I have now started to build test jungle scenes with the foliage I created in Maya. I am aware that because so much foliage is needed I could quickly incur a massive poly-count so have got to try and create a filled-out jungle with depth whilst being careful not to over fill it.
When I create the final scenes I will ensure the camera is placed exactly where it needs to be based on the direction of the shot. So anything that is in the camera frame will be trimmed to try and save render times.
Below: First of all I created a small jungle scene and experimented with the colours. I wanted to do a traditional looking jungle of greens and browns. Then I tried changing the leaves using colours similar to those in the book, Where The Wild Things Are (1963). After doing this I added a post to the ADMP Facebook page and asked fellow students to comment on which colour scheme they preferred.
Below top: a test render – normal colours.
Above bottom: the colour test render I created.
Below: some of the comments that I received back.
More people than I expected liked the weird and wonderful colours. I am not sure yet which I prefer.
After finding a copy in my son’s bedroom I have now read the classic children’s book Where The Wild Things Are: by Maurice Sendak (1963). I also watched the the 2009 movie adaption in order to get a feel of the strange world/environment created for the story. The movie did however seem a little lost and the environment in it didn’t seem to follow the style seen in the book. In fact the movie seemed a little dysfunctional, and although I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, the story just didn’t seem to transition well from book to screen.
The things that struck me the most from the book were the transition in which the main character Max’s bedroom morphs into an imaginary forest in which he becomes immersed, and the colour pallet, which wonderfully uses shades of blue and orange for plant life as well as more traditional colours we’d expect to see in a forest/jungle. Although the environments consisted of simple shapes, the palette gave the book its own magical feel,these are things that I would consider carrying over to our animation providing they would work with our concept.
What’s extremely interesting about the book however is that the story stems from the main character Max being sent to bed for being disrespectful to his mother. Max then appears to channel his rage into creating this imaginary world in which he has total control and his able to manipulate strange wild beasts in order to become their ruler. Despite being a children’s book the story has quite a dark and emotional meaning to it.
In 2012, in an article about the book and it’s author, Mikaela Conley stated “In just 10 sentences, Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” illuminated not only the protagonist Max’s imagination, but also rage, a reaction to a mother’s emotional absence and the overall darker, and neglected, parts of a child’s psyche.”
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(Fig.1.) Melissa Musik, Not noted. TCC Reads: Where The Wild Things Are By Maurice Sendak [online]. The Catholic Catalogue.com. Available at: http://thecatholiccatalogue.com/tcc-reads-where-the-wild-things-are-by-maurice-sendak/. [Accessed 21 February 2016].
So now that the project is back on track, and we have a definitive idea based on the survey results, I have picked up where I left off creating jungle leaves and plants for the animation.
In past projects I have only built plant life or foliage in Maya by using alpha’s. These are single polygon planes with a 2D image projected onto them. The image contains an alpha channel which masks the polygon out, leaving only the image of the plant/leaf showing. This gives the illusion that the plant is free standing, and is a method that dramatically reduces poly-count. It is particularly effective when developing games, and helps prevent them from becoming too memory heavy.
Because we are creating a a video animation we don’t have to optimize in the same way we do when making a game, therefore we can use more polygons to make the animation look pretty. Despite this luxury we cannot become too complacent because we have to consider render times nearer the end of the project.
Below: work in progress. Building leaves proved to be difficult, however I am very happy with the progress I have made. I painted the textures in Photoshop and then used Quixel’s NDO to draw my own normal maps. Once I had imported the textures into Maya I added the normals and used them to create bump maps for the textures. This gave the textures contours and depth. It also effected how light connected with the surface of the textures.
Below: from flat to shaped, I used the soft select tool in Maya to shape the leaves and make them appear to drape.
Below: a slide show that shows the process of texturing.
The results of our survey are now in. We had 12 responses and some interesting answers, but which of our two ideas was the most popular?
As per the below screenshot from the survey results, the idea with the young boy adventuring through his make believe jungle world was the most popular. But the results were closer than we had originally anticipated, which led to some interesting discussions between Jamie and myself.
Below: the results
I initially said that because the results were closer than we expected them to be we really needed to consider whether or not to go with the cow idea. Jamie raised a good point though, and in some of the research he has done its very prominent that if young children are interested in something, be it a concept, a story or film etc. their mothers are usually likely to be interested and will want to share in the experience with them.
Many of the answers from the survey indicate that this is truly the case, and responses very often showed that mothers were considering their children when deciding which of the ideas they preferred. At no point were any of the mothers told that target audience were children. As a result of this we decided to choose the child’s story.
It’s no secret that myself and Jamie wanted to go with our idea of the boy in his adventure land, partially because of the challenge it presented, but also because it seemed so easy for parents and children to relate to. It isn’t the most original idea but sometimes a lot can be said for using a proven formula. I have gathered a number of YouTube links to popular commercials that all show children, and in some of them, young adults in their own imaginary worlds. Although I couldn’t find any that had entirely the same concept as ours, there are many similarities in the commercials that I have gathered below. So, despite our preferred idea not being completely original, could we consider that it is already tried and tested?
Our idea of the cows and the bulltender may be much more original but sometimes original ideas aren’t necessarily the best received by an audience. The movie industry is a perfect example of this. Hollywood is currently churning out reboot after reboot and often long awaited sequels are using the exact same template as their predecessors simply because its a proven formula. This doesn’t make it wrong as in many cases it’s what fans want and these movies are often very well received by audiences and critics a like.
Rebooting sells?
Recent hit movies Star Wars The Force Awakens (2015), Jurassic World (2015) and Mad Max Fury Road (2015) are all perfect examples of this.
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Scroll over image (Fig order for references).
Kayti Burk stated in 2015 that “The Force Awakensexists at the intersection of two categorizations: the sequel and the soft reboot. This is a pop culture intersection that has been getting some serious play lately. (Think Jurassic World or Mad Max: Fury Road.)”
At the other end of the spectrum there are more original films like Tomrrowland (2015). In a 2015 article titled ‘Tomorrowland’ Exposes Hollywood’s Originality problem, Brent Lang tells how Dave Hollis, Disney’s distribution chief, quoted “‘Tomorrowland’ is an original movie and that’s more of a challenge in this marketplace,”.
So, originality vs the proven formula – it will be interesting to see what what our survey results come back with.
Below: A selection of commercials gathered from YouTube.
funnyraptorex, 2014. BEST COMMERCIAL EVER!! Nike Football – Winner Stays ft Ronaldo, Neymar, Hulk, Rooney, Iniesta etc[online]. YouTube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv09DRd4lsM. [Accessed 12 February 2016]
GameNewsOfficial, 2015. STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT – Live Action Trailer (starring Anna Kendrick)[online]. YouTube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoOYNKLH51A. [Accessed 12 February 2016]
Over the past couple of days myself and Jamie have put together an online survey through the website Survey Monkey. The survey asks the target audience (mothers of young children) which of our two ideas they prefer. We have included a basic image of both ideas complete with a small story synopsis for each. These are followed with questions and comments boxes which allow them to explain their answers.
I know a number of mothers with young children and have forwarded the survey onto them. We have already started getting results back. We are going to leave the survey for a couple of days and then collate the results which will inevitably help to decide which idea we are going to move forward with.
Below: a slideshow of the survey.
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Below: replies from some of the volunteers showing their willingness to take part in the survey.
Following on from the last blog, below is a bullet pointed plan of action. Jamie and I discussed what we need to do following our talk with Jools:
Cease all practical work and building of our current idea on a temporary basis;
Create a survey that includes a small synopsis on both our current idea with the boy in adventure land and the discarded bulltender idea. The purpose of this is to gain an idea of which concept the target audience prefers;
Send a link to the survey via Facebook chat to a number of mothers I know have young children, as well as non target audience;
Research the classic book Where The Wild Things Are: by Maurice Sendak (1963) along with the 2009 movie adaption in order to get a feel of the strange world/environment created for the story. As per Jools recommendation.
Okay, so last night I sat down for half hour to relax and take a break from project work, however my break was rudely interrupted! At around 11:20pm I had a Facebook message from Jamie explaining that he’d received feedback on his blog for this project from Jools, our Course Leader, which indicated that he wasn’t particularly impressed with what we had come up with so far.
This morning we had a chance to sit down with Jools to discuss the feedback that he’d left on Jamie’s blog.
Jools pointed out that the the idea we have isn’t particularly original and that it has been used in a many different ways many times before. He suggested that this was something we could exploit by researching similar stories/ideas that have been successfully used in TV and advertising over the years as proof that, despite it not being an original concept, it is a proven formula that does work. It would all depend on what proof we could find to back the claim and counter his argument. This is something that I will certainly be exploring.
Jumping the gun.
The nature of the work that myself and Jamie have decide to undertake for this project is is extremely time consuming and we were well aware of this when we made the decision to pursue it. Because of this we started research early and tried to get as much in as fast as we could in order to start the practical work and save time at the end of the project for animating and rendering. I am currently creating environment assets and plant life in Maya and Jamie is developing the character for the animation. But have we moved into building the animation too soon?
I had already interviewed my wife, Faye, about the project and gained her opinion on our ideas and so had it in mind that any more testing would be based on work in progress i.e. characters, environments and asthetics etc. Jools pointed out that this was a crucial error as we had not tested the story of our animation with nearly enough of the target audience. Jools also mentioned that he really liked our idea of having the two cows in a bar along with the bulltender and that we had written that idea off without even testing it with the target audience.
Time to re-evaluate!
I have to admit that initially the feedback received on Jamie’s blog was really demoralising, however, after sitting down with Jools today and hearing a few home truths it has opened our eyes as to how we can get so much more out of this project.
Today I have been collecting a number of different images to use as references for when I begin creating jungle foliage and plant life for our animation.
Below: I started by collecting a number of real jungle images. Scroll over image (Fig order for references).
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After this I started to have a look at images from Pixar’s Up (2009) and The Incredibles (2004). Both films have scenes that take place inside a jungle. Scroll over image (Fig order for references).
Today myself and Jamie presented our idea on a Prezi Presentation that we had put together as per the Assignment 2 brief. Below is a link to the finished presentation:
Last week Jamie created an animated storyboard whilst I put together the presentation using research we had both collated. Once finished I sent the Prezi to Jamie and we combined the two. We then both went over the presentation together to ensure we had covered the brief.
Today we presented to Andy Love and the other students in his tutorial group. As mentioned in a previous blog Andy is very hard to please and we were hoping that, having met with him a week or so before with our original ideas, we would be able to show him how we had acted on his advice and feedback. Andy didn’t comment all that much on the presentation itself but more on our idea, which he did appear to quite like. He mentioned that the idea of having two stories in our animation, (an adventure world and a real world) was a really nice touch, however he said that trying to emulate Pixar was far too much work for the two of us – their movies have thousands of people working on them!
We tried to make it clear that Pixar was an inspiration for our animation and that we were never out to achieve the technological levels that Pixar do within their movies in the time that we had. However we pointed out that when you look at other animation studios and their movies, the majority of them are all based on the style that Pixar originally created. Despite this they have all evolved and have their own look, we are just looking to do the same with our animation.
Our presentation had a nice animated storyboard embedded in it, created by Jamie, based on the original storyboards we sketched out together. By doing this we thought we gave a clear preview of what we were trying to achieve. Andy Love did complement the storyboard however, because it wasn’t quite complete, he said he was still none the wiser as to how the finish animation would look or advertise A2 Milk. We did explain our idea for the end of the animation and told him we have yet to script the advertisement of A2 Milk.
Below: The animated storyboard from the presentation.
Nicky Martin 
