Post 23 - Initial Animation: The Narratvie

I have ironed out the basic plot of this animation. 

Shot  One
Essentially the animation starts in the middle of a battle, where a simple last resort objective must be fulfilled. The 'human' character (protagonist) has the objective of reaching a lever labeled 'SELF DESTRUCT' and initiating the process. This is located in the center of the scene and much of the plot revolves around this spot. The camera will pan and rotate, showing the robot (enemy) character on the other side of the war torn environment. The robot will be patrolling the surroundings (possibly in the search for the protagonist). shot one shows both characters, the lever and that they are armed with the same rifle. 

Shot Two
The human runs for the lever. He runs down some steps, where the camera simply pulls out from his facial expression and rotates to see him running for the lever. 

Shot Three
He is spotted by the robot, who then takes several steps, kneels to take aim and fire. 

Shot Four 
A brief shot, featuring the protagonist reaching the lever, pausing for a moment before initiating a 'SELF DESTRUCT' sequence. This will feature several facial expressions from the rushing towards the lever to just before pulling it. 

Shot Five 
Slight pan, then front view of the robot. It fires the gun and the camera follows the bullet across the scene. The bullet hits the human when a slow motion 'death' sequence is shown (hopefully showing an understanding of key framing in relation to timing and movement). This rotates aroun the character until he hits the ground. 

Shot Six 
Shot from a low angle with the dead human character in the foreground and shows the robot in the background throwing it's gun the ground (slight panning to establish the scene. Just as this happens, a projectile falls from sky, hits the planets surface and causes a huge explosion, which engulfs all in the scene. The robot will be shown to acknowledge this with its arms in the air and will be engulfed just before the main character. This will be shown using artificial 'camera shake' and will grow in strength as the explosion wave gets closer to the camera. This is where the scene will end.

In total, the animation will be made up of six short sequences. Two options which will be considered for this are as follows:

1) Uses different cameras for each sequence, render them out in different clips and then edit them in a video/audio editing application. This would allow for several versions of the scene to be saved out and different scenes to be managed in each file. In turn, this would allow for a smaller time-line and a more bite size structure to the work flow.

2) Use the same scene/file and camera and create different sequences by having the end of one sequence at key frame 100 and the beginning of the second sequence at key  frame 101, thus creating the illusion of an edited video. This would mean that a much longer, single time line would need to be worked on, requiring the need to stretch, shrink and scroll the time line.

After looking into both methods, I have decided to opted for option two. Although this means that I will need to navigate across a much longer time-line, I believe that this will make it easier to manage the scene by using one camera, does not require a separate program to edit the clip/s, and means that all movements and assets will be in the same file. This will keep the whole project within 3ds Max.


The next post will show this shot by shot using several screen grab images.