Storyboards

We have now finalized a storyboard for the cinematic and figured out some story elements. The girl is now called Tabitha and the robot is called ALBUS (Automated Lifting Bipedal Unit Solution). Surveillance bot is still called Surveillance bot.

To figure out the storyboard we all made a quick one ourselves. We eventually settled with Sophies storyboard. Alex, as part of his Manga Society, will be making a comic based on the storyboard.

Here is the storyboard that I created.

Surveillance bot

As Surveillance Bot will be appearing in the cinematic, I decided to do some more sketches.

Initial idea decided

After a moment of deciding, we have decided to go with Alex's idea of a steam punk setting with a girl finding and fixing a broken robot.

Right now we are still in the concept stage, developing the characters out and getting into the mindset of the setting. We have agreed to also put the 'Surveillance bot' from initial planning into the scene as we all enjoyed his design.

As we all want to work on different parts of the scene, we have decided to roughly split the work by characters. I will work with the 'Surveillance bot', Alex will work with the main robot and Sophie will work with the girl. I am sure we will also be splitting the work on other parts as well.

New Team and Initial Ideas

For this module I have made a team with Alex and Sophie. Not only are they very talented and hardworking but I also teamed up with them in a previous module last year so I was confident that we could work well together. We then started on brainstorming some initial ideas for the game cinematic using the three subjects (Surveillance, Exchange, Stolen) that we were given.

We all had many ideas including mobster trade-offs, classic cops and robbers, kids stealing ice-cream, characters based on the zodiac, skeletons stealing bones, robots stalking people and so much more.

Final Concept and Floor Plan

I have produced a final concept for my floating island enviroment. After the tree tutorial I decided to make the trees have multicolored leaves as it makes the environment feel more magical and fit the feel I am going for.

I also produced a simple floor plan based on this concept to help the modelling process.

House designs

In my Sceneography I wrote about how a Wizard lived on the Island. However, I did not think that it would be obvious to the player that a Wizard lived there. I thought of an idea to combine a traditional wizards hat with the house.

I think this will help communicate with the player and set the mood of the enviroment a lot easier.

Floating Island Concepts and Sceneography

I developed my sketches a bit more and made a new concept for my Floating Island Environment. I used my Sceneography to also help develop my concepts.

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 SCENEOGRAPHY – REFINED BRIEF

Name : Ryan Lancaster

Project Brief:  UFO/ FAIRYTALE / KIRKSTALL ABBEY - ( delete as applicable )

Project Title: Floating Island

Broad Audience:  Child / Teen / Family / Mature  - (delete as applicable )

Mood / Atmosphere: Light, relaxing.

Scene Description

Time of Day: Midday/morning                INTERIOR / EXTERIOR / BOTH

Explanation / Backstory of Scene:

A man, travelling through the skys by airship, falls after encountering a turbulent storm. He awakes to find himself on a floating island, covered in grass and peppered with gigantic glowing crystals. The only signs of civilisation being a single house, owned by an eccentric wizard and a dock going out to the open sky. Smaller islands can be seen in the distance, with similar crystals on them.

The entire island is calm and relaxing. A small pocket of nature in the sky.

 
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I have taken some inspiration from games such as Skyward Sword and Crash Bandicoot, I would like to recreate the simple and lighthearted feel those games had.

Floating Island sketches

I made some sketches for my Floating Island enviroment.

At the moment I'm still getting a feel for how I want the Island to look. I have decided I want to have a family friendly enviroment, one which is bright and colorful.

UFO B-movie scene

Here is some sketches for the B-movie UFO crash scene.

The scene would be set in a warehouse, with a section changed with a fake UFO and backdrops. There would also be film equipment and various other things. The area would be blocked off by warehouse walls.

I really like the twist in the UFO crash here, as I am using cliche UFO visuals, it should also be pretty easy to model.

Ideas mind map.

I have made a mind map showcasing some ideas that I have for the location. I am not sure I I want to the the Kirkstall Abbey location as I think I could do better with a more imaginative and unique location.Ideas that I quite like are the B-movie style UFO crash and the floating island.

Poem 1 Animatic

Before we could film the scenes for the poem, we needed a more clear idea of the timings of each scene.

Using his storyboard, Alex made an animatic for the poem. Alex also got his friend Adam Fergler, who is music student , to produce the music for both the poems for us. This was very useful for us as we didn't have to worry about fitting the edit to pre-existing music.

Untitled from Adam Fergler on Vimeo.

Animatic by Alex. Music by Adam Fergler 

Poem 1 ideas & Storyboard

As a group, we decided to look into the poem and Analise it in great detail. We took out key details from the poem we found interesting. The most interesting themes we got from the poem is that of a forbidden love story and the city being a negative influence.

We then decided to separately come up with some ideas for scenes, so we could get a more clear idea of what we wanted to do.

 

I liked the idea of the city being an evil influence and tried to think of ideas for that. I drew out scenes of a skyline with a timelapse, static going over the screen and a faceless businessman. The static would symbolize how unreal the city can be to real life and the faceless businessman being a personification of greedy corporations. Ultimately we didn't go with many of these ideas, though we did utilize the timelapse with the city skyline.

We decided to focus a lot more on the forbidden love aspect. Both Alex and Sophie produced a test storyboard for the poem. We looked over both and decided that we were playing on the religious side of things too much.  Overall we went with an edited version of Alex's storyboard for the final storyboard.

Storyboard made by Alex.

Individual film ideas & storyboard

For our first task we had to create a one minute instructional video. This could be done in any style and be about anything we wanted. Immediately I started to sketch some ideas.

 

I decided I wanted to do an instructional video for something very simple (How to fry and egg) and make it very melodramatic. I also wanted to make it funny so I would juxtapose the very serious scenes with more comedic scenes.

After I fleshed out some ideas for my film I created a storyboard for the key frames of the video.

I planned to make the serious scenes black and white, taking place in a field. It would then cut to the actual instructional part of the video in full colour and in the kitchen. All of the scenes in the video would only require a crew of one, with the use of a tripod.