Im feeling a lot better at this milestone. I had to do some reworking of my story so its on a little bit of a smaller scale now which I think makes it much more manageable than the original idea. Instead of this taking place in a city, my capstone will be taking place in a smaller town square with the main character being a banker at a bank located in the square and the antagonist being a monster of my own design. The original idea of an asteroid landing and the antagonist coming out is still being used, but I switched from a Trex to a more humanoid looking monster thing. I was getting too overwhelmed too early on and I think it's because I was looking to rig and animate a dinosaur which seemed like too much of a headache and would have most likely not have looked believable. The smaller scale of the environment and idea will allow me to focus on certain aspects and goals that I can use for my portfolio. For example, I want to try and show off my modeling skills with the town and I feel as if there may be more opportunity for character animation within a limited environment. Another thing I wanted to focus on was using the camera in different smart creative ways with more dynamic movement to hid certain things to allow for less minute things to be animated. Overall, with this scaled down version of the original, I feel a lot better. I feel like I finally have a coherent direction in which I wanna take my film.
Below you can see two different mood boards I have created, one for my characters and one for my environment. For my main character, I wanted him to be a slightly snobby banker who is obsessed with gold, which ends up being the reason he is drawn into action. I think I want the banker to be wearing a suit with gold accessories such as rings and a watch. The antagonist I wanted to be a bigger monster who has more of a humanoid figure so I can utilize a rig that I am more comfortable working with, while having the addition of a tail so I can show off some spline IK skills I'm learning this semester. Also, I think the monster having a tail can be a good tool for destruction which is the main thing I want to achieve, destruction. Another detail of the monster that I want to add that can add to destruction and chaos is it having laser eyes, or a laser eye. I like the idea of the monster being cyclops like with one eye which might make things a little easier when trying to display laser eyes because I would only have to worry about one laser rather than two. I have an idea of what it will look like in terms of its silhouette, size, and posture, but I'm not quite sure what kind of details I want to incorporate. I think adding gold details would be cool and add to the story but I don't know how over the top I want to go with it or if it should be more subtle.
For the environment I wanted to achieve a midwest small town vibe with focus on the central town square. Most storefronts I will come up with later, but the two buildings I want to have more detail are the bank building where the main character works at (Wont see the interior) and the town movie theater (will see the interior). I am drawing inspiration from a theater in my home town that I worked at called The Arcada Theater. I have begun laying out the town square in C4D which I think will help to guide my story and get an even better sense of the area I can work with.
More work needs to be done in terms of detail in my concepts for my main characters and perhaps the main buildings. Overall I'm happy with the progress made so far.
