Storyboard

Now that we have cemented our ideas in place, I have produced a storyboard for my scene. My scene takes place between Mike’s golf scene and Simon’s air show scene. Because of this, I have included both transition scenes between mine and my other group members in my storyboard.

My ideas finer details are still susceptible to change, but I am confident that the general layout of my idea will follow this storyboard quite closely.

Yet More Idea Evolution

Our ideas are now reaching their final stages. As we look more into the time constraints, we have resided ourselves to the fact we should do one idea well, instead of two ideas poorly. As of this point, and for the foreseeable future, our individual sections of the animation are as follows:

Tom Early – Lawnmower Racing
Mike Walton – Golfing
Myself – Chelmsford Beer Festival
Simon Mills – Southend Airshow

As for the art style, we have decided to go with a healthy blend of realism and cartoon works. Similar to works produced by Pixar and DreamWorks, we wanted to produce something fun, but not lacking detail.

Jo showed us some projects from previous years that we could take insight from. We found some interactive flash videos which allow the user to choose which part of the video they actually watch, giving a personal and customised experience.

We have decided that if we have enough time after putting together a video for the client, we will also aim to offer them an interactive flash application as an extra deliverable.

Evolution of Our Idea Part 2

After presenting our ideas to Jo in the third week’s tutorial, we have discovered that the idea of a 3D map is very popular, with almost every other group suggesting something extremely similar.

Feedback we got from Jo suggested that the risk of sticking with this idea would be that it would be in direct competition with every other version of it, meaning it would have to be the best one to achieve a dominant place. With this in mind, we thought it would be a good idea to cut our losses and continue with the other segment of our idea, being a combination of activities and events in Essex.

Looking back at the huge list of items we had originally chosen to create, we realised that our workload would be far too large to create them all to a good standard. We decided it would be for the best to streamline our ideas, and pick out one or two at most items we wanted to continue on with. There was talk about continuing with the 3D map as some sort of extra overlay in the corner of the screen, but I felt that this would be seen as clutter rather than a positive item on the screen.

Remembering that the idea of our video is to be displayed on a website, it should be as clear as possible so that no detail is lost if it is scaled down to a size similar to that of YouTube.

[ Group ] - Essex Map Ideas

After the meeting we had on Tuesday, I went about researching the best way to display Essex. I thought that it would be a good idea to show Essex as an entity by itself, that way it is the one and only focal point on the screen, meaning that the audience can't help but be drawn into it.

I looked for some basic outline of Essex, and found this image:


I felt that this was a good representation of Essex, without it being so detailed that it would take masses of work to make it look the same.

I went about tracing out a spline in 3Ds Max, which I then converted into an editable poly. Once I had done this I extruded it out to make it into a wedge. I beveled the top edge of the wedge to give it a more stylized effect.

I think that it looks very characterised and will fit our project well. Here are a few variations of the image.



As the project progresses, I look to add more detail, such as towns and natural land marks such as rivers and forests.

Evolution of our Idea

We had a meeting with Elli Constantatou, our client from the Essex County Council. She gave us some very useful information about what she expected our videos to include, as well as providing us with handouts and leaflets explaining the main attractions in Essex and some of its most popular recreational activities.

After some more speaking on the subject of our group idea, we began to raise issues that we felt about our Colchester Castle idea. We all feared that the castle would be used too widely in other peoples videos and that it would be too difficult for the four of us to have an equal part within the project all working on a single scene, so we went about finding other subject matters we could work on singularly, but which would link together very well. On top of that, we also wanted to choose some items of interest which other people would not have done, making our video more unique.
We also spoke about having a 3D map of Essex, showing the characters moving from point to point, giving the viewer a brief breakdown of what is to happen in each of the areas. Inspiration for this section was taken from such games as Civilization 5, and Sim City. We will be looking into these for ideas and pointers.
Expected to present our ideas in week 3, we come up with some main points to tell Jo. These consisted of a group of tourist attractions, including:
Chelmsford Beer Festival
Colchester Castle
Hatfield Forest
Clacton
Southend Air Show

These attractions would be abridge and transitioned using a selection of activities partaken in Essex. These could be cycling
Walking
Cycling
Windsurfing
Jet Skiing
Horse Riding
Golfing

Initial Thoughts

In the latter 7 weeks of this semester, we are to split off into groups and design a short animation promoting tourism in Essex.

Our group consists of Michael Walton, Thomas Early, Simon Mills & I.

Our initial ideas can be seen on a group blog we set up. The URL is:

http://3dvisitessex.blogspot.com/

Our idea at this point in time is to create a video of Colchester Castle through the ages. We wanted to show the castles life under Saxon rule, then being used by the Romans many years later, all the way up to modern times. Our only reservations at this stage are that Colchester Castle may be a popular choice amongst other groups.

I am looking forward to this project as it means I will be able to practice my animating and material skills, as I am not happy that they are up to the same standard as I feel my modelling skills are. It will be difficult to produce a video that the entire group is happy with within seven weeks, but I feel that this will be quite true of what we can expect in a real industry scenario, so I welcome the challenge.

If it turns out that our video is selected to be placed on the client’s website, this will also be a huge point to add to our CV’s. In our next group meeting, I aim to bring up model size consistency, as well as art style consistency, as these are two points that will really help with the unity of our separate video segments.

I aim to use this blog to show my own personal progression through the project, as well as anything that I add to the group blog. Anything I post here from the group blog will be clearly marked as such.