Narrative: "Love Bird" Making Of

The Making of...LOVE BIRDS

Narrative: Environment Lighting and Texturing

The environment was passed onto me to do the texturing and lighting once the UVs were done.
I put some base textures down for whilst I do the lighting arrangements.

This was the first lighting arrangement that was done before the environment was given to me to work on, the main feedback for this was to take out lights from the light bulbs as it was too bright.

Firstly I took out all the directional lights before touching the light bulbs and adjusted the windows at the back.

Since the start of our animation is supposed to give an overall dull feel before the light change.

As there was no finalized design for the environment as a whole I made some adjustments to the machinery, placements of the crates and added paper littering the environment.

During the animation their is a slight colour change to the environment, so I added some pink lighting to suggest the romantic theme of with the use of an ambient light in the scene.

I took this shot into after effects to see what type of filter we could do for the "romantic" scene, it entirely depends on how over the top we'll be with it:

There are some lights above that need to be removed and designs on the posters to be laid out.

 Now that I had a good idea of the lighting I was able to concentrate on the texturing that we wanted. 

Changed the grating floor to a smaller, diamond shaped texture and reduced reflectivity.

Added a rusted brass texture to the machinery.

To differentiate between the boxes "UP" lettering added to them. Small screws were also added to the rollers on the conveyor belt so when animated a sense of movement is given.

"Valentine's" posters added.

Lighting touched up slightly and handed over to add the characters into the scene.

Narrative: Female Character UV - Starting

After Scarlett refined the female character it was pass back to me to UV, there are just some left over bits to touch up on the hair which will be done in the morning ready for the next step.

Narrative: Female Character Head Model

Narrative: Character Orthographics

Narrative: Male and Female Character Design Development

After getting together the four of us discussed what we wanted for the characters in our animation. My main idea for the male characters was a squarish design and for the female more circular (I looked at couples such as Carl and Ellie from Up for inspiration). 

Now that I had a decent idea of how I wanted these characters to look, I worked on them digitally to make it easier to adapt the style for the both of them.

Narrative: Origami Crane idea

In our rough script we have one of our characters trying to get the attention of his colleague in various ways and in the end makes and origami crane, it drifts over to her and ultimately he finally gets her attention.

I had a quick thought in regards to the whole origami crane sequence for our story. There's a legend about making 1000 origami cranes to make your wish come true (Senbazuru), so instead if it being one crane and getting picked up by a draft, maybe we could have origami cranes trickling down the conveyor belt to the girl? (We obviously won't do a thousand since that's a lot of work to do, but it would get the idea across?)

Here's a rough sketch of what I mean, and this would also make her finally look at the other character after all of his attempts?

Narrative: Initial Character Ideas

Since the three of us agreed that cardboard boxes would be a good idea to incorporate into our designs in some way I did few sketches.
I wasn't sure how literal we wanted to be so made a few cardboard characters:

I also did a quick stylized human character to go along with it, inspired by the Animal Crossing art style:

Scarlett, Megan and I all agreed that we wanted to work more on the stylized human style for our character rather than literally being a cardboard box. We plan to play around using cardboard textures on our characters/environment.

Narrative: Environment Research

Our new narrative follows two characters working in a valentines card factory. One of the characters is bored of their work and the other is in love with them and tries to get their attention in various ways incorporating our quote "actions speak louder than words". 

Since our narrative has gone down a different route, and we have a clearer idea of the type of factory we're going to have this animation centered around, I started doing some research of what to expect in a card printing factory.

This video is a very good reference of the type of machinery we would be expected to model. Its probably pretty helpful when it comes to where we want the two characters to be interacting.

Fig.1 Xerox igen4

Fig.2 UV Coater

Narrative: Ideas and Style Inspiration

"In the Factory"
"Actions speak louder than words"

The first thing that came to mind for me was an indistinguishable type of environment. Factories have order, an unchanging routine. So if we were to go down this route, what type of narrative would we want to go with?

The few things I've thought of at this point are things like going against the system, breaking the cycle. 

This is just the basis of the type of idea I have for the narrative so it needs a lot more research and development on my end. For now I wanted to show some examples of the type of idea I have in regards to both an indistinguishable environment and going against the system.

This animation has been a favourite of mine for a few years now with how it addressed the monotony of school and its unbreakable routine. I thought it was a good example for my idea with its indistinguishable characters and breaking the cycle.

Another example of breaking the cycle and going against the system. She mentally beats her job which is centred around this statue, and literally beats it by finally walking away from it.