Dimension Hopper Pitch Presentation Slides

We had the pre-production presentation this week, and I was aware of the fact that we were falling behind a little and I was feeling apprehensive about giving the presentation – even more so than usual.  The feedback we got was critical and there were a lot of questions asked about the direction of the project and inconsistencies pointed out and we left feeling a little bit unsure.

We once again began to discuss the storyline and plot beats and overall storyline, due to further feedback and direction from Henry and Mike about how the storyline was still overly complicated and hard to understand for an audience who had no prior context. So, after further discussion between us and the lecturers, we decided it would be better to focus on the idea of the rabbit being a thief who is breaking into the place to steal the artefact and having the cat be a security guard there who is protecting the archives instead of trying to tell a convoluted story through a court case in what would probably be roughly a 2-minute animation.

After receiving the feedback from the presentation and reworking our storyline, we decided we needed to create an outline of the storyline events as well, so we had a clearer idea of the story and plot beats to build upon and to allow us to move on with developing storyboards and clearer concept art.

Megan set up a Miro and Trello board to allow us to visualise the concepts and then organise and track work progress. Chloe and I sat together and worked out the storyline, organising it in the Miro board for me to use in the storyboards, as I told them I needed us to have a clearer idea of what was going to happen in the short if I was the only person going to be working on the storyboards.

 

Further Story Development 

For the next week Chloe and I focused on developing the concept further, especially after receiving feedback that Chloe’s original concept was too much work for the size of the group that we had. So, we then had to try and scale it back significantly as we only had 2 people, with the potential for 3, as Megan wasn’t sure whether to do a solo project or join this one yet. We played with some ideas and ended up settling with changing the concept a little to give the lawyer more personal stakes in the storyline and making it less complicated so we wouldn’t need the animation to be as long as it needed to be before the edits were made.

Second story rework;

Agent Hopper, an agent of the secret facility dedicated to collecting strange or dangerous artefacts, is on trial for using one of the artefacts and travelling through dimensions for fun. The defence attorney was involved in shady deals revolving around the artefact and the crime in the background and therefore has to get a ‘not guilty’ verdict to cover up his own misdemeanours and involvement.

 

Style Development

We then started to look into art direction and other animations to draw inspiration from. We discussed whether to have the film be 2D or 3D but eventually decided on having a 3D animation, as most of us were more experienced in 3d work. The original idea was to have the animation be 3D but make it look more like a 2D animation, as this was an interesting style to explore that was becoming more relevant in the movie industry at the moment. The goal was to achieve this by using toon shaders and outline shaders in Blender and incorporating the style into the texturing of the characters and assets.

The original stylistic inspirations for this short movie were;

 

‘Into the Spiderverse’ – for its iconic mix of 2D and 3D styles, using 3D props and having parts be in 2D as well as its cartoony animation style

 

‘The Dragon Prince’ – a TV show that was made using 3D models that were textured to look like 2D drawings as well as using the outlines of the models to help them appear more like a 2D drawing

 

‘Hi-Fi Rush’ – a game that used toon shaders and thicker black outlines to make its art style appear as if it was a 2D comic instead of 3D models as well as having a simplistic and stylised approach to shadows

‘Ace Attorney’ – A game that had similar themes to the original concept, as well as being a 2D game that was close to the 2d cartoony style we were going to try to achieve. It was a heavy inspiration source for the original concepts

 

Early Concepting

We had moved into concepting things for this fairly quickly, as we wanted to get a better understanding of the overall art direction and the sort of environments we wanted. I began to create basic concept art for the courtroom and archives environments to try and get a better idea of what the group’s vision for the environment was. Originally Ace Attorney was a big inspiration for the setting and art direction, so the concepts were designed with this in mind.

Archives;

 

Courtroom;

The second concept here was an idea I had come up with originally to try and lessen animation work and modelling, by getting rid of the jury and replacing it with an electronic board where the other agents in the facility would vote on Hopper’s fate.

 

 

Further Stylistic Changes

We had some further discussions about the overall art style of the project, over the next week, completing texturing tests to see how things would look in blender with the toon shader and experimenting with different settings and styles. We did some research into texturing styles for animal characters as well, looking at Nickelodeon’s Peter Rabbit TV show as a main reference for how to go about painting fur without having to set up hair and render fur out. The fur is basically all done through the texturing as well as some extra planes around the models to give the effect of fur going outside the model outline.

 

Another direction was suggested by Megan as she had originally wanted to do a solo stop-motion style animation for her project but ended up joining our group instead. So she showed us some of her inspirations and materials she’d been looking at for the clay-style texturing and we liked the look of the mock-up material she had made. Due to this and further discussion on whether it would fit our project and what else we would have to consider, like animating and rendering to fit this style instead, we decided to pursue this style in the project as it would be interesting and allow Megan to use what she had already been developing and was interested in. We agreed it would be a fun direction to try and take our project, so instead of emulating a 2D appearance we were aiming to have a stop motion clay look instead, it felt like a more unique angle as well as 2D appearing 3D rendering is very popular at the moment due to the success of movies like Into the ‘Spider-verse’.

Original Concept

The first few weeks of the semester were used to discuss ideas with other students and hear about the ideas people have created for their final projects. I didn’t really know any of the other students as I’d gone straight into final year instead of taking the placement year meaning I was with mostly different people. I was originally interested in a 2D project about an animated music video, however, the job areas I’m looking into for the future are mostly 3D ones, so I knew I had to find another group more suited to developing those skills. I eventually ended up talking to Chloe and Megan, about Chloe’s idea ‘Dimension Portal’, the initial concept seemed interesting and was in 3D so I spoke to this group in more detail.

The simple summary of Chloe’s original idea;

A courtroom trial within a secret organisation, where a rabbit detective is on trial for misdemeanour and generally breaking most of the rules when dealing with an artefact they had recovered, ending up in another dimension and causing chaos. Her lawyer was a grumpy cat who is one day away from retirement.

Initial storyline idea inspiration was taken from ‘Ace Attorney’, as we wanted to create a kind of comedic court case storyline where the plot is unravelled and explained through the case.