Project Overiew 3rd Year Major

Been awhile since my last post, but I'm back at uni again and with a tone of stuff to show. For starters I want to just explain some of the new developments that have occurred with the 3rd year major project. Initially the idea was to focus on a a trailer slash short animated feature that would take the visual style of Team fortress 2 coupled with the themes of films like the The Dirty Dozen or the more recent inglourious basterds, with the major difference being that all the characters would be anthropomorphic animals (look at my previous posts for examples).
This however with several discussions with my team members, became more and more impractical to do as we just hadn't constructed any story around these characters and wasn't going anywhere, so with increasing time pressure we decided to think of a simpler idea.

With the intention of first creating a story, then creating the aesthetics, we looked at a huge number of student and personal animated short films. The characteristic that stood out right away was that the story was simple yet en captivating and only contained a small amount of dialog and characters. so with this starting point we brainstormed a series of ideas revolving around a chase or search for something, something generic yet easily understood by almost any audience.

The Story

The story will now contain 3 characters and will be in its simplest explainable form, a big game hunt, with a steam punk themed Hunter and his apprentice tracking down a rare creature in a lush alien jungle. But changes when we discover that the apprentice gains affection for the rare creature and tries to prevent the hunter from taking his prize, ultimately leading to the hunter becoming victim to his own madness and rage to kill this creature, leaving the apprentice and creature safe.

We have built a fairly large team now and the positions people have on the team are as follows:

Myself – Direction, Concept Art, Storyboarding, Modelling,

Tom Dowler – Producer, Writer, Editor, Direction

Matthew Luxton – Modelling, Lighting

Matthew Butler – Modelling, Rigging

Emma Taylor – Concept art

Roy Nottage – Concept Art, Animation, Art Direction

Oddne Madsen – Animation

Holly Bird – Animation

Peter Stache – Compositing/VFX

Scott & Ollie from Second Year – Maya Buffs/Riggers.

please check out the team blog if you would like to look at some of the progress the other members of teams are making Here