I set up a discord server for our group and we quickly got started on coming up with some initial ideas. Lyndsey had a really good idea to start us off about a waterfight happening between plantpots. She also made a miro board for us all to collaborate on and share ideas, references, concept art, etc. We used discord to communicate a lot throughout this project, both through text chat and having regular voice calls. It was also used to keep each other up to date on our progress, issues and more.
Our initial waterfight idea quickly devolved as we realised that trying to do fluid simulation would be complicated and unrealistic to achieve in this assignment. We still stuck with the idea of having flowerpot characters however, Lyndsey suggested a second idea:
We went through other ideas surrounding the theme of nature but trying not to stick with the obvious ideas like plants. Eventually we developed an idea surrounding two groups of plants in a flower shop, where they participate in a beauty contest to be accepted. This idea was worked on a lot by me and Lyndsey but eventually we scrapped it. Lyndsey had another idea which I thought had a really cool theme about forest spirits/sprites having a war over land with each other.
This was the rough plot outline I wrote for the flower shop idea:
Our first progress presentation goes over our ideas/references/concept art and reasoning behind the two ideas that we had:
This was some of the concept art I did for both ideas:
Flower Shop
My references for the above concept art, mostly for the venus fly trap character, I was really inspired by three headed hydra snakes + snake that flare out their skin around their necks.
Forest Spirit War
Our Miro board (linked earlier above) also contains a lot of references and visual inspiration we found on Pinterest towards both the flower shop + forest war idea. We were all torn between the two ideas but eventually we voted as a group to go with our second idea about forest fairy sprites fighting. Mainly because we really liked the theme/potential for the environment/character designs, we also found that we enjoyed working more on the storyboards + concept art for the forest war idea too.
We planned a general outline of the plot for the forest sprite war idea and we decided it was a good idea to start making our own individual storyboards and then come together to choose what scenes we liked best from each.
My storyboard as well as my animatic can be found in this post.
I also made a Pinterest board for our final idea which I found was really useful as reference later on in the final production stages when I was creating environment assets and texturing them. It was also really helpful for lighting and putting my environment assets together later:
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/sav_scarlett/3d-animated-short-forest-spirits/
An overview of the plot and our inspiration.
