Final Animatic, Film Shot List, VA + the demise of my hand

Animatic Pass 3 –

My animatic is now finalised! The only change was to move the boat at the start to intersect with the rule of the thirds so that there’s better focus.

---

Spent most of March working on the Virtual Anatomy (VA) project. I scheduled myself to have 1 week dedicated to the project to complete my part – retopology, UV Mapping, baking, and texturing. However, I had a lot of problems with the high poly meshes the medical artists gave me and a lot of baking issues too which was just annoying over anything. Spent most of my time redoing some of their high polys, then redoing my own topology to fix baking issues. Was a lot of back and forth which wasn’t fun and ended up having to work on this for 2 weeks + but I pushed to get this work done as people were counting on me, and the deadline was coming up with the work still needing to get implemented. Big thank you to Lipin though, who was doing another VA project and figured out how to get the correct web file format we needed.

---

As my animatic is finalised now, I decided to make a film shot list to have some organisation in this project. My injured dominant hand acted up because I used my hand every day to finish the VA project, so it was perfect time to do some written work to rest a bit.

Shot list:

While I was at it, I also created an asset list and character breakdowns. Although I had character breakdowns from last semester along with the script, I expanded on these. Taking Ymir, Sol and Mani, Skoll and Hati, and Hraesvelgr and writing what I like about concepts of them, ideas I’d like to continue and things I’d like to add.

I also started thinking about colour theory and how it could influence the story. For example, the start and end of the story exists in the ‘real world’ so could have cooler colours whereas the Norse Mythology stories exist elsewhere in a higher realm and could have a richer and warmer palette much seen in high fantasy concept art. For example, this concept by Matteo Bassini:

I looked at a lot of concept art at this time to gather ideas and inspiration to start thinking about doing concept art and design work for the film. I found a lot of examples that had interesting backgrounds that I’d like to continue into my concept. Here are some examples:

I think that because my film is very flat there needs to be visual interest which the backgrounds can add. Just a little bit more character.