Animatic: "Breaking News"
Intelligent life found in outer space! This historic event warrants a breaking news feature on Trafalmadore, a distant planet inhabited by intelligent robots.
The story
Imagine a world inhabited by intelligent robots that have never before seen organic life. To them, machines are the only form of life imaginable. Welcome to Trafalmadore!
Now imagine these intelligent machines stumble upon our planet and observe what is going on. It is easy to imagine that their perspective is so different that they might confuse our machines for the inhabitants of this planet, and we, the humans, are only here to support the machines. I asked myself: What would an intelligent extraterrestrial entity see if it had a look at us on Earth? Would it see the humans as intelligent beings that control machines to make life easier? Or wouldn't it seem as if we were the supporting "helper cells" for the machines?
Details
This is a result from the course "Communication with Sequence, Sound and Motion" that I attended during my semester abroad at the School of Architecture and Design, a department of KMUTT in Bangkok, Thailand.
The task was the design of a three minutes animated short on the topic of "science fiction" and its production up to the animatic stage. The kook had to be hand drawn, so 3D animation was not allowed. The project was an individual one (no group work allowed) and consisted of the complete production cycle up to the animatic:
- Story development and Storyboarding
To give my story a sense of believability I copied the style of a normal "breaking news" feature and the style of the very well known CNN-Logo for my "Trafalmadore News Network" TNN.
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- Graphics- and Character design
The following images of the main character's development illustrate this process quite well: I always started with rough scribbles to block out the form (image 1). Such a scribble is then digitized (with a scanner or camera) and cleaned of all shading (image 2). Then the outlines are traced in a vector drawing program which makes it very easy to adjust the lines to get the desired look. The final vector outline (image 3) is the printed out and the coloring is done by hand to produce the final result (image 4).
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- Sound recording and editing
Audacity was used for all audio related work. The speech was spoken and recorded by myself, which posed some practical problems mainly because I did not have access to a proper recording studio. To reduce background noise and echoing I had to switch off air conditioning and sit under a blanked - it is amazing how fast it gets unbearably hot under such circumstances! - Speech Visualization
The green lines in the robot's mouths moving in sync with the spoken audio was done with a very simple yet effective trick: I just recorded a screen video of a media player's audio visualization and used that in compositing as an animated texture on a plane. - Production of an animatic
Combining the still images from the storyboards and the recorded and edited sounds, the animatic shows the final timing of the story. The graphical part was produced in Blender by layering the separately developed graphical elements as shown in one of the screen shots. This meant a great deal of flexibility because changes in the layout or single elements could be done very easily.
Finally, soundtrack and video where combined in Adobe Premiere.
Random Fact
The alien planet Trafalmadore actually "exists" - it is the name of a fictitious planet in Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse five" (the Trafalmadorians in this novel kidnap two humans to study them in a kind of zoo).
Some work-in-progress impressions from the production phase:
