The Brief
This brief further develops skills in the production, preproduction and presentation of an animation concept. Working to a live brief and presenting to an industry commissioner you will be required to present a polished and well-researched idea in the form of a pitch product. Beyond this you will be asked to develop this concept to an animatic stage for submission.
The Brief: Your task is to present a pitch/animatic concept for either:
CBBC
We are looking for ideas across all genres that have a universal appeal to our 6 to 12 age group. Wolfblood and Danger Mouse are obvious examples of commercially successful brands which still clearly reflect a UK identity.
Or..
CBeebies
From Teletubbies and Go-Jetters to Magic Hands and Twirlywoos, we advocate our philosophy
of exploration and discovery by ‘learning through play
For this brief my group will be doing a pitch for CBBC.
Script
The script was done by group member Kade Collins.
Cloud 9 : The script
The scene starts off with freddie in school standing next to his locker before class starts . then all of a sudden Malcolm his dog companion pops his head out of his backpack.
F: Malcolm! Get your head back in the bag
M: Ruff! Sorry i’m still getting use to this voice box.
F: Malcolm….
M: Relax Freddie, no ones around
F: Okay… but if you get caught no more Honey Dogg treats
Malcolm moans at the thought of eating honey dogg treats. Freddie opens his locker and starts to use the hidden computer he has in it , alongside his over devices in there. He receives incoming news that the destroyer of clouds “Dr torbjorn “ is causing havik once again in cloud 9.
F : Look who’s just arrived in cloud 9
M: Is it time to play ?!
F: Yes it is ! Lets go fetch us a villian
Freddie and malcolm sneak out of school dodging teachers so they don’t get caught on their way out.
Next scene is a couple of hours before freddie receives news that dr torbjorn is in the city(this is shown on a black scene showing the duration of the past scene ). This then leads to a wide shot of Dr Torbjorn’s lair . Then a pan shot through the halls of his base, till there is a shot of a room where we get a angle shot behind a chair with the doctor sat down with his hand out emitting electricity from his hand.
Dr Torbjorn stares at a model of Cloud 9 plotting away.
Dr : A cloud without light will be consumed by darkness . I must bring light to cloud 9.
Dr Torbjorn stands over the model and begins to walk to the door , passing a table with a device that he picks up.
Next scene , a wide shot of freddie’s house
Freddie walks through his towards a secret button which is a teddy bear holding a honey jar. He presses the button which opens a door under him and he drops down to a hidden lift that brings him to a room called the gallery of gadgets.
F: it’s that time again
M: i think you should let me pick this time
F: the last time you picked we ended up covered in a pile of dog treats, so not today Malcolm we have a job to do
M: okay.. But i definitely need to use that gadget again
Environment Research
I find creating a pinterest board is always a good method of starting the creative process. I looked at a few different possible art styles including a steampunk floating city similar to that in Bioshock Infinite and then I found some concept artwork from Nasa project HAVOC which gave me the idea of making the background lore based off of project HAVOC.
Here is more image research on HAVOC from NASA website.
The upper atmosphere of Venus, has similar pressure, density, gravity, and radiation protection to that of the surface of the earth. With the addition of this extra lore it adds a interesting realistic backstory.
Initial City Design
For the initial cloud city design I used a premade model for the blimp found here and the Greyscalegorrila City Kit plugin which allows the user to seamlessly create detailed city-scapes easily while maintaining a high level of detail.
Here is the model of the blimp that I deconstructed and edited to make it more suitable
I added 4 cylinders that attached from the blimp to the base of the city to make it appear that it was suspended. With the addition of 2 rear fans it gives the look that the city can propel itself and move around.
The first intial design used textures on the buildings. While this adds nice detail it also adds a lot to render time. As it is an animatic I figured it did not need textures, so I could leave it greyboxed.
I played around with adding clouds inside of Cinema4D as apposed to adding them in post production.
These clouds were created by taking white brush stroke png files created in photoshop and then placed on multiple planes with alpha texture that are offseted along the Z axis. This creates a layered cloud look as you pan across the scene. However, the clouds don’t really look that realistic so instead I will use cloud images from google to use as backgrounds.
Here are concept images I created in photoshop by using multiple cloud textures and overlaying them. This gives a sense of the cloud city is actually in the scene and not just placed onto a cloud image. Using cloud images instead of c4d alpha textures looks a lot more realistic.
The final design of the cloud city.
There were a few other environment scenes that I had to create; The school, the school corridor, the protagonists house, the gadget room, Dr Torbjorns ship, and the interior of Dr Torbjorns ship.
School Design
As it is an animatic I didnt need to model a high fidelity school. Instead I headed over to The Free 3D Model website and downloaded a pre made school model.
The model came semi untextured and was a low poly model which was fine for my need, anything photo realistic would look strange with the current design and style of the animatic.
I textured the school a simple stone material so it didn’t stand out from the rest of the grey city texture. The school is all placed within the model of the cloud city.
Here is a wide shot of the school within the cloud city.
School Corridor Design
There is a part in the script where the two characters are in the school corridor talking. For this I needed to model the corridor so I researched into what the layout of school corridors are.
The research showed I needed to have a few key models for the scene; lockers, doors, florescent ceiling lights.
Locker from free3d
The scene is a elongated cube with lockers, a school chair, some posters and a water fountain.
I tried keeping the colour scheme as simple as possible using magnolia colour on the walls and a concrete texture on the floor.
Here is the final shot of the corridor with all the added details. I added a mars poster on the walls which adds nice detail as it is set on mars.
Protagonist House Design
From the script, the house needed to have a secret gadget room for the main characters to go in and from inital sketches from Kade, the house had big satelite dishes and telescopes on the roof of the house.
I once again used a premade model from TF3DM which was orginally the simpsons house model. I chose to use that model as it fits the aesthetic of lowpoly simple design.
I changed the colours and added the modifications that were in the inital sketch.
Interior house design
For the interior of the house, I needed it to be open space and wide enough for a secret entrance/doorway into the gadget room. As I keep reminding myself, that it is an animatic and there are time restraints I looked into using a premade model once again. I found this living room model from TF3DM.
With a few adjustments the scene was more suitable for my needs. I deleted all the baby objects in the room like the floor mat and toys. I rotated the camera angles and found a good shot to incorporate the secret entrance to the gadget room.
Here are images of the adjusted scene.
For the entrance to the gadget room I decided to make a lift that goes down into a basement. I did this by cutting a segment in the floor and extruding downwards.
Gadget Room Design
I wanted it to look very clinical, modern with some high tech industrial accents.
It starts as the lift comes down to the entrance of the gadget room, a big reinforced steel door.
It was a fairly simple scene to create, using mainly concrete and blue metal textures. The light source being 9 high luminescence squares.
For inside the gadget room, a few of the models at the front were premade models and the ones at the back were just primitive objects in cinema4D.
I originally wanted the scene to look like this, all the gadgets in glass boxes and the glass reflecting and refracting the other boxes to make this visually interesting shot. However, all the glass makes the render upwards of 10 minutes.
I then tried using the first 3 with glass which looked better but the render time for an animation would still be quite high.
As I still wanted to keep a high visual fidelity, and not opt to use no glass. I decided to render the glass frames 10 times with the box around the watch moving down. This way, it still shows the animation of the scene while maintaining the nice visuals.
Dr Torbjorn Base Design
For inspiration I turned to the havoc concept art for the initial base design for Dr Torbjorns base base.
The image to the left shows a circular base attached to a blimp. This interesting structure looks quite menacing so I will use this design for inspiration for the evil lair.
As you can see I tried to replicate the model closely but changing the colour scheme to reflect the underlying colours of the characters, in this case, purple, for torbjorn.
For the interior I looked at evil base designs on google and found this image of Dr.Evil’s base from Austin Powers.
From this image I took a few things, firstly the layout. I like how the evil mastermind sits in a chair either side of these big stairs which focus your eye towards him. I also like how the surroundings of the base is covered in a triangular structure that gives it nice detail.
Comparing the inspiration image to my scene you can see where I took inspiration. For the chair I wanted something throne like but all my attempts of creating something menacing failed, so I turned to using a premade model of Darth Sidious Throne from TF3DM. From the script Dr Torbjorn towers over a model of Cloud 9 so I scaled a model of the city down and placed it within a bell jar model.
Initial Venus Design
I knew I wanted the opening scene to the animatic to start with a environmental shot of the Venus and some info text giving some background info and text to
the animation.
I headed over to Nasa3D for a ultra high resolution stitched image to use as texture wrap on a sphere.
From that I added a light source to act as the sun and added a custom cloud alpha texture map.
With 3 different cloudy texture maps taken from earth and which the land has been removed I overlayed them all and changed the opacity in photoshop to create a bespoke weather map to emphasise how cloudy Venus is in my animation.
This image only uses 1 cloud map but soon realising the clouds were too minimal so I added the other 2 varied cloud maps. I added a second sphere that holds the cloud texture that is a few cm larger this gives shadows from the clouds that cast down on Venus from the Sun.
here is an image of 3 spheres, the planet, the weather map, and an atmosphere hue.
Here are some atmosphere variants
Heres the spheres all overlayed on each other with a few lighting adjustments. I chose to go with the yellow hue’d atmosphere as it looks the most natural.
With the addition of a moon orbiting around the planet and a ultra high resolution star map it makes the scene a lot more believable. As I knew I was going to be adding some text in the corner for background information for the story line I needed to leave space either side of the planet, but still needing the planet to be the centre of attention.
I did a rough mock up in photoshop to play with font styles and text colour to which i decided to go with a top secret mission styled text and colour.
Final Animatic
Presentation Recording
PDF Presentation
Conclusion
I feel Cloud 9 was a very successful project which tested all the group members strengths and weakness. I have found group work previously difficult as members have had different visions that made it hard to work efficiently or group members do not work fast enough. However, Cloud 9 has been quite the opposite. Everyone in the group pulled their weight and made the whole experience very smooth. The character design by Lucas fitted into my 3D environments very well and didn’t look out of place which some hybrid 2D – 3D animations can be sometimes. With Kade working on the script, idea and presentation that took a lot of the workload of Lucas and I which sped up the whole workflow.
I’d say our biggest strength this assignment was working with competent animators and artists. Whenever I needed something doing I didn’t have to explain my vision to Lucas, he just did exactly what I needed without asking for more information and vice versa. This made the whole process for the characters easy and efficient.
One thing I would improve on is time management through the project. Time management is always something I struggle with on projects. Getting a plan and figuring out what to complete that day/week for a set time period would help tremendously in planning but its another thing trying to stick to it while juggling other projects. If I correctly managed my time during the project the end result could of had a stronger storyline or better visuals.
Overall I am massively pleased with all the group members which led to a quality piece of animation.
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