For the very first week of preproduction we arranged ourselves into groups of five people which we wanted to work with. In these groups we generated a few ideas to suit the prompts we were give.
Our theme this year for our animated shorts was the theme of escape, a broad topic that could be interpreted in many many different ways. We were given the time limit of 30 seconds and were told that our characters could have arms but no legs and as a technical limit we were required to render our animated scenes in eevee as opposed to cycles like how we learned to in the first semester.
With that we were given the chance to start gathering into the teams we wanted to work with during this semester for this project. To start I asked my friend Odhran if he would work with me this semester which he agreed to, then we managed to join up with Anna, Bailey and Teirnan. When we arranged ourselves into the group we then started to generate lots of ideas of what we could do for our project.
For some examples we had the ideas of making:
- A short based around escapism, which could show the struggles of an animator (Same Face Syndrome, Imposter Syndrome, Art Block etc.). We came up with ideas of characters we could use to embody the issues faced by artists and the short would show how an artist can face these issues but escape them or overcome them at some point.
- A short based around spirits that could escape from a haunted house where they were trapped after dying.
- Robots that escape from their programming to earn their freedom from doing the day to day routines their programming forced them to relive each day.
- A short about the effects of music and how it can change a greyscale boring world to something that is colourful and cheerful.
- A dream themed short based around sleep sheep which could either focus on the sheep escaping from the dream world into reality or focusing on how entering the dream world helps to escape real world problems we face day to day.
- A prison break that followed characters that escaped their cells and the prison they were kept in.
- A character (or characters) escaping from a stick of dynamite they were strapped to which would explode after the 30 seconds of the short were up.
- A short following the emotions of characters or how characters can escape from overly emotional situations.
- A reimagining of the artist struggles escapism idea was also explored in the sense of the sequence being the nightmare of an artist that was struggling with these issues.
- A short that follows the life of dust-bunnies living in a carpet that are chased by and have to escape a fox themed hoover.
Out of all of these ideas the two which we seemed to like the most were the dust bunny concept and the artist’s nightmare concept. We then began to go through possible character designs we could have for each of these concepts.
For the artist’s nightmare concept each of us came up with the idea of having the main character being an artist half-body that would begin at a desk and then would fall asleep at the desk working on something. The scene would then change to something similar to the backrooms where there will be a corridor of doors which the artist would then progressively open as the short went on. Behind the first door there would be a huge cube in the middle of the room which would have the words “Art Block” written across it, then the door after that would be occupied by an among us inspired character which would pay homage to a character that was created last semester named evil sack [this would represent Imposter Syndrome]. Finally the last door would be filled with characters that would all have the same face which would swarm the artist [representing Same Face Syndrome]. Then after all of the doors were checked the artist would wake up again in their office at their desk again, therefore escaping the nightmare they were having.
For the Dust-bunnies idea we developed more ideas of what our surroundings would be and what our bunnies would look like to be able to adhere to the limit of not being allowed to have any legs for our characters.
In the end we ended up going with the dust bunnies idea as one member in particular seemed to really want to do this idea and it also seemed to be the easiest and most doable concept we had come up with in regards to the restraints we were given for this assignment.