Project Pre-Production

Since my last post we have now began work on our Final Projects. This module is Pre-Production and basically includes doing all the work except for the animating for our final piece i.e. story development, concept art, modelling, rigging, research, reference shooting, storyboarding and animatics etc.

After brainstorming some ideas for a possible project idea I've decided to create a piece based on my own original retelling of 'Pandora's Box'. I aim to create a stylised, dark, cute piece around a minute and a half in length featuring one main character, one scene and some simpler creature designs.

I'm going to attempt to build my own rig for this module as there are no female rigs for max, especially not children which is what I'm after. This should be pretty challenging. I've modelled, skinned and rigged before using biped, but it's not really something I've done much of so it should some additional learning, especially building a facial rig. I have some videos on the process so I'll get round to watching them when I've finished the model.

So far I have planned out all aspects of the story and development, wrote a character profile for my protagonist Pandora,created all the concept art for my characters, props and the scene as well as additional sketches of various story aspects to get a feel for the piece. 

I'm now in the process of modelling from the templates I've drawn up of my final designs, writing up an an animation script and drawing the storyboard to see how it reads.

I'll start posting some of my work in following posts.

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This is a ringling thesis short I watched recently. Nice story concept, great character models and animation! If I can get my character models looking as good as this I'll be very pleased, haha!