FINAL IDEAS

Once I had decided that I wanted to keep the characters in my film small and simple I began defining their look. The images below show some of the developed ideas I had before writing the plot and drawing the storyboards. The final characters can be seen in the last 3 images.

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WORLD DESIGN

To keep the continuity of the scenes in my film a global design or ‘world design’ was established. This was a palette of colours I used throughout the film. To do this I firstly decided that greys, whites and blacks would be the foundation of the palette and any use of colour would only come with effects (such as particle systems and glows) or used on objects that have been coloured for a purpose (for example the two fireballs that Jed launches at Juniper are used to link their ‘imaginative’ world with the ‘real’ world scene at the end).

To mask all the scenes with one look I used the ‘effects’ option in 3D Studio Max that allows post effects to be added to a frame. (To see how this was done see the ‘lighting and effects’ section). I had played around with different material styles such a ‘ink and paint’ and a combination of image map textures with ink and paint but decided that the atmosphere of the film could not be portrayed properly with this style as I found ink and paint does not embrace shadows and well as I hoped. Below is an example of ink and paint, and then the final look I chose.

I wanted the film to be filled with background objects and large scale scenery. The idea of the film lent itself to grand set design but due to rendering times some of these were scaled down and reduced in detail. It was my intention to keep the characters minimalist and yet fill the frame with objects that created depth. To do this the characters were designed with polygon numbers in mind and effects such as ‘volume fog’ were rarely used. I wanted the characters to be lit differently in different scenes so lighting was unique in every scene and was never ‘merged’ together. The combination of soft diffused omni lights and negative omni lights created an interesting lighting where harsh shadows are cast behind objects.

Although the essence of the film is visually similar to old hammer horror films, ‘Juniper – The Last Robot’ does not share the same psychologically fear-provoking plots or excruciating tension building. I feel the animation and plot although dark and unconventional, are a balanced mixture of modern 3D design and the more alternative Kafkaesque puppet works of Quay brothers for example. But this is not necessarily a bad thing.