CrAzY PaViNg FlOoR?

This was just a really quick post to ask you guys what you think about the floor of the foyer. I think crazy paving of some sort would be really stylish and simple. I included it in my 1st concept of the room if you remember? Anyhow, I started attempting it in maya, and realised I could just extrude the faces of the circular floor base, shape them, round them, etc. etc. Eithert that or model a single paving slab, make it funky and curved, and then dupe it up to create the floor? I could just alter the size and shape of each one slightly and then arrange them from the tuop view in maya? This may be easier than extruding and shaping each face? What you think?

CrAzY PiLLaR?

Hey guys, today I modelled the columns that will be everywhere in our mansion. Need touching up and maybe a slightly higher smooth, but other than that quite happy. Dave if you like, then we can use them for the front steps area? I'll just give you them on mon. What you think?

Final Character Concept

Simple, stylish and rich in colour. Here's our guy....















The guys agreed with me on the final design for our character, so I quickly conjured him up in photoshop this morning to give us an idea of how he would look in full colour. Im really pleased with him, as firstly he will be so simple to model, aswell as animate. I already know how I'm going to create the blendshapes for his mouth. He will only have about 4 or 5 different expressions, all of which will be simple rotates and scales of his mouth and eyes. Now we have his design we can include his face in decor around the rooms. It's all coming together.......

Remember this?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R6K6pXqkWY

Zafira Meriva UK 40'!

FOUND IT!

Style Guide

The group had a meeting with Jared earlier this week to discuss our progress so far. Jared helped us define the style our designs seem to be steering towards which is a combination of a 60's villa, a looney tune structure, and a tikki lounge! We have all designed our rooms full of curves, rounded edges, swirls, bending architecture, and bright colours. Below are some useful references to the style we have adopted....

60's Villa - resc

We want to capture the feeling of a luxury built villa, with its balcony's, fountains, pillars, arches, terracotta tiled roof, palm tree surroundings, blue sky etc. I also love the colours they are painted - simple pale pinks, oranges, creams or even just plain white are common villa pallets.


Looney Tunes

Jared picked up on the fact that my original foyer concepts contained traces of looney tune designs. Upon watching a few episodes (1 in particular in which daffy is relaxing in a villa pool) I realised the painted backdrops do have a resemblance to the sort of style we are after. They use bright block colours with simple gradient changes for shadow and depth. The buildings are usually distorted and are made up of jagged edges and bends. Swirls also feature alot in the decor and furniture. I really want to achieve this wacky look within our mansion.

Tikki Lounge

This is another style our designs reminded Jared of - Tikki Lounges. This is more of an inspiration for Phil, as he is designing the Swimming Pool area. The style fits in perfectly with the rest of the mansion because it has alot in common with our other style influences. It uses bright colours, chunky structures, wacky faces embedded into pillars, bendy architecture made from planks of wood and bamboo, aswell as swirls and wavy designs. I would love for our pool area to have a tikki feel. If nothing can be taken from this, then at least have tikki palm trees around the mansion!

De Blob

De Blob has always been our main style influence from the very beginning of this project. We love the simplicity of the environments, the rich colours, the wacky curved architecture, and the fun child like aesthetics. We also love the simple characters that inhabit the world - the blobs if you will. They too have been designed in the same minimilistic colourful style to match the environment.

Scarface


Need I say more?









So there you have it, the 5 main influences for the design of our mansion. I hope we can mix and match these design styles to create our very own stylish wacky mansion!

Character Development

Right guys today i attempted merging the 2 character concepts we liked best from my original designs. I have numbered them 1-6, so let me know what your favourite is in the comments bit. My personal favourite is number 5. I love the rounded triangular shaped body with the afro and a huge mouth. We have to just choose one now so we can get our rooms and so he can be simply modelled this week. I also feel its important we decide on a final design now as it will influence alot of my decor in the foyer e.g the stature, handle knobs, paintings, etc. We can all start encorporating his face and afro into the ornaments and designs of our room. Scanners busted so I used photographs but it does the job, post feedback pleaseeeeee ........

Balcony Prototype

This was my first taste of modelling for the project. I attempted to create the balcony stone railings for our foyer. I used reference from the internet, which was a picture I found of a Roman style balcony. I'm really happy with them, all I think they need is a slight bend to add to the curvature and wackyness of them. I will attach a bend deformer to it tomorrow. Comment guys...




Reference Pic Prototype Model

1st Storyboard Draft

As promised, my section of the storyboard done over the weekend. It is only 3/4 of my foyer scene however as I am still not sure how to end the room on a joke. It is not important at the moment, however if an idea comes to me on how to cut to the next room I will draw up the last few frames of the board. I tried timing it out, although it is almost impossible to guess how long the camera pans and tracks are going to take, but i worked it out to be about 25 secs up to the last frame I have drawn. This is too long however as the end joke still needs to go in. Let me know your thoughts on my camera movements guys, as it is undoubtedly going to change over time.

Weekend Tasks

Me - Refine Character, My section of storyboard
Phil - Develop mansion exterior, your section of storyboard
Dave - Design Weights room, your section of storyboard

As agreed we will all come in on Monday, wack our boards together and then hopefully have a full storyboard, timed out and everything.

Character Concepts

Today I drafted some rough character designs for our character - Pony Fontana. I'm still not sure that name works but it will do for now! I was mainly influenced by the designer toys (I am Plastic) and De Blob, with a bit of Looney tunes thrown in. I kept them:

- Simple, colourful, rounded, groovy
- Blinged out/Rich
- Non human
- Big ego (big head!)
- Small
- Child-like
- Flamboient/Ostentatious
- Simple to model (as we are only getting marked on our environment)

Let us know what you think guys:

Changes

Today the group had another meeting and discussed a screenplay Dave had put together. We had to make quite a few changes to the original draft as it was firstly too long, secondly contained too much animation, and thirdly was too much to model. We cut the bathroom scene, saving us having to model another room just for a toilet gag. We cut the cadillac outside, as again more modelling. We cut our plans for the guy running from room to room, down corridors etc. as it was again too much animation and time we didn't have. We decided to go back to our original funny idea, which was to have our fast MTV camera work in the 3 most important rooms (foyer, weights room, and swimming pool) followed by an embarassing pose/action by Pony at the end of each shot. The camera will be spiraling, zooming in on ornaments, panning, tracking across walls etc. and then always ending up zooming out of a spot in the room to reveal the whole room. During the zoom out the camera will always spot Pony, who has appeared pulling a funny embarassing pose - camera will then swing to blur focus/zoom on him and fumble downwards to cut to the next room! This continuous joke of him trying to grab attention at the end of each room will be much funnier and requires less animation. Also our establishing shot of the mansion on the hill above the Jollygood sign has been less prioritised until the 3 rooms and information screen has been completed.

Btw I liked Jared's idea for the information screen guy's, it pans up front of house, 54 bedrooms, 28 bathrooms, etc etc. and then 1 twat! lol what do you think? I'm going to include it in my opening section of my storyboard, as it leads on to my foyer scene.

Dave - post the new screen play mate....

Foyer Concepts

This was my first sketch of how I invisage the Foyer for our mansion. My main inspiration for the layout of the room was taken from scarface - with the 2 huge stairwells either side.
However I have kept it simple, stylish, and cartoony/looney tunes, and added a touch of a 60's villa. It needs to be properly developed, and I will individually draw the different parts of the room at a later stage. The character is still to be developed, and will have an effect on the final design of the statue of course.

Let me know what you think on the comments guys....

Home Sweet Home

Back from Barcelona, which was so much more inspirational and relevent to our project than I had first thought. I took hundreds of photographs and did a number of good drawings for reference while out there. I have listed below the main areas of intrest I took back from the trip:

The Montserrat Mountains
This was by far the most valuable location I visited, as it had significant relevence to our project. Our MTV Cribs Mansion is to be set in on top of a wacky version of Hollywood hills (Jollygood). Well I couldn't have asked for a better real life resource than Montserrat, as it was built up of gigantic rounded funky rocks. There were even a number of mansion like buildings over hanging these cliffs, which was another bonus! The view from the top was unbelievable, with green bumpy mountains and valleys almost as far as the eye could see. The Jollygood sign belonged here! The location was perfect for the style we are after as a group, and I wasted no time in taking some snaps, and making a few sketches:

























Casa Mila La Pedrera
We visited this Gaudi architecture on the last day, and even though it was a bit of a walk I am really glad I went. Although I found the interior of the house a bit boring, such as the attic, walking out on the terrace was a different story. It was like walking on mars, because it was made up of unusual spiraled turrets, curved bridges, funky archways, and lots of geometric shapes, all carved out of orange stone. It was a bit much to take in all at once, especially because it was overlooking the whole of barcelona! It felt like an something from the sahra desert mixed with a bit of an aliens villa?! Nevertheless I sat up there for ages with my skecthbook out, with the sun shining above in a clear a blue sky. Again the location had excellent relevence to our environment project, as its simple geometric shapes and curves will match that of our wacky mansion.














The blue sky contrasted against the crazy orange landscape



Life Drawing
Aswell as capturing some of Barcelona's best architecture in my sketchbook, I also wanted to practice my life drawing skills. I drew various locals bustling through the market on the first day aswell as a few classmates drawing on the train ;) ...

Delegating Jobs

Today DDP Productions met up for a final meeting before I set off to Barca. We focused on setting jobs within the group. We also divided our mansion up into 5 main areas - Exterior of Mansion + Jollygood sign, Foyer, Bathroom, Weights room, and Swimming pool.

Myself - Character Design, Foyer Design


Phil - Mansion Exterior Design, Swimming Pool


Dave - Weights/Gym Design, Bathroom


All - Research

As I will be in Barcelona for the next 4 days I am going to focus on finding inspiration out there. I already know Gaudi has designed some funky/geometric shaped buildings so hopefully I can return with some solid drawings and photo's to help us define our style.

The Idea?

DDP Productions has been formed and consists of myself, Phil, and Dave. We had our first meeting as a group earlier this week and came up with a pretty solid idea for where we want to take this project. We all agreed a comedy was in order, and we loved the idea of an environment which interacts with a character, rather than the other way round. This idea then escalated into a house which moved, transformed, and even shape shifted to guide a blind character through it.
We had loads of inspirations and sources of reference for an idea like this, such as Monster House, Mr Magoo, Car Adverts, Foster Adverts, Elephants Dream, etc etc. All of which encorporated an environment which affected the character in it.

However - after a weekends thought and hundreds of possible ways for a house to move spinning in my head! We met up again and agreed the idea was too complex, and was slowly turning into a feature animated film!

We went back to the drawing board and reviewed our original brainstorms. I pitched an idea to the guys which I thought of a while back, which was to create an MTV Cribs style episode. However to maintain our comedy aspect by making it a wacky spoof. This idea then spiraled into being a mansion set in the town of Jollygood rather than Hollywood, with a funny rich character showing off his wealth in a rather embarassing way! This Cribs style camera work gives us the oppurtunity to show off our environment but with a narrative twist rather than just the bog standard fly through. A common occurance is the desire for our environment to be fictional/ colourful/wacky/stylized and simplistic rather than a realistic detailed recreation of a location. Designs from Viva Pinata, De Blob, and AKA Studio's are exactly the look we want to encorporate into our mansion and character. Bring on the research.....

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