Modified

I watched the Dark Knight again last night and realised that my interrogation room wasn't completely accurate. The window spacings and the fact the pillars between the window protrude out weren't in my version. Due to the layout of my room it's quite difficult to alter the spacings now, however I have added the pillars so hopefully it won't affect the final outcome too much!

Environment under way!

My environment is in two parts; the interrogation room from the original scene, and the open-plan fighting ground. Today I've been working on the interrogation room for the start of the animation. I spent a lot of time messing about with textures to try make this part of the animation is true to the original as possible. I also spent a bit of time trying to go about it with the fewest possible polygon count.

Anyway, below you can see a few stills. I've yet to create the roof, lighting and furniture, but the initial layout and a few textures are there.

Creative Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes, but mainly in the form of existing films..

So I’ve had a brainwave (is that still politically correct? Hopefully I won’t offend any epileptic surfers), I was watching Tim Burtons, Alice in Wonderland last night and really liked the scene near the end of the film where both sides meet on the giant checked board, surrounded by ruins. At this point I remembered what Andy had said about the fight scene for my animation, I liked the idea of the room falling away and both Batman and ‘The Joker’ falling downwards whilst fighting. Sort of like the initial falling down the rabbit hole in Alice and Wonderland. My idea is that, as the Joker reveals to Batman that the only way he’ll get what he wants is to break his (his being batman) “One Rule”, at this point the walls get ripped/blown away to reveal a giant two themed board. One side of the board will be over the top, crazy and generally joker-themed, where as the other side will be quite dark, a little scary but with something symbolic of justice, indicating Batman side.

Now I’m thinking have some arcade style fighting game narration (i.e. “READY! FIGHT!” and “K.O.” – similar to the likes of ‘Tekken’ and ‘Street Fighter’) along with health bars, name plates and possibly time left and rounds. Using After Effects I could add glows to fists for when they make contact to simulate other existing games. Hopefully this will contribute to the style I’m going for with the fight. The fight will end with Jokers health bar hitting zero, the fight narrate shouting “K.O.” and Joker telling Batman where both locations of the victims are, at which point Batman will either simply leave via the door (same as original scene) or go back to his roots and using the trusty Bat-Grappling hook and to fly out of there in a typical batman style!

Character Appearance and Scene layout

In a typical adaptation style I have decided to turn all the characters in the scene into an animal counterpart.

Batman being 'BAT'man the obvious choice would be to have his character be a bat, though I'm not sure if I like the thought of Batman still being a bat. I could make Batman be a different animal and try make it seem ironic, but which animal I'll use if that is the case, I don't yet know.

I quite liked the thought of the Joker being a rabbit, purely because you can make a rabbit look quite erratic, having said that you could probably do the same thing with a lot of other animals, plus Andy used rabbits as an example in the seminar and I don't want to appear to be directly ripping ideas from other people. However, as it stands, a rabbit is still my most desired animal for a Joker style character. My thoughts flick to the Rabbit from Tim Burtons Alice in Wonderland.

Commissioner Gordon seems the most difficult to pin a character too. He’s only seen very briefly at the start of the scene but he sort of sets it up for Batman so I would prefer to keep him in the scene, but as for what character I'll portray him as is a different story. I like the idea of him being some sort of Walrus, used in childhood cartoons to portray old men. The actual character from the film is quite thin so it won't accurately represent him but I suppose it's an adaptation, it doesn't have to stay true to the original!

I would prefer for the scene to stay true to the original, a dark poorly lit square room, which when illuminated is quite overwhelming in contrast. We’ve been talking about making everything within the animation consistent, so although I’ve changed the original cast to their animal counterparts I’d still like to keep the room the same. For the sake of keeping theme I have considered keeping the layout roughly the same but maybe making the interior (as that’s all we can see anyway) look a bit more like the wooden house seen in Disney’s Tarzan at the start of the film, possibly composed of bamboo/realistic wooden branches and rope ties with maybe a lantern for light instead of modern day lighting.

So I've been really indecisive

I've decided to stay away from the scripts we've been given because I don't want to end up with something similar to other animations; however, in doing so I've been having some serious decision issues with what exactly I will do.

Initially I thought I'd do a scene from a recent topical film or a timeless classic film; with this I considered scenes from the likes of 'Inception', Lord of the Rings', 'Pulp Fiction' or 'Iron Man'. I couldn't quite think of any particular scene from Inception that would make a good adaptation, and I didn't like the thought of doing Iron Man as I felt it would seem more like I was taking an easy way out in the sense that we had already covered the rigging of robots in the previous term, and with Iron Man being predominately robots, I saw no other way around this. I liked the idea of reproducing a scene from Pulp Fiction, specifically the first scene featuring Samuel Jackson and John Travolta. However, I felt the scene was too long and contained too much dialogue to fit into a roughly 3 minute animation.

Now, having spent much thought on this and having watched countless films I have finally settled on (drum roll please) 'The Dark Knight'. Personally, The Joker was my favourite character from the film, but there are many scenes from the film that I could have chosen. In the end I have decided to go with the interrogation scene between Batman and The Joker. If I did it to timescale then I'm looking at it starting in the dark room with the Joker and commissioner Gordon, and then ending at the point where Batman pulls the Joker over the table for a somewhat dramatic finish. However, if I wanted I could cut the dialogue down a bit and probably get in the whole scene, during which Batman roughs up the Joker a little.

Virtual Environments - Term 2 Project

For our latest project we are to produce a 3 minute animation using either one of the pre-determined scripts or optionally to devise one of our own. If we chose to use one of the three scenarios presented by the brief then it would have to be our own take on the script, not just imitated.

By the sounds of things, the majority of students have opted with the ‘Matrix Dojo’ Scene because it sounds the most appealing. Initially I was undecided about which to do, but having scrawled out a mind map I have decided to do my own adaptation of another existing film.