Playtime - A Final Year Film

My final year film that I submitted for Year 3 Animation at the Norwich University of the Arts. This film was meant to help me understand the entire pipeline by doing every step of the process myself as I wanted to get a better understanding for making personal projects especially after graduation. The steps I took were: Sketching, Storyboarding, Modelling, Retopology, Rigging, Weight Painting, UV, Texturing, Animation, Lighting and Rendering (Redshift).  After completing the film, I felt like I had achieved a really developed understanding of each practise in the CG field than I was before going in. Whilst I wasn't able to fully render my sequence out due to time and a lot of trial and error, I still feel very proud of what I've been able to accomplish having gone through some of these different areas of the pipeline for the first time.

My main overall inspiration to make the film was to make something horror related as horror is my favourite genre to watch and experience. The way I wanted to go about it was to look into the idea of subverting your expectations by presenting something as it is but it's actually something else. One big inspiration to this idea would be the 'Meet the Pyro' short film from Team Fortress 2 by how the Pyro's vison looks like everything sunshine and rainbows where in actuality,  he's horrendously killing people with a blowtorch and setting the world on fire. It creates a very humorous feel to the entire film which was something I greatly wanted replicate for my project in order to balance the horror that transpires before. 

For the Kaiju that's featured in the film, I was inspired by a specific archetype that comes from the Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game that goes by the name 'D/D/D'. These demons are portrayed very high and mighty in their artwork as they are based off real world leaders but transformed into kings and demons. The main takeaways I took from looking at their designs were the demonic way they are posed as well as the riches that they wear on them to show their superiority. This was something I really wanted to get across in the film to show how threating and scary the character is. 

Sketches for Characters 

Turnaround of Kaiju Character

Rig setup for the Kaiju Character

Assets I used to help make the film: 

 Baby Rig for the end scene - https://temaroots.gumroad.com/l/yu-lon_RIG

Models:

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/wooden-men-toy-3d-model-1478061

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-simple-childs-room-1769930

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-toy-car-model-1306799

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/toy-car-3d-model-1765069

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-garbage-bag-1230370

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-model-lamplight-light-1428597

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/trash-3d-obj/778247