In teams of 4, create an animated short based on the theme of ‘Adventure’.

1. Pre-production

For our project, my group decided on the idea of using a cloud as our main character and we wanted to create of story of adventure based around clouds. The first thing we needed was a plan.

After a lot of discussion and debate over the discord chat, this was the final narrative we decided to work with;

A little cloud trying to find his shape:

• The cloud notices some interestingly shaped clouds in the distance.
• Excited, he attempts to copy the shapes, but can’t get it right.
• Disheartened  he is upset and gives up.
• During his little emotional outburst, he is unaware of some withered flower that are below him.
• The flowers are grateful for his little rainy spell,  upon looking down our little cloud sees his reflection in the puddle he created.
• The flowers rejoicing and thanking him, the cloud smiles and realising he is perfect how he is with the help of the flowers.

We had each created a storyboard to put the narrative into perspective, here’s mine;

After we had got the narrative sorted, we needed to choose what we wanted our cloud to look like. We wanted to go for a low-poly type look, just to keep everything simple, yet cute-looking.

When researching more into our cloud themed idea, I found that there are 3 different types of clouds, high, mid and low level clouds. This was useful for deciphering which cloud type would be best to use and we decided to use some of the low-level clouds. 

I had also turned to YouTube for a few cloud modelling tutorials, such as this one to see which methods would be best when modelling and designing the clouds for our final 30 second animation.

 

Here are some simple designs I had created to help figure out which clouds would be best to use, and referring back to the different types of clouds, I had decided to base my ideas of two different looking cloud shapes and thought these two would be perfect.

I had also volunteered to design a couple of backgrounds for our animation;

Here is our groups final 2D animatic of an example of how we wanted out final 3D animation to turn out, created by one of my group members.

2. Production Progress

To make things easier we split the narrative of our animation up into 4 sections;

1. Cloud sees other clouds, looks at himself and gets an idea. 
2. He attempts to reshape himself to look like the others. 
3. He gets upset that he cant and floats down towards the ground.
4. He noticed his reflection which cheers him up, then he floats back up to re-join the other clouds. (My part)

After the models were created and the backgrounds were done, all that was left to do was animate and render. For my part, I wanted to make the cloud down at the reflection of himself, then look at himself (from left to right) and then realise that he actually looks fine. However, the only was I could communicate these feelings/thoughts to the audience was through moving either the eyes or the arms, as we didn’t have dialogue or narration. This was the first attempt;

And here are parts 1, 3 and 4 put together;

 

3. Finished Animation 

After a lot of editing, tweaking and rendering (and figuring out how to work the camera), this is how my part of the final animation looked along with the finished animation;