This week we had our first meeting as a group, where we established our role within the projects and the concept behind it. We first confronted the two briefs from both courses (MA 3D Computer Animation and MA Virtual Reality) and we shared some ideas on the narrative of the project since we know that it should be structured as an immersive group media prototype based on an adaptation of a cartoon which in our case would be the comic “False knees” by Joshua Barkman. We after agreed before our next week weekly meeting we should research into the comedic genre and will argue how this genre reflects in our adaptation through the characters, storytelling, content, design, technique and style. The author often features creatures found in Ontario, such as squirrels, birds, racoons, however we are going to include in the virtual reality environment some Seagulls since they are notoriously considered to be as an aggressive species of birds and many animations are featuring them, moreover the author has made some comic sketches we could use to get some inspiration create our own sketches and puns.
Us from the MA 3D Computer Animation will work on both the characters, the seagulls, and environment concept, development, modeling, rigging and texturing and the members from the Virtual Reality course will work on the development of the virtual reality environment first concentrating on the script writing in Unity showing us also how it would work (we planned a session were they would show us how to “move” within this environment to to get a better understanding on how to include the 3D models in it. We are all included in the research of the comedic genre. I think that the collaboration within this two fields can be very interesting and that all together we can archive something innovative and original.
I will try to find some examples of previous animations including seagulls or birds in general to get inspiration from as well as reading some comedy sketches from the author itself so that I can create a mood-board out of it. We agreed that the narrative should include two main seagulls with distinctive personalities since that in comedy genre a “duet” dynamics is really functional such as the famous comedic duo of Laurel and Hardy where Laurel would play the clumsy, childlike friend to Hardy’s pompous bully features. The person playing and having the control in the virtual reality environment word be living the experience in first person impersonating an actual bird witnessing the puns next to the other birds at their same levels.
Esme and I tried to think of some narrative coming up with the script involving the two birds in different environments: we thought of some plot set in the city of Brighton since we can the seaside and the pier settings as well as the city one were in the last few years has been largely populated by seagulls. We are also going to create some storyboards and animations out of it to better visualise our Animation Process. We thought that also some PreVis animation and scene settings planning may help for the visualisation process and to see how it would work within the environment of VR.
In our meeting we agreed on sharing all our ideas on a platform to get the update from everyone’s development which is Miro a digital whiteboard that makes it easy to collaborate with others. The software allows you to create notes and designs, move things around, and communicate through embedded video calls or online chats.
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOTsXnB8=/?invite_link_id=529926724090
Esme and I, since we are from the same course and will work on similar tasks for this project, we thought it might be useful to have a pallet page to share our progress.
https://padlet.com/esmeduncan99/kc04ozilhwg9bs8q