Initial Ideas
When considering ideas for my final year project my main inspiration came from my placement year at INCISIV. I loved making environments for game purposes, having creative freedom to make anything I wanted and pushing the limits of what I could do with an environment in VR. This project was the perfect opportunity for me to showcase my environment creation skills and to really push my skills at making complex effects and dynamic materials, leading me to the idea of making multiple distinctly different environments. My thoughts settled on having my film entirely from a first-person perspective to make the viewer feel like they are walking through and discovering these worlds, like I had felt when creating my VR environments. However, I knew I did not want to make an actual VR project as having to restrict the size of my project to work on a VR headset would limit the quality and the extent of my creations. I even played with the idea of making my project interactive. Having the first-person camera be moveable would mean players could walk through and experience my environments first hand and be more immersed. However, after thinking on this more, I decided against it as I don’t have experience in creating game type levels by myself and I was unsure whether I could both create these environments and add interactivity within the given deadline. I did not want to overextend myself and wanted to make sure my goals were achievable and I could spend time making it higher quality.
Inspiration
To make each environment unique I thought of using a magic doorway that the camera would pass through to transition between them. Later I revised this to a portal within the doorway that showed the other scene, creating a magical window. This led me to consider the art style I wanted to use. I wanted a realistic feel but for it to have a sense of magic and wonder, to use realistic textures for my assets and to make use of post processing to add a magical feel. I drew inspiration mainly from video games using different ones for each environment. I mainly took interest in their atmospheres, use of lighting and the effects they employ.
The first one I had a clear vision of was a snow storm forest. I wanted a dark, intense, natural environment to start with heavy snow flying around and low visibility down a forest path. I wanted strange lights moving around the trees, contrasting against the darkness and creating dynamic lighting and to have interactive snow that moved with the characters feet to make the world seem more real. For inspiration here I looked at God of War and The Long Dark due to their use of snow and dark, intense snow storm atmospheres.
The next environment needed to be vastly different so I had the idea of a man-made room set in a futuristic city with towering skyscrapers. To tie it in and make it more mysterious, I added the aesthetic of the city in ruins and had the room falling apart and being taken over by nature. This theme meant I could add more effects and build a more interesting atmosphere. For this, I drew inspiration from Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last of Us as they both use the aesthetic of run down cities taken back by nature.
Finally for the last environment I wanted another more natural setting set in a calm, peaceful lake. Here I could create more sunny, natural lighting and play with water effects. For this scene I looked at Red Dead Redemption 2 as I love its use of natural lighting and the realistic feel.
While having stunning environments was my main aim, I realised early on I would need characters or animals in order to add life to my worlds. I decided I wanted an ethereal/ ghostly spirit animal as it would give me the chance to make interesting lighting, particle and shader effects. I even wanted it to interact with the camera to add to the first-person feel. I found good inspiration for this in the patronus animals in Harry Potter.
From the start I knew that I wanted to hand make as much of this project as I could. However, I was worried that I would not have the skills to rig and animate a quadruped animal by myself so I was thinking of using a third-party asset. Although, after speaking to some of my tutors, they assured me that I would be able to create and animate a quadruped easily enough within the time.
Once I had sorted out all my ideas and come up with a planned project, I settled on a synopsis. As my project isn’t narrative based, my synopsis was quite simple:
“A first-person perspective of a lone traveller following a spirit animal through mysterious doorways that lead him to new and strange worlds.”
Pitch Presentation
During my presentation I presented the final version of my idea, to have an entirely first-person perspective film, immersing the audience into my magical environments with a spirt animal acting as a guide to lead them through portals into the different worlds. After the presentation I received some very useful advice that helped me see my project from a different perspective. I was advised to try add more complexity to my project, to include a centrepiece asset in each scene that acts as a focal point and to try use VR to capture my first-person perspective for better immersion.
Notes and Mood Board
Below are my initial notes, thoughts and mood boards I made when coming up with my idea.
