's always like that. All credits to Øyvind for drawing all of these frames.
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Here's the current version of the story treatment for our film. The way the story was made we sat down in the schools basement and shared story ideas with each other trying to figure out what we wanted the film to be all about. We knew we wanted some humorous parts and maybe a little bit of action going on. After some time discussing and voting, we evetually ended up with one of Ole Petter's ideas; A business guy having a hard time getting on the subway to work. The treatment is in norwegian and is written by Ole Petter. T-bane helvete (Production title)
DAVE, 30, er på vei til T-banen. Når han begynner å nærme seg ser han at neste tog kommer om kort tid, så han setter opp farten. Han finner fort ut at han har dårligere tid enn først antatt, så han spurter mot toget. Akkurat i det han kommer ned på perrongen, smeller dørene igjen foran han. Han står der oppgitt, og ser på at toget kjører av gårde uten ham. Mer eller mindre irritert står Dave og venter utålmodig på neste tog. Det står mange andre på perrongen nå. Da neste tog endelig kommer, rekker Dave bare så vidt å ta et skritt før alle vognene er fylt opp til randen av mennesker. Dave dytter og presser, men blir bare møtt med sure blikk og knuffing tilbake. Plutselig lukkes dørene, og hånden hans blir klemt mellom dem. Han skriker av smerte og drar seg ut igjen. Dave må innse at det ikke nytter å komme seg inn i dette toget heller. Toget kjører videre, mens en forbannet Dave står igjen på perrongen med en vond hånd. Mens han venter på det neste toget er han så å si alene på perrongen, til Daves lettelse. Men da toget ruller inn mot stasjonen legger han merke til at dette toget også er ganske fullstappet. Fast bestemt på å klare det denne gangen, peiler han seg inn på en dør og følger den til vognen stopper. Han trykker på åpne-knappen i ett sett, men i det den åpner seg, rekker Dave så vidt å innse hvilken tabbe det var å stå der. Folket fosser ut, og han blir helt overkjørt. Toget ruller videre, mens Dave ligger nedtrampet og mørbanket på gulvet. Brillene er sprukket, pennen i brystlommen er lekk og papirer fra kofferten ligger løst omkring. Han stabler seg på bena igjen og kjenner raseriet tyte ut av ørene på ham og gnir seg hissig i hodet i undertrykket frustrasjon. Noe tid senere er Dave ferdig med å plukke opp og sortere papirene i kofferten, og ringer jobben. Mens han venter på svar høres lyden av et tog fra tunnelen. Dave lener seg ut av perrongen kikker utålmodig inn i den mørke tunnelen. Han skimter noe i åpningen og gjør seg klar til å løpe mot nærmeste togdør, ved å vri og knekke på nakke og skuldre. I det han står glassklart til å løpe på, stopper han helt opp i ren forbauselse når han ser at det ikke er et tog, men en DRESIN! To GRUVEARBEIDERE jobber iherdig for å holde farten oppe med hvert sitt håndtak. Mens de ruller forbi titter de på ham med undrende blikk. De triller sakte, men sikkert videre inn i neste tunnel. Dave står bare og måper, med store følgende øyne. Plutselig skvetter han i det han hører gjentatte svar i andre enden av telefonsamtalen, som fører til at han glipper mobilen i gulvet slik at den kortslutter. Dave sender håndflaten i pannen med et hardt klask. Mens han oppgitt plukker opp mobil-delene hører han neste tog komme. Ingen tid å miste! Han rasker fort sammen delene og kaster de i kofferten. Denne gangen skal han ikke feile. Han spytter i hendene og drar håret bak i en sleik før han stiller seg opp inntil veggen, klar til å løpe så fort han kan inn i det kommende toget når dørene åpner seg. Toget kommer rullende inn på perrongen. Men til Daves forbauselse er vognen faktisk omtrent tom. Det er heller ingen på perrongen. Han kan omtrent ikke tro det, og går først forsiktig, før han omtrent løper inn i vognen. Dørene lukker seg bak ham. Dave kaster hendende i været og småjubler for seg selv, mens de få andre i vognen kikker rart på ham. Han setter seg ned og slipper ut et lettet sukk med et smil. Han kikker ut på perrongen, medtatt, men fornøyd. Men hans fornøyde uttrykk snus raskt til et av ren forferdelse. Kofferten står ute på perrongen! Dave spretter ut av setet og lener seg tett inntil vinduet. Toget begynner å kjøre. Med blikket festet på kofferten løper Dave gjennom vognen og banker på alle vinduer og dører i ren fortvilelse, men til ingen nytte. Han når det siste vinduet i enden av vognen står klint inntil vinduet, mens han forsvinner vrælende inn i den mørke tunnelen. We've now started on our final project which is to create a short digital animated film. Øyvind, Christoffer, Ole-Petter and myself have grouped together and formed N-Gon Studios. As Christoffer and Ole Petter went on Animex the first week of our project time, Øyvind and I had a little rough start trying to come up with an ident and a story for the project. It's not that easy when half your team is absent... Also, I'll admit I'm not the most creative person when it comes to storytelling. We started by coming up with multiple names and ideas for the ident. Some based on random word generators, like "Juicy Bite" and "Monitor'd". Others based on 3D related stuff, like "Turbosmooth" and "N-Gon". Based on a little doodle I made, I came up with the name N-Gon Studios and started planning out an epic ident animation. The N-Gon logo was modeled and textured in 3ds Max and Photoshop and I simulated the impact using nVidia's PhysX plugin and added some subtle smoke and sparks effects with FumeFX and ParticleFlow. The ident was rendered from Max using V-Ray and was composited in After Effects afterwards. This was all done the first week. By the second week, we were all back to work and could start focus heavily on the story. By Tuesday we had a pretty good idea of the base story, so while Ole Petter was writing the treatment the rest of us started drawing some concept art for some of the stuff we knew would be in it. Here's some of mine: We're still not settled with the art direction for this film and will need to discuss this further. We know we want something cartoony looking, but just how cartoony we're not sure yet.
It's all going pretty smoothly as we enters the winter vacation. During this week I will take some time to start modeling the metro station and maybe some props. "Work individually to present, as a journal post, a minimum of two ideas for a short 3D animated film." IDEA 1: -Untitled- Pitch: Two neighbors are fighting and constantly trying to top each other, but then this new chick moves in to the house across the street. She turns out to be even worse than the two neighbors, so they decide to team up to get rid of her. They do so by mounting rockets to her house and giving her a one-way ticket to the moon. Neighbors become friends. Style: I'm imagining this to be in a bright cartoony style. Very typical 3D animation. Plot: In a seemingly peaceful neighborhood, we get to know this middle-aged man stepping out of his house with a soda and a newspaper. He goes and installs himself in his new hammock and just as he starts relaxing, we hear a loud and sharp lawn mower sound. It's the other neighbor mowing his lawn. This sound goes on his nerves, and as a response he throws a rock right in front of the lawn mower, effectively breaking it. The neighbors starts fighting, but suddenly stops when they sees a new chick is moving in right across the street. Trying to make a good first impression, they both try to behave like civilized men for once, but as it turns out, she's even louder than both of them, playing louder and louder music by every night. The neighbors can't take it anymore and team up to get rid of her. The next night, they sneak up to her house and starts installing something on her house. When the sunrise arrives, they're finished and runs back to their own property. Just as she wakes up and moves to a window, one of the neighbors brings up a remote control and presses a button. Four huge rockets on her house fires up and lifts the house into the air and off into the horizon. Neighbors shakes hands and becomes best friends. IDEA 2: -Untitled-
Pitch: Two young siblings (a girl and a boy) are playing around, when one of them is nearly ran over by a trailer, but they continue playing. We change point of view and now the boy is playing all alone. It's made clear that the girl was killed by a trailer quite some time ago. Style: A darker and more realistic/gritty art style. Plot: Two young siblings (a boy and his little sister) are outside playing and laughing. While playing they're crossing a busy road with a lot of traffic and the girl is nearly ran over by a passing trailer. They stop up for a second before continuing playing. The camera cuts to a nearby house. We're now looking over the shoulder of a person staring out of a window. From the person's point of view through the window we can still see the boy playing, but this time, he's completely alone - but seemingly still playing with someone. The camera turns around and zooms in on a old newspaper cutout surrounded by flowers above the fireplace. The picture and text reveals to us that the girl was ran over and killed by a trailer quite some time ago. We're outside again, and the boy is still playing and laughing - alone. We've then come to the final part of the storytelling and cinematography projects. In this last part we had to create a 3D pre-visualization from the same treatment, storyboard and animatic from before. The way we approached this was we split and divided the work between us in the group, I'd take the modeling, rendering settings of the scene and compositing everything while Ole Petter, Miliam and Tim each took a couple of shots, placed the necessary cameras and rigs, animated it and rendered it out. In order to get the scene layout correct, I took a look at the storyboard and created a rough layout of the scene based on the shots. Layout image shown below. From this 2D layout I quickly modeled the scene and passed it on to my teammates who then added the cameras and divided the shots between themselves. Here's a couple of renders from the scene: After they had finished their animation, I created a render setup that is both fast to render and has a good lighting setup, that'll highlight the bright and cartoony style we wanted. We ended up with a V-Ray setup with a V-Ray sun object and indirect illumination lighting up the scene. Rendertime and quality is both awesome. As the others started to render out the scenes, I started on the final composition in Adobe After Effects and imported the renders as they were ready. Final output rendered at 1280x720 pixels. Final Previsualization:How would you improve the 3d pre-viz that you (or your group) present?
I would personally have added the General into the first few shots, as he's supposed to be introduced to the audience here, fighting zombies from his tank. I believe we could've added a shot or two between shot 2.3 and 2.4 focusing on the General and what's happening to the zombies outside. What sequence of shots are your most favourite? My favorite shots in this previz has to be the final two shots (2.8 and 2.9) where Dead Meat is running away from the burning town, gets the flashbacks, stops up and decides to go back. Our next assignment was to create a 2D animatic from the storyboard we created in the previous project. While Ole Petter, Miliam and Tim Daniel were busy putting together and labeling the storyboard I sat down and started editing the animatic from what we had. Because the animatic was created at almost the same time as the storyboard, there are some slight variations in some of the shots, but nothing I can't live with. To create the animatic I used primarily Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop for editing and Audacity to edit and mix the audio. Because I was the first to finish my storyboard shots, I started out alone on the animatic while the others were still drawing their shots. I even added some additional shots on my own to further strengthen the story and make the story appear more continuous to the audience. I was later on joined by Ole Petter who helped me out finding some of the sounds we needed for the project. Here's the final 2D animatic: 1. How does sound help to limit the amount of shots?
Sound effects can add a entirely new dimension to the animatic as it can help visualize things that's happening outside of the screen at any given time. It can also reduce the amount of drawn shots because a sound can sometimes give us more information about what's going on between the two shots. 2. What lessons did you learn when producing the animatic that may help you to make a better storyboard next time? Building some of the animatic in layers and moving elements around can greatly increase the readability of the animatic. 3. Can you begin to see, understand and know more the role of the editor in this workflow? I already had a fair idea, but yes. 4. Colour: is colour needed in a 2D animatic? Give reasons for your response to this question. It's not needed in every productions, but can create more interesting lighting and make the characters more recognizable for the viewer. With the treatment settled, we now had to draw a storyboard describing the story and shot decisions in pictures. We decided early on that the film would have a very cartoony style which was my intention for the treatment from the very beginning. So before we started even planning the storyboard, we drew some concept art for the main characters; Dead Meat and the General to make sure we were drawing based on the same concepts instead of drawing four different versions of the same character. We eventually went for my interpretation for both of the characters with just some minor tweaks to the General. Concept art below. Having the character concepts nailed down, we could now start planning out the various scenes and shots, so we sat down and discussed and sketched down the rough shots and camera angles we wanted in the storyboard. Some sketch samples: After having planned out everything, we split the shots into four parts and started drawing 1/4 of the storyboard each. I myself was responsible for getting the ending and some action shots together. Here's my final drawings: I was not much involved into the actual storyboard assembly but creating the initial layout and setting in a few of the shots. I was busy planning out and editing the animatic at the time. Final storyboard: I'm overall quite satisfied with the end result and I don't think there's much I'd personally like to change. Maybe just a couple of camera angles and positions, but that's about it.
A treatment is a short presentation of an idea. They read like a short story, except told in the present tense and describing events as they happen. I came up with the basic idea for the treatment when we were writing down a list of story ideas in class. One of these being a zombie apocalypse seen from a zombie's point of view, and hence Dead Meat was born. I took the basic concept and built it around the mandatory three act structure and the monomyth or "the hero's journey" if you will. Dead Meat (working title) A seemingly normal town in the middle of a desert is populated by ZOMBIES. One of these characters, DEAD MEAT, is living a somewhat normal zombie life dedicating most of his time eating brains. He's quite different from the others though; He's constantly made fun of by everyone around him because of his above average INTELLIGENCE. One day he wakes up by some loud sounds he's never heard before. He gets curious and halts to the window to see what could be causing the sound. What he discovers is that a bunch of humans have entered the town and are now killing every zombie on sight. They're led by the GENERAL, a big bulky guy with a grenade belt and a love for large armored vehicles. Dead Meat is seen fleeing the scene, dodging zombie limbs, gun shots and grenades. He successfully leaves the town unseen and starts wandering into the desert surrounding the place. After he's walked for a while, his pea-sized brain starts growing a conscience and he decides to return and save whatever is left of the inhabitants. He sneaks up on one of the humans vehicles and grabs a couple of heavy machine guns, some explosives and a screwdriver. Dead Meat is now on a killing spree, shooting, blowing up and stabbing through everything that isn't already dead. By a impressive demonstration of raw force and a little bit of luck he's able to face the General and an epic battle ensues. Moments later, Dead Meat seems to be losing and just before the General is about to land the final blow, Dead Meat is able to reach and pull out the safety pins out of one of the General's grenades using the screwdriver. They both blow up into smithereens. With the humans defeated, life eventually goes back to normal. After this was done, we were randomly grouped together in groups of four (I was grouped with Ole Petter, Miliam and Tim Daniel) to read and discuss each others treatments and decide for one to use for a storyboard, animatic and a 3D pre-visualization. We eventually ended up with using Dead Meat because... well... it has zombies in it, and a pretty obvious three act structure. We then proceeded with adjusting the story a bit like introducing a second zombie character and having Dead Meat actually survive and become accepted by his fellow zombies. Dead Meat |
About the authorOle Kristian Busk Archives
August 2018
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