Film Meeting Notes

L e p o r i d a e T a l e

G R O U P M E E T I N G L O G

First Group Meeting

[ Next Meeting ]

9th October 2008

Find out everyone's strengths and weaknesses work out the best way to break up the project

Steven
Strength:	Weakness:
Modelling UV Mapping Texturing Skinning Compositing Lighting Matte Painting Sound Editing Websites	Animation Special Effects Rigging Z-brush

Glen
Strength:	Weakness:
Modelling Texturing Lighting Animation Compositing	Special Effects Rigging Z-brush Sound Editing Skinning UV mapping Sound Editing 3DS MAX

Sam
Strength:	Weakness:
Animation Lighting Compositing Painting Concept Works	Special Effects Rigging Z-brush Sound Editing Skinning UV mapping Sound Editing Modelling

Glen is an exchange student trained in different software to what we use in this course so we need to find out what he can do while remaining compatible with the project workflow

The main 3d application we use is 3d studio while glen has been trained in Lightwave so we will need to make sure all the content made in other programs is easily imported and usable with the rest of the assets in the project

This will be a matter that needs to be checked on during every step of the project

The story, go over the current storyboard and tried to identify problem areas

At the moment the story seems to be overcomplicated for a short film, so to explain the story the film would require about 30 seconds or narration at the start that we decided would not be suited towards a short film that needs to grab peoples attention quickly while this would likely lose half the audience before the film had even started properly.

We will look into simplifying the story, so it can get straight to the animation as quick as possible without leaving the viewer feeling confused

Visual style, characters

The current designs for the film have a clear anime look to them

There are 2 potential problem areas with the current character designs, the main enemy character is a gorilla style robot, one of the most memorable films from last year also featured a very similar looking robot which i think will draw to much comparison, we need to look into giving its own unique look

The main characters face is very comparable to some well known dragon ball type characters, it would be good to try and work on some alternative looks

Environment

Current environment designs seem to work quite nicely, its quite an open area which will combine matte paintings with modelled objects, at the moment only the shape is planned out and due to its scale we need to work out how to detail the environment to keep it interesting for the viewers and keep a feeling of scale

Some of the columns feature flags which are currently hanging directly from the columns, we may want to use dynamic cloth to animate these so it may be best to move them away from the colombs a little to minimise potential collision issues.

Dialogue

It is currently planned for the film to have dialogue, this could be in English or Japanese along with subtitles we identified some of the pros and cons for each language.

Japanese:
      pro - may be more fitting to the style of the film
      pro - can help disguise voice acting flaws for an english audience
      con - requires subtitles that will make it harder to focus on the animation itself
      con - will take extra time editing and timing sub titles

English
      pro - no subtitles
      con - english voice may not blend with the style
      con - any weakness in the voice actor will be very obvious to the audience

Tasks to work on before next meeting

Focus on getting storyboard ready for upcoming class presentation

Work on new concept images to show alternative / updated designs for the character issues identified during meeting

Work on concept images for the environment to show more specific detailing

Get all the current planning work scanned in so everyone in the team has their own copy

Get the websites ready for the project, focus on getting blogs and group meeting notes in place first

All come up with some alternative names for the film so we can pick the best

Second Group Meeting

[ Next Meeting ]

14th October 2008

After meeting with Kevin it was clear the story even in its shortened form was still overcomplicated and would be extremely hard to explain to an audience so we decided to look into adding shots to the story specifically to explain the story in a direct simple way.

Areas to look into:

Character motivation - why is he fighting

The world in the story is split into 2 main sections, the ruined dead earth and a sky castle, the castle is draining the energy from the planet so the hero is there to stop this from continuing by confronting the castles king.

To help show what the castle is doing there will be a an added effect of an energy beam / pulse running upwards from the planet to the base of the castle.

To help explain what side the hero is from, in the opening shot you will see him on the ground as a silhouette facing the castle, to put across the idea that he is from the planet and heading towards the castle.

There will be a shortened narration sequence between this shot and the jump to inside the castle to explain the story a little, this section will be used as a spacer to give time for the character to reach his destination so it does not seem that he suddenly jumped a huge distance in an instant.

The king

In the original version of the story the king had been corrupt and was encased inside a robot shell, that was controlled by a dark spirit. The hero fights to save him by destroying this shell that has taken over and turning the king back to normal but this required making 2 models for the king and the second model would only be shown for a couple of seconds at the end of the story.

After some discussion of options we decided to remove the king character and focus on the spirit and the robot that it controls to defend itself.

Before the spirit only played a background role but now the spirit will replace the king so will have more of a purpose in the story without spreading the story between lots of separate characters with smaller parts.

This helps keep the story clearer and also reduces the workload so more work can go into getting the important characters looking as good as possible.

The spirit - Character Adjustments

As the spirit character is a larger focus now she could use some adjustments to make it a bit more interesting.

We decided to go with the idea of making her hair into a spider web of power cables that run around the environment.

Extra end shot to help explain the story

To help clarify the fact the castle was draining the life from the planet we decided to add a end shot similar to the first one showing the castle at a distance, but the world starting to recover, maybe more colourful or some plant life.

Alternative weapon for main character

Explore different designs for the staff

Additional Shot

From our time with Kevin discussing the story we felt it would be useful to show the main character had to fight his way in rather than just walk right up to the throne room so to show this the shot that jumps to inside the castle will start with dropping to the floor as if they have just been defeated, these could be just silhouettes with a sword slash effect to avoid having to model extra characters for 3 seconds of film but as the story all takes place in one main room we would need to model some broken robot parts to leave on the ground otherwise it would seem their bodies had vanished from the room.

Dialogue

We want to keep the dialogue to a minimum, with the new adjustments more of the story is explained visually so we want to keep the dialogue to a single sentence at the start narration to set things up while looking at the castle at the start, and then a short conversation before the main fight between the hero and the spirit to clarify the situation to the audience without going into a long conversation, we need to work out specifically what the characters could say to each other as clearly and with as few words as possible to minimise lip sync work required, voice acting and to avoid a long drawn out scene with little going on.

Third Group Meeting

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28th October 2008

We had another tutorial session to go over our project progress so decided it would be a good time to have another meeting to discuss the suggestions and see how we want to impliment them.

Intro Sequence

Our extra shot at the start of the story showing the character looking towards the castle will be expanded to try and explain things even more. We have decided to have a camera pan showing the world go from healthy to dead as the camera looks closer to the location of the castle, this makes it clearer that the planet should not be this way, or was not already this way but is it direct result of what the castle is doing.

As the pan reaches the point where you can see the castle, there will be a silhouette forground with a dying flower and the character will enter and pickup the flower that will then turn to dust in his hands and disapear into the wind.

Titles

We were also working out where in the story to put the title sequence, there seem to be two suitable points we could do this, in the new pan accross the environment, or between the shot of the character looking towards the castle to him fighting as he enters the throne room.

It would be good during the pan as this will be a fairly slow moving shot at the start and will look good just overlaying the titles. If we put the title sequence at the second point it has the benefit of padding out the timeline to allow time for the character to go from the ground to the castle, so it doesn't seem like hes traveled there in an unrealistically quick time, but if we put it into this point we will need to create a stand alone title sequence to put between these shots.

Queen Ending Scene

We have also decided to adjust the ending, when the queen gets knocked out the castle instead of flying up into the sky she will just fly into the distance and fall in the background in a cartoony roadrunner style trail, very comical but this seems to work a bit nicer.

It was also decided it may be best to have the final blow hitting the queens body rather than the face, but this will likely depend on the final design of the character, it just needs to make sure it hits a spot that connects and would carry the queen along with it.

We also looked into a potential alterative having the final blow as a javlin style attack rather than a rocket, if we couldn't work out the effects needed to get the rocket looking right, a smoke trail, flames etc. A javlin style throw of the staff could work without requiring any extra effects to look right, but this may lose some of over the top power / comic value we need for the final scene to work how we want, but works as a potential backup if needed.

Fight Sequence

It seems during the fight sequence between the robot puppet its easy to forget the focus is really about defeating the queen and the robot is just an obstacle towards this goal, so during the fighting we need to make sure the queen plays a bigger part instead of just sitting in the background while all this is going on.

The original plan was to make it clear the robot was just a puppet by having the queen connected by a power cable to the robot itself but this may cause complications with the animation so we are looking into alternative methods for making it clear the robot is just being controlled by the queen.

Related to this issue we need to work out how to add more emotions into the queen character, with the mask covering her face we are limited with what we can do with this character so we will look into minimal movements focusing around the eyes to show her emotionals. It was noted sleeping beauty could be good reference material for this as one of the characters has a lot of focus around portraying emotion with the eyes.

Fourth Group Meeting

[ Next Meeting ]

8th November 2008

We did have fourth meeting before this but it was just a review and continuation of previous discussions so this is considered the next proper meeting.

This meeting was focused around the upcoming animatic deadline so we wanted to look into getting the storyboard sorted.

Animatic Timings

We acted out the film and used a stopwatch to work out rough times for the main shots.

Times
SHOT:	DISCRIPTION:	TIME:
01 02 03 04 05 06	Environment Pan Character walk in Pick flower stand holding flower character looks up Look at castle, zoom	15 s 03 s 04 s 07 s 02 s 04 s

Note - We decided to do a zoom in steps for this shot so we need to add extra pannels to show this

Times
SHOT:	DISCRIPTION:	TIME:
07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15	Titles SFX, slash Points weapon Close up talking camera pan to robot mid robot, reveal queen - dialogue Queen close up - leave or i will... Main character - please stop... queen - do you think...	06 s 02 s 03 s 01 s 03 s 05 s 02 s 04 s 09 s

NOTE - Shot 15 is too long, needs camera movement, maybe pan or extra shot during dialogue

Times
SHOT:	DISCRIPTION:	TIME:
16 17 18	Main character - you are wrong... queen close up - guard destroy... robot activates, jumps	12 s 2 s 3 s
Total time so far: 1:27s

The next portion of the film is a fight scene with lots of rapid shots, we decided it would be best to work out this by eye, we estimate this section to be around 30 seconds long.

Times
SHOT:	DISCRIPTION:	TIME:
	Rabit falls to ground Queen orders robot to finish - kill him robot jump robot in air rabbit sees an opening aims weapon robot bum shot	2 s 1 s 2 s 1 s 1 s 3 s 1 s

NOTE - We decided to adjust the order of the frames at this point to show the robots face right after hes been shot with a rocket up the bum to show his reaction, as the current order didn't seem to have a strong as impact and this way should add to the humor.

We also decided to have the robots head get stuck on the end of the rocket as it shoots through him so we could have a shot of his face with the stupid expression flying towards the queen.

Times
SHOT:	DISCRIPTION:	TIME:
	Robot face shot rocket going through robot queen pov, rocket coming towards queen gets hit energy overload - energy forms a ball explosion, rabit shields eyes particles raining down on the planet, queen falling in background end credits	1 s 2 s 1 s 2 s 6 s 2 s 10 s 10 s
Total time so far: 2:15s

Combining the 2:15 timed out shots with the 30 second estimate for the fight we are looking at a rough time of round 2 mins 45 seconds. We are quite happy with this time as it fits within the 2 - 3min range we have been aiming for.

Dividing the task

Now we have this worked out we decided the next things to focus on were putting together a animatic using these timings and the current version of the storyboard that we have.

Steven - Write up meeting notes, put together the first version of the animatic using current scans and timings. Then work on getting the sounds.

Sam - Work on drawing higher quality pannels were needed, draw missing pannels where we decided extra images would be required to explain a shot fully and work on additional pannels for the new story changes we have just agreed on.

Glenn - Work on title sequence and work on additional images / concepts needed for the presentation.

Mini meeting [5th Meeting]

We will meet up on monday to look at the animatic and work on refining the timing exactly how we want it and work on the timings of the fight sequence and replace old pannels with any updates that have been done.

Sixth Group Meeting

[ Next Meeting ]

30th Dec 2008

Our next big task to focus on is the production portfolio so we decided to meet up to work out a checklist for all the main tasks and distrubute them between the group.

Portfolio Tasks
STEVEN	SAM	GLENN
Clay model Colour / Mood boards Personal research Pipeline Design production schedule	Previs layout Storyboard layout Personal research FX tests	Branding Concept layout Screenplay layout Personal research Title sequence

This may not be a complete list of what will be in the end portfolio but this seemed a good amount to get on with and once this is done we should meet again to review what has been done and then decide what should be done next.

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