Design Bible Explained

Back again! In case you hadn’t guessed yet I’m having a bit of a blogtastic week. Today I’m going to revisit and explain my design bible which was rather hastily posted at the beginning of December so Andy could see it. I’m reposting it here to save you having to find the old post because the kind of nice considerate person I am.

I will be honest, the bible was cobbled together at the last minute and became more of an exercise in editing together bits of artwork and footage rather than explaining anything, but nevertheless it does occasionally hint at bits of information that might be useful to any perspective lakies I happen to stumble across. Since I have now resolved to not use any extra help, apart for sound design and comping the bible is pretty useless but it does sort of illustrate what I want to do and how I am going to do it, I think.

The title for my epic: Boobs and Violence is a working title but is sums up the content and my general “if I’m going to fail I’m going to fail as spectacularly as possible” attitude, so I might keep it.

First in the bible we encounter the animatic, this has since been edited and now flows a bit better but the basic storey line remains pretty much the same. (The changes I have made will be discussed at greater detail in a later post). I’m going to deliberately keep what happens in the animatic pretty open to allow as much scope as possible for improvisation. As of yet there is no scratch track – Georg has kindly offered to play penny whistle for me, my plan is to use this as foley for the piper and as a backing track in some other sections. The rest of the sounds will just be provided by foley.

Right, the creatures have developed from puppy like things to happy little blobs with teeth. A more detailed account of their development will be posted soon, for the time being I am going to talk about animating them. When I first started animating them I found that after a while they would start to develop a head, which although it looks nice is a right pain to re-sculpt. To solve this the model just needs to be picked up occasionally and re-rolled into a ball, you can get away with an amazing amount of jumps from one pose to the next, so its not too difficult to re-position them it on set and it be noticed.

The eyes are very, very important, infact, most of the character’s expression comes from the eyes and very limited movement of the body. One thing I didn’t mention in the bible was that the eyes do have a tendency to move up the body till they sit on top of the head, this is BAD AND WRONG as you can then see through them. This can be avoided by keeping the eyes roughly central on the blob. And of course we have the beauty of the blob, quite possibly the nicest thing to animate ever. If the model gets into a bit of a dodgey looking pose it can simply be re-rolled into a blob and allowed to roll away, consider it a get out of jail free card.

And so we move onto the piper herself. The key with this character it to exaggerate everything, nothing is subtle; the bigger and more whacked-out looking the pose the better. She also has various aspects such as her fingers and the feather in her hat, which trail behind her and generally flop about a lot, hopefully making her look a bit uncoordinated. And of course we have he most rather ample assets, courtesy of Holly and Georg, these are going to have minds of there own and are going to bounce around all over the place. I think I need to do a lot of in depth research into this in order to get a good realistic bounce.

Then there is the set, it is currently mocked-up out of card and I’m happy with the dimensions and the forced perspective look I was going for. The rough layout is going to be constructed out of foam board, and then I will just stick random stuff on it till it looks right.