Pitch for an animated short     Involvement: Script, Character & Sets Design, Storyboards, Final Rendered Boards

“We all grow up with this notion that we need to be perfect in almost everything that we do, have, want or live for to being successful in life, being loved by our loved ones, being able to pass every test that comes our way, being able to be in the good books of the almighty, being able to stand in front of your own conscious self, may be the list is endless. This notion also brings with it disappointments and guilt when we fail to do so. The film tries to give the message that you don’t have to be perfect and accept what you are. Try and live this moment, as that is what life is..”
The project was a pitch for an animation project based on a book by Shel Silverstein with the same title. All aspects of film making were explored; like adapting a script from a book, character design, storyboard, set design (for backgrounds) and coming up with final rendered boards to present the concept. The 3D part was entirely done with Maya (from modeling to rendering) with final touchups in Photoshop.

PRE-PRODUCTION

The pre-production process was split into three major parts; Script, Character design and Sets. These initial sketches were helpful in deciding the mood for the film. Based on these early sketches the detailed story board and character design was done.

CHARACTER DESIGN

The Circle is the main protagonist of the story and its design had to represent the emotions that were to be communicated. The story is about being whole in life, to be able be in our own pace and not fall into the trap of fast paced life, running after materialistic goals. The character is an abstract ‘circle with a missing piece’. The aim was not to take away this essence but still be able to give a certain personification so that the audience could relate to it. The inspiration came from creatures like tortoise and snails that have a shell and live within it. These were perfect metaphors to represent the circle, as it can roll and pop only when it stops. Semantically it fitted the story perfectly as we can only ponder back on our life’s when we give ourselves time to halt peacefully and look in retrospect on things we have done. There are a few other characters which take the story forward.

The design were then translated to actual clay and thermocol models before getting them modeled and rendered in 3D with Maya. Below you can see how the metaphors were translated to the design and how the final character took shape.

STORY BOARDS

As the story was very abstract, story boards were are great help to decide how the flow of the film should be, what frames are required, how the characters would be animated. The story board was done fairly detailed at some places where actions had to be defined. Here are some of the story boards.

3D RENDERS

 Building a 3D model and a 3D environment is a fairly complex job, and it’s a must to have lots of trials before the final models are made. There are a lot of parameters which have to be considered like how the rig of a character would be, how the texture of the character would look like. The set design play an important role. In our project since the final output was to give a feel of how the film should look like and not really rendering out the entire animation, we did not go for compositing multi-pass render’s but did the entire thing in the 3D application itself. This helped speed up the process.

FINAL RENDERED BOARDS

The final output for the film was a full rendered Animatic, the boards for the same can be seen here. These give the final impression of how the film should be!