Friday 13 November 2015

Rational essay

Parody is the imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre used to create a more comical and exaggerated way of effect. Parody isn't something new, as it's been around for a fair amount of time and with the rise of social media and other sites like YouTube this has become part of culture and is seen practically all the time and is very well dug into pop-culture as a whole. Parody can be done in almost any way and can completely even change situations or even change a genre to a completely new one like Sci-Fi to western, love to comedy parody can completely change it. This is where my work falls into this situation with a really heavily angered and rage fuelled soldier joins the fight.

My early brainstorming and developments was focusing on what I should chose as my genre to parody first as this was going to end up being what I would stick with for the next full semester. After a short time of picking my top few favourite scenes I finally settled upon the Scarface’s “say hello to my little friend” scene, and soon quickly settled on a soldier in a sci-fi settling which I felt was working very well as a whole.

Overall throughout the designing phase and towards animation I always focused on a more semi-realistic look to what I was doing. As I mainly focused on the soldiers look to make him feel like a real person in a piece of Armor that makes sense when worn and applied to real life conditions to an extent, making the movements much more relatable while making him feel mobile. A lot of his mesh shapes are separate parts like upper and lower arms and legs and his body from waist to chest. This was made to allow movements to be made with ease and different areas showed different amounts of success. As an example the legs had the highest amount of movement with little stress on the mesh. Honestly as I came to the point of the UV texturing I knew what was needed and the two types of materials to be used. It gave the character what it needed to look like a soldier at the end.


During creation of the props, the gun was the first thing needed as the scene required some form of heavy weaponry to its real counterpart. As the use of a grenade launcher from Scarface inspired me to make several designs for heavy weapons and after several designs I settled with a rocket launcher, as this was very simple but an excellent way of showing off the explosive power from the movie. The area where the scene was going to be created was fairly simple from the beginning and didn’t require a lot of planning. As this was going to hold two areas. A large square room where the character would be situated and the corridor with a door where it would be needed in case I had planned anything else. Lighting didn’t come without its own problems. Yet however this was successfully overcome in a way that allowed the room to be fully illuminated from all corners of the room while keeping the lighting dark enough. This kept the rooms nicely lit to create a mood shift when being looked at. Finally the boxes and ammunitions were added as a last minute addition as I finally decided what the location was and it was a small ammo storage unit. The ammo was placed into the open crate being amazingly easy to make and came out very nicely at the end and even used it as the shell fired from the gun in the scene. Meanwhile for the boxes only three types where made all keeping the same textures in general, and ended up being a fairly nice addition.


The animation was planned originally to be very close to the story board but I personally found out through that this wasn’t going to happen with the props keeping most of the areas where the camera would be out of view and making it difficult. So my solution was to make the camera like actual security cameras and the well placed angling worked very well in my favour as it gave it an appeal to feeling you were actually a guard watching through the cameras and gave the soldier the perfect angles he needed to look appealing. The animation itself required the soldier to show expression through movement and to fire the gun at the door and this was the only thing kept on from the storyboard. After many words of advice from Keat I finally got the soldiers body to be moving in an effective and also slower pace, as originally the character was moving fairly fast in general with way too much movement.

With this all fully done it was finally time to do audio in After Effects. I kept the original audio and it was perfectly synced up to the clip. A very clean fit with little to no editing in general. A feature to make it feel like this was like looking out of a camera that was the use of TV static. Although this worked in the beginning it caused issues with the video but was quickly fixed by reducing the use and time of the static inference. Overall I’m very proud of how the animation went out, after all this being my first 3D film piece makes me feel proud of what I’ve achieved in the end.



By Zack Karai

Wednesday 11 November 2015

Sunday 6 September 2015

Wednesday 29 July 2015

storyboard



the current storyboard work so far

item concepts

the prop of choice is a future like gun of some sorts with heavy firepower as in the movie equivalent the main character brings some extra firepower to fight with. This being a grenade launcher attachment.

In my designs i tried three types of weapons, assualt rifle, cannon (carry based) and rocket cannon (shoulder based)  all designs share common traits within each other as their primarily huge for their class all looking towards the shooting from the shoulder type exculding the launchers which are shoulder mounted weapons

the assult rifle class guns are based closely off the movies prop with a heavy gun with a grenade launcher attachment this is under the concept of the weapon being used like it was a parody of the films weapon great for shooting from the waist.

the cannon (carry based) is simlar to the rifle in that it can be shot from the waist to a certain respect but its much bigger and way more powerful than that of a grenade launcher attachment and can be a snigle shot to multiple leaving a much more powerful impact on its targets

the final cannons (sholder based) is around the idea of going for a rocket launcher in a nutshell as powerful as its carry based counterparts or even more powerful in some respects this weapon makes fire power too the fullest in all respects and could lead the development of the desengs

color concepts

after early concpet work was finished i decided to pick out set colors for the soldiers armored uniform as it would be military standard and would be fairly distinguishable to know its a soldier in the first place. adding some greens/ greys help define this while the dark greys to blacks are mainly there as added feature like Kevlar body suite for the armor attachments. Colors like blues reds and purples are ideas to give him a bit more life to the character so its keeping him out of being a standard trooper and into a more unique noticeable character

Monday 27 July 2015

getting started



Blog: I've decided to chose the scene "hello my little friend" from Scarface a action genre, transforming it to a sic-fi genre. The iconic scene is based around a cocaine rage fueled Tony Montana with a death wish. As he fights off a score of hitmen, being a mafia leader and says one of the most well known quotes in movies as he starts to fight off hitmen in one awesome final stand. Which is the original scene based off while instead for my version of it in sci-fi with a future soldier thats really in for some payback with a bigger and much more powerful gun in some small space like a corridor.

The primary goals to achieve in character design is:
- achieve a futuristic look for the soldier
- a idea thats detailed yet fairly simple 
- make a fairly big gun thats futuristic also
- make him have a decent build cant truthfully be weak but dont want him to look seriously buff also
- make a stand out color like maroon while keeping greys and blacks
- keep his look intimidating 

So far ive decided the basics for the characters look based around likelihood of time period which is around 20 to 50 to even 100 years ahead from now in a nutshell to help with design and through several attempts have come up with a good idea of what to plan for this as a black Kevlar and some new type of strong metal/ carbon fiber materials to show modest protection and making him also very intimidating the helmet will be a challenge as it needs to show a concept of a menacing face behind it.

 honestly when i comes to referencing i couldnt really find the name of the artists but instead focused more on many random artists but the concept art relates alot to overall design as a whole like areas will have total cover like chest and lower legs while areas like upper legs and arms will have more plated protection as examples include call of duty ( advanced warfare and black ops 2 and 3), Doom ect where armor and weapons come in many shapes and sizes as a whole. some of these concepts will come later on when i make a reference to the ideas

the soldier would likely be put in very undesirable situations like most common soldiers and will want a bit of payback so maybe as a background coudl be a damaged area or a ship or space station where its time for some revenge to occur weapons could be some heavy duty weapon like a mobile artillary peice or a shoulder cannon to fit the era of his battle