Thrive

[Richard_Culver]

Update July 28 2024.

Here it is unbelievably 4 years later. Granted, this is not the only project we are working on and we have suffered shifting gears on production methods/apps/rendering several times. All my fault. But in a way I think this project has been a way for us and myself to learn. And we wound up settling on Blender as the main go-to app. However, because we had already invested so much in rescorces in making and rendering the city in Unreal 5+, I decided to leave those shots as is. They look great. And I did not see the reason to redo them in Blender. So we decided to comp the characters, rendering the character in Blender and comping the city background.

We also decided to ditch particle hair in favor of polygon hair for a more stylized look. Also faster render times and overall less technical issues.

As of this date all props and city assets as well as sets and characters for this portion of the film are done.

All interiors are rendered in Blender. We are in the process of finalizing the renders and comping the results of Blender and Unreal using Davicni Fusion.

The project we are completing now, is a 5 minute clip of the first sequence in the feature film. So it is a short/teaser.

The plan is to use this as a show piece to raise money to make the feature as well as a show piece for our studio and enter it in film festivals.

Here are some screenshots from the opening scene. Animated and Rendered in Blender. Cloth is Marvelous Designer.

April, 04, 2020

Since starting this project in Sept of 2019, there have been a lot of changes to the script idea and concept of this film. All for the better. I have decided to focus on this only as a short film (not a fake commercial) that can be then developed into a feature or into a series. Or simply remain as a short film, and move on to other projects, if I can not generate backing for it as a longer form project.

I will edit my posts here to reflect the most current information and a simple progression of production updates.

The start of a page on the website:

WE THRIVE TOGETHER | Animationrenaissance

[Embassy_of_Time]

I am very much looking forward to this!

[Richard_Culver]

Thanks. Yeah it is interesting. This is one of the more fascinating stages of the process. Starting with a kernel of an idea. And then nurturing the story ideas. Right now we are discussing some basic improvements to the story line.

I will share the summary of the changes when I have them.

[Embassy_of_Time]

If I don’t break my back entirely on the ‘rush-job movie’ I’m currently experimenting with (the one in the other thread) I hope to go down a slightly similar route with the beginning of 2020. Be good to have some ideas for the groundwork, so my eyes will follow your work, most definitely!

I hope you don’t mind me aping your workflow a bit along the way

[Richard_Culver]

@Embassy_of_Time

I hope you don’t mind me aping your workflow a bit along the way

Not at all. That is one of the reasons I am putting it here. So that others can get some insight. If anyone can take any part of it and can use it, that would be great.

On that note, I will open up to my writing process next and some of the reasons behind changes we will make.

[Richard_Culver]

As cool as all of this verbiage was, I am going to streamline this thread and rid it of all of the walls of text. It is here in this PDF if you want it.

writing notes.pdf (44.1 KB)

The first step for us is deciding on a theme for the film. Here are some mood boards to show how we started this process:

Characters

Knee Brace

Robots

City

[Richard_Culver]

Characters.

We continued to dial in a style. I also assigned one artist to do all of the character concepts. However there are four concepts remaining in here that are from another artist. I wonder if anyone can pick them out.

[Richard_Culver]

The logo.

We did some research to find some kind of theme for the film logo. I wanted the artist to identify some themes that would help tell the story of the film.

From this the logo artist started with some preliminary sketches.

I took one of these ideas and suggested that we incorporate some idea of the theme of together.

That idea never went anywhere… lol

Then I suggested we add some kind of element in the logo that shows what the film is about. Such as these:

The artist came up with this:

Brilliant. I then suggested we add a city backdrop to give the sense of an urban community.

That idea seamed to stick, with these as the first sketches:

Which gave us the finals that can be used with different backdrops and situations:

[Richard_Culver]

EDIT: April, 04, 2020

Here is where we are as far as set design.

Angela’s room.

Dance Hallway.

Hallway to the company that manufactures the robotic knee brace.

[DawnDarkness (Daniel)]

This is a good start. I am making my own cartoon animation, but in a serial style (though, I haven’t begun on the screenplay yet).

Might be checking back later for when there’s more progress on your short film. I’m interested in watching the final version.

[Richard_Culver]

Yes. The updates will be gradual with progress from storyboards all the way to final. I will try my best to give insights on the process along the way. Not just updates.

[Richard_Culver]

EDIT: April 04, 2020

Here I would like to share the process of designing one of the sets.

Here is a screen grab of the online white board I use to work with my artists, and track progress.

I started out with the basic instructions to follow a certain theme and I told him to to continue to research more for each aspect of the design.

He started updating the design like this:

So now we had this.

But for an animated film we want to try to keep this location brighter to feature the dancers more.

So I gave him that final instruction, and now we have this:

[Richard_Culver]

Additionally I finished my very rough version of the storyboard that my concept artist takes and makes into a “real” storyboard.

Here are samples of the outline I give the artist (mainly images from the internet and my crude sketches)

And the artist take:

My continued outline:

And the artist interpretation:

April 2020 Update: We now have a rough animatic version of the storyboard

storyboard animatic 01

[ArtAvenue (Avery)]

Really great stuff. I look forward to watching this project grow and seeing it turn from idea to finished product. And I don’t doubt their is going to be a lot of great knowledge to learn from here. I wish you and your team the best of luck.

[Embassy_of_Time]

Looking good, very excited to see what is still to come!

[Richard_Culver]

Thanks!

@Embassy_of_Time

Looking good, very excited to see what is still to come!

Yes. Me as well. Thanks!

[DawnDarkness (Daniel)]

Have you done more progress of the short film? Looking forward to see what you’ve done in the past month.

[Richard_Culver]

Thanks for the bump.

Lots of progress. I have been meaning to clean up this thread and update it. But… busy with so many other things. But I and the team have been progressing on this. Let me just give a general sampling all around.

Edit April 04, 2020: I am going to continue to clean up this thread with a more cohesive progression of updates.

[Richard_Culver]

I will leave this space blank and start adding more recent updates at the end.

[Richard_Culver]

Wall of text transferred to PDF:

leads.pdf (42.4 KB)