Project ideas and progression.

23rd

Toying with themes. Created brainstorms of what each theme could explore. Thinking about how I could develop these themes within my toolset and to exploit knowledge I already have accrued.

Initial thought's on Snowdonia have come up short. I'm struggling to think of an interesting story aside from "this thing looks cool". Whacking a cool building or something in craggy terrain or heritage villages doesn't explore any interesting themes, and would probably struggle to keep my excitement throughout a year.

Listening to "Dragon" by Clive Cussler on Audible. It's a fixating story so far that I think probably lends itself to perhaps character themes. Adventure/action narrative, but perhaps some scope in interesting locations; underwater habitats, retro cargo ships etc.

Alien Nation

Sci-fi is fun and certainly piques my interest. Not sure exactly how one would approach this subject without modelling and animating aliens though. Other people in the class have jumped straight into the idea of hostile aliens, invasions, attacks. The cohabitation side of the whole idea presents more interesting narrative potential in my eyes.

Prognosis. Still no real idea, but Alien Nation probably has the most scope.

28th

Basically settling on Alien Nation and coming up with ways I could bypass the character modelling thing, or at least minimise it as much as possible. Current idea is implied storytelling through what the world itself is presented as. A simple idea is to make the aliens oversized, so how they used buildings etc is very evident through modifications they've made.

30th

Sunil's lesson on roles of talent within the work environment, and that a jack-of-all-trades is essentially what we are doing this year, but does not fit within a typical production pipeline.

Showed off how he previz's ideas. I am initially uncomfortable with trying to capture ideas down using fast computer methods. But can see the potential of how it can be used.

Talked to Sunil about my idea, he was persuasive about locking down some more of the narrative detail before focusing too much on the macro detail. Motives of the Aliens, more about how they interact with the world (diet, temperature, locomotion).

5th Oct

Progression on idea. Aliens are cold perhaps?

Project discussion with DH.

Explored my broad strokes idea and how I was aiming to approach it without delving deeply into character design/animation. Discussed that I still only had a rough overall scene in my head without many ideas into the narrative of the final project. DH suggested intriguing ideas to explain the lack of alien presence in the project itself; perhaps the aliens have attacked, perhaps they've left the planet, perhaps they've been driven out by native humans.

Further discussion about pre viz workflow and how I could utilise my current modelling skills within Revit and how that is supported in Unreal - currently not fantastically.