Once settling on the story that we would be working on, we worked on finalising the storyboard into an animatic and further refining the story with a written script to help us better understand and emphasise the characters’ motives. From this process, we added elements such as the butterfly (which conveniently also has antenna) leading the Alien to the Giraffe, and the inclusion of a HUD design on the inside of the Alien’s helmet.
Along with colour palettes and environment designs being made by other people in the group, I worked on some designs for the final space ship, which included inspiration from the character Opa-Opa from Sega’s ‘Fantasy Zone’. We ended up settling on that specific design, as it included antenna-like wings, which would keep in line visually with the theme of the animation.
Along with concept art, I also worked on some storyboards segments that evolved into a full storyboard and animatic that was used to help better define the pacing of our story. Elements like the butterfly had not been set in stone at this point in time.
We extensively used our Miro board throughout this whole development process, adding images to reference for characters and environment elements and jotting down our thoughts and opinions in a very open and honest manner.
Once we received feedback on our progress at this point, we started to get to work on the production of our 3D animation. To help streamline this massive task, we make a Google Drive that contained folders for all aspects of development, organising our work and making it easier for all of us to navigate files and uploads. To further help us organise our work, we set up a Trello board so that we could assign ourselves work to do so that we could all keep track of it.
Alisa and Matthew worked on the Giraffe and Alien models respectively, texturing and rigging them according to Alisa’s final design sheets. Elements like the trees, bushes and Main Planet were modelled between Matthew and Dayna, and the spaceship and extra planet models were done by Ben. I mainly worked on the 2D painted backgrounds that were used throughout the animation. I was greatly inspired by the background art of Disney films; specifically The Lion King and Treasure Planet.
The planet’s skylines are generally pastel in tone, used both to help convey the early morning time that the animation is set in and to match the pastel colour palettes used in Alisa’s concept art. Especially for the space background, I learned a lot about how to best blend the colours on the canvas to represent the ethereal nature found in many cosmic photos.
I had also worked on the textures for the Main Planet, taking inspiration from the bright colours seen in ultraviolet images of Saturn. Considering that giraffes exist on this particular planet, I used mainly greens and blues for the body of the planet, but then made a gradient effect going from indigo to violet to pink for the asteroid antenna to help them stand out against the rest of the colour palette on screen in the opening shot.
it’s 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 the wrong time to look at Saturn in ultraviolet ✨🌈🪐✨
📸: @NASA / @NASAHubble pic.twitter.com/cnEZBHHydi
— ✨Star Stuff✨ (@SpaceRachey) March 10, 2021
When I worked on my animatic, I had included an ending title card, which was just the title written in my handwriting with little antenna on each side. Yet it was from that little sketch that the final logo was inspired from, with the antenna acting as apostrophes to emphasise the pun of the title. Along with a round cutesy font and a slight curve to the letter placement, it’s a very simple but hopefully effective logo design.
While animating the first shot, I had to take time to learn about lighting and rendering through Arnold, which included things like implementing a skydome to allow the lighting to show the the Arnold Renderview port. When we finally got the spaceship model, I could properly animate my shot, which includes the ship propelling itself around planets, with the asteroids of said planets floating in the background.
It took around 5-6 hours for my laptop to render the 140 frame long shot, to which I could then edit the frames together with Adobe After Effects.
