START OF PRE-PRODUCTION – BRAINSTORMING
Once we had been assigned into our final group of four (myself, Hurley, Nikita and Richie), we immediately began to create a mind map to brainstorm ideas for our project. Since the theme we were given to focus on was food, we decided off this basis that a food fight of some description would be a good conflict to drive the plot of our short film. A few concepts that we explored included sweet foods vs savoury foods, a forbidden love story between two different food groups as well as historical concepts such as incorporating regency and rococo desserts into a Marie Antoinette inspired skit. After a few hours of listening to each others ideas and incorporating different elements, we eventually decided that we would focus our story on a plot centred around the conflicts between a small and cosy quiet coffee shop, which barely receives any customers, that resides right beside a comically large thriving corporate coffee chain.
COLLABORATIVE MIND MAPS & CREATION OF GROUP SCHEDULE
Hurley, Nikita and I took the evening to create a plan for the coming weeks to keep our group on track. The three of us continued to work on planning, I created a storyboard to establish the main story beats of our project whilst Hurley created an organised schedule for each week of the upcoming semester.
We each drew inspiration from each other’s basic storyboards as we developed a final storyline that we could use for our project, which Hurley created a final storyboard for. After which, we decided to move onto the next stage of pre production: concept art.
GATHERING REFERENCES & VISUAL INSPIRATION
In our second week of class, expanding upon our concept of the opposing cafes, I took it upon myself to create concept art for the cute girly cafe, compiling a mood board on pinterest and annotating the imagery that i wanted to draw inspiration from when I was creating the overall vibe of the props, characters and locations. I wanted to keep the designs relatively simple as that would make them easier to model and render in a 3D environment, keeping within the pastel colour scheme to maintain a cohesive look for the area.
PROP CONCEPT DESIGNS
CHARACTER CONCEPT DESIGNS
In our study session that evening, Hurley, Nikita and I took the time to create some character designs for our respective cafe environments. We decided that in order to keep our characters relatively easy to animate in blender, we should make our characters robots instead of people or animals. Therefore, I decided to work on a few character turnarounds to experiment with this idea and how it could work with the concept of the cute cafe that I was developing.
Eventually I decided to choose my third character design to develop and take forward into production as the one that I would produce a model for. My plans were initially to give the robot character a screen based face, however upon reflection, I decided to keep the eyes and mouth as inset faces that I would add a light effect to and change the colours to express the robot’s emotion in post production when it was scripted to make noises (in lieu of dialogue.)
ENVIRONMENT CONCEPT DESIGN
Finally, I created a concept for the location where my robot would work based off the prior visual research that I had conducted, heavily based on parisian patisseries. I tried to incorporate a lot of cutesy shape language such as the heart shaped window pane on the front door in order to make it as girly as possible without relying entirely on the colour palette to communicate this energy to the audience.
Sticking to the pastel colour palette that I had used for my robot character concept, to keep the visuals of my environment cohesive, I set out to create an almost doll-house like layout to the cafe, overly polished and perfect looking, in stark contrast to Hurley’s cosy and homemade cafe concept that she was working on to directly oppose mine.
Overall, I believe that the pre production phase of our group project went smoothly. Richie has yet to contribute more to group discussion and developing ideas that we all agree on, but hopefully they become more willing to collaborate effectively with the rest of the group moving into the production stage.