Week 4

Week 4 was a whirlwind.

We welcomed our new team member, Jared, into the fold! He will be co-producing with Kristy and helping with storyboarding, editing, and voice direction, among the many other assorted tasks production will inevitably require along the way (such as writing this blog!). The welcoming party couldn’t last long, though, as the team scrambled to get ready for Quarters.

Quarterly Report

As we are now a quarter of the way into the semester, the ETC faculty visited the Sirena team in small groups to get a sense of what we’ve accomplished and what help we might need to hit our goals. To best illustrate this, we created a presentation highlighting the main progress we’ve made on art, story, technology, and pre-production.

We got a lot of valuable feedback from Quarters, and spent an hour as a team to process everything that was said. One thing we showed were the many character design concepts Muhammad came up with, to which several faculty members recommended we go with something semi-realistic, so as not to set the bar too high for either photo-realism or stylized art. Another recurring comment was that, to best distinguish our mermaid, we should be basing it off aquatic mammals rather than traditional fish. To that end, Niharika narrowed down her animation research to dolphins.

Tahiti’s Next Top Model

One of the major hurdles we faced from the outset is that nobody on the team has much character modeling experience. With a character-driven story like “Sirena of Guam,” solving this problem was critical to get anywhere. We set a deadline for the middle of the week to find and purchase a character model from the Internet. Our search led us to a few choices from Turbosquid, and our finalists were the following:

We proposed these two as options to our faculty instructors. They had a few reservations about the Athlete, as the images that Turbosquid provided had no visual evidence that the mouth opens, and had issues with the edge loops around knees and ankles. Otherwise we believed it was a good choice. The team was very excited about the Bride, but there was a major concern in that in all the photos, she wore high heels. This, of course, would not make sense in our Polynesian myth. We had no idea if the heels could be removed. We emailed Turbosquid’s support line, and crossed our fingers we’d get a response before our deadline.

Lo and behold, the shoes could come off!

With that issue put to rest, we decided on the Bride as our Sirena model. Of course, we will design her different clothing that will be authentic to the time and place of our story, so don’t expect a wedding at the end!

Staying the Course

In following up with some of our post-Quarters decision making, we set up another story meeting with Chris Klug. The previous draft he assisted us with had a number of additional characters to flesh out the story, but as we examined our scope it seemed like a less feasible structure. So, when he asked us each what we would most like to change, it was to cut back on characters. Hearing this, he was happy to listen to our ideas in terms of simplification and work with us on fitting the story into a ~1 minute runtime.

Something that we highly valued was providing some context or reason as to why Sirena becomes a mermaid, and this was a big point of discussion for us. Our next step is submitting him a storyboard of the transformation with timestamps so he can get a sense of how to add context before and after the scene.

On the technical side, Yikai continued his research and development into water simulation.

Meanwhile, Kristy kept building underwater seascape scenes in Maya so we would have a place to put Sirena.

Niharika moved on to lighting and caustics, which we learned from faculty will be important in making believable water on-screen.

Muhammad and Jared worked on the storyboards, and Muhammad also spent time developing a Mirror tool in Maya that will help showcase the reflective parts of water.

All in all, a lot of progress was made towards visualizing our transformation sequence this week. The team is eager to get into full production and start working in the animation pipeline!