Blog 2

Week 2 has been a little hectic. We received information from our teacher that we needed to come up with 3 stories and get approval on one of them, this lost us a lot of time and pushed us back as we needed to halt our current story and come up with 2 other polished ones. After a struggle to make 2 other stories of same quality as the one we had, we finally got approval for the story we were working on, as it was the most polished one and had the most work done for. We refined the story and prepared our presentation for the upcoming Wednesday. I ended up making some character sketches for the raccoon and how he would look like, we decided to give him a cyborg arm to add a more cyberpunk feel to the story, it also played a huge part in the second plot point of the story. We were planning to have the raccoon find the cyborg arm and put it on, he then clicks a button on the arm which results in a mini toy rocket to shoot out of it and hit one of the magnet crane machines in the area. The crane gets angry, picks up the raccoon’s RV and throws it into the crusher. We were aiming big with this project because we had a lot of modelling to finish, lots of trash and population had to happen because a junkyard is a messy place. At first we planned on using alphas to make the mountains of trash look like a pile of junk but it would take away from the overall aesthetic of the place. When we presented the idea to our teachers, it was apparent that our plot was a little disfunctional, we wanted to make the teddy bear a big part of the raccoon’s life and we didn’t know how to do that without stretching the story out. We had to change so many things in the story we just ended up scrapping the whole thing and coming up with another story. It took us a couple of days to come up with something we can use, we decided to go with a still-life story because our team consisted of modellers and no animators, so we tried to aim for something visually stunning. We came up with a story that included gems and crystals, rendering those with just enough light sources would make for an amazing environment. We went with a cave and crystal animals, they would fight for a specific gem that was a life source for these creatures and would end up killing each other. The story sounded interesting to the team and we were excited to carry it out, so we decided to pitch it. When we did. The feedback we got is that our teacher wanted some sort of monster or humanoid creature in the story, whether it be a troll, reaper or golem. We didn’t really want to add any humans but we then decided to add a troll, as they are known to protect things in their areas. We did some work but realized we were overwhelming ourselves with work, we wanted a crystal cave, a troll, a human/hunter and lots of skeletons. So we waited until our class with our teacher to clear things out.