Category — Filmmaking

Okay, I’m trying to work out the basic dimensions of the space our first set occupies, so I slapped together a 12-second flyby video of what I have so far.

As you can see, very basic shapes at this point. Ignore the hideous colors.

That thing that’s sitting in the middle of the room? That’s our hero robot! Well… I guess you could call it a “low-poly” version of our hero. Anyway, I need him there so I can work out the scale of this room.

I’ve kind of backed off the idea of a “heavy industrial” look like I was contemplating earlier. The whole rusted, worn-out, dirty, used-appliance kind of style — ala Star Wars, etc — has been done to death and back again (oooh, that makes it zombie style! Cool…). Same goes for the “future retro” look, like you see in Robots or Meet the Robinsons. Bleah. Still mulling over the possibilities…

Any guesses what this room is yet? Any? No? Good! I like surprises — heh heh heh…

Okay, I’m at the point where I can look at the hero robot model’s design and say, “Meh, close enough…”. Seriously, though, I’m pretty happy with his appearance. A little more detail than before, nice rounded edges… yep, I think he’s good to go.

There’s a bunch of other robot designs I have already — they were put together a couple of years ago when I first took a crack at this thing. Those models look pretty good to me, so for now I’m going to leave them alone. Later on, I’ll need to teach them how to hold stuff. And how to eat. But not right now…

Next thing I want to tackle is our set. I have several quick rough sketches of some alternate designs, so it’s a matter of picking and choosing. I want an industrial, hard-edged look; a place for those working robots that are low on the food chain to congregate. What is this place? More on that at a later date…

Once I’ve made my design choice, I’m going to put together some rough POV models of my set and post them here. This is probably going to eat up a sizeable chunk of time, but I’m hoping to give you something to look at by the end of next week. After that, I’m going to do some initial staging…

Holy crap, this thing is actually moving forward!

After four months of annoying, irritating, fingernails-on-chalkboard-cringeworthy ink work, I’m down to my final two scenes (excluding titles and credits). Yayyy!! I’d love to say it’s been an enjoyable four months, but it hasn’t. Not even close.

Sad part is, I’ve been down this gruesome path before — looking through my post-project notes for Doing Good Deeds, there’s a paragraph that very clearly states inking with the Wacom sucks doodoo. Or words to that effect.

*insert forehead slap here*

Feel free to state the obvious. “Nice going, moron! Don’t you read your own notes? Or do you enjoy repeating stupid mistakes? It’s not like you’re young and have all the time in the world to do retarded crap like that.”

Whatever. I’ve already flogged that mule to death, so there’s no point in going over it again. I’ll just say that a week from today I’ll be in a coloring mode, and all this inking razzmatazz will be a fuzzy memory. Sometimes turning into a forgetful old fart has its advantages…

One of the things I need to be careful about when working my models is adding too much detail. I want the characters and sets to have a greater degree of detail than I used in Break Time, but there are limits to what POV-Ray can do, and while those limits don’t necessarily affect the robot models, they do affect the organic creature I plan on introducing in later scenes. Basically, I don’t want to pair up an exquisitely-detailed robot with a blockier, cartoonish alien sidekick — imagine something like Wall*E next to one of the bee models I have in my bee movies and you’ll get what I’m talking about…

Something I can do is round off those harsh edges on the model. A perfect 90-degree angle does not exist in the real world, so when the eye encounters one in the digital world, it tends to raise red flags. As you can see in the image above, I’ve got the claws nicely rounded now. In addition, our robot now has FINGERS! Sort of. A couple, anyway. We very well can’t scratch our cabooses without fingers, can we?

I finally got my markers in the mail… yayyy!!! Here are a couple of views of Larry with some color:

Neither color is quite the one I’m looking for — I want something between the two and lighter in tone. So, looks like another trip the art store…

It took all of five minutes to pencil, ink, and color each drawing. Scanning and a slight color correction didn’t take long at all. That means at least in principal the idea of making the drawings less computer-centric will speed things up considerably…