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.

Animation finished! Design Practice 3 over.

I'm glad this project is over at last, though I put that down to rushing it to meet the deadline, if I had been a little more organised then it would have been much more relaxed, pleasant and, in my opinion, done to a higher standard.

I was happy with the modelling and rigging out the robot itself, as well as the look of the environment. I enjoyed experimenting with some of the textures, however I believe I still need to work on this aspect of modelling.

In my opinion my strength lies in the modelling and rigging, as apposed to actually animating. Even so, I enjoyed doing this project, and it shed some light on areas I need to improve upon; namely lighting, animation, and most importantly, organisation and time keeping.

Below is the my finished animation.

It's aliveeeeeeeeeeee!

Robot complete! Not finished with the texture, but I just wanted it to look fairly tidy for now.

Below are a few images of the robot in its complete form, some poses included.

Stop and Stare, because currently I have no mouth.

Robot nearly complete, with just eyebrows and mouth left to go.

Influences

As I said in an earlier post, the arms were influenced by the arms from Spiders Man, 'Dr Octopus', and some sort of aquatic probe I came across whilst browsing robot pictures on google for inspriation.





Having designed the arms I decided, for the sake of continuity, I would design the legs similarly. By this I am mainly referring to the ridges in the pipework of the legs, and the three toe-like supports at the end of the foot that mimic the three point pincers on its hands.

The Hip, Chest and Spine all have a similar sort of design, this wasn't really influenced by any outside sources but I thought it looked quite futuristic and again, for the sake of continuity, made the spine and chest plate follow a similar sort of design.

The head and eyes were influenced both by the Stabbing-robot from Futurama, and from Disney Pixars, Wall-E.




Below is the image of the almost complete robot. Robot and Environment will be uploaded by the end of the day. Then for the fun task of texturing, animating and rendering. Hoozah.

Robot Update!

My robot is finally almost finished so I thought I'd post a few shots I'd taken early on during production.

The arms were influenced by Dr Octopus from the Spiderman comics/film, and the idea of a spider struggling to get out of a bath seemed quite comedic in terms of the robot falling over during the animation.



For the sake of continuity I used the same ridge patern for the legs and arms, and attempted to make the feet look similar to the pincers on the hand.



Both arms and legs together. Very crudely teztured for the moment.



The Spine and Head had been created however I decided to recrate as I wasn't happy with it.