Rough Character Design...

Here are a few rough concepts I drew up on Photoshop for our main character, Katie. We all pitched in to figure out what she could look like. Since our character will be waking in what seems to be a dream world of sorts, the group suggested that her clothing be that of bedtime attire to give it a more familiar dream-ish feel.

Nightie Concept

This is an idea from group member Zack Monga. Leaning towards a more simplified look of the character wearing a one piece nightgown or an over sized white shirt to match the setting, with rolled down white socks. The baggy-ness of the nightie/shirt could be a bit complicated to emulate in Maya.

Casual Concept

This is a my own concept. Dark hair, large shirt with blue sleeves, tight shorts and bare feet. Quite boring to be honest. More of a style and proportion test.



Bear Suit Concept

This concept consists of a full body bear suit complete with a hoodie with ears and a pair of piggy shoes. Has very loose leggings that tighten at the ends and loose arm sleeves.

Although it somewhat has a cuteness factor to the design (minus the weird colour scheme), the modelling process as well as the animation for the folds and the head movement within the hoodie could present more than a few problems for us 3D first timers. So we decided against this design altogether.

Bunny Pajamas Concept

I think a majority of the group liked this concept. Much contributions here from Hope Morgan and Marc Dagatan. This costume is composed of nice purple pajama set with a pair of pink bunny slippers. Her hair is brown with a slight part in her fringe, side bangs and a very short ponytail. She also has green yellow-ish eyes.

The only thing that would be changed to this design would be the long sleeves. To avoid dealing with complicated wrinkles around the elbow area, we've decide to roll her sleeves above the elbows.

The group agreed that Katie would have a very stylized look influenced by anime elements. This is to hopefully capture a sense of innocence and cuteness through the use of large eyes and a larger proportioned head.

Mood Board...

Mood Board

Compiled images to draw inspiration from and help us get a fair idea of what we want to produce during this project. The group seemed to resonate towards something similar in style and feeling as a Japanese animated film "Oblivion Island". It has a nice, cute, soft nature to everything in that film that the entirety of the group would like to aim for.

Rough Animatic...

This is a very rough animatic of our basic story edited together in After Effects from previous storyboards. I had to modify and cut a few of the intro scenes because they took up too much time and didn't really add much to the overall story. I also did very basic timing which will be more refined in the final animatic.

Happy Endings (Rough Animatic)

We pitched this to the tutors and got quite a positive response along with some positive feedback. Our story was clear and straight forward even though it lagged a wee bit in the middle of our presentation due to technical issues. The only things that were highly recommended was to delete a few scenes near the end. They found that the mid shot where Katie is lying on the bed was unnecessary and the end shot where the spikes flat line. Tutors recommended that it might have a better impact if we use only sound for the flat line because we've already established whats actually happening from showing Katie in the bed. Tutors were also concerned with how the objects would grow and materialize and suggested we try some animation tests to figure it out.

Now after we implement those tiny changes to the storyboard we have to finalize Katie's character design and further plan what objects will be appearing within the dream sequence.

Storyboard...

My rough storyboard as per brief. Very basic camera shots and scene setup. This was just a bit of practice for me to solidify more on what our story really is about. Will elaborate more on dynamic camera angles and shots when we put together our the final storyboard.

Storyboards

Even though a ongoing work in progress, that's basically our story in short. All shots will have the camera focal lengths of 35.000.