For my concept, I have decided to create a 5-10 minute 3D animated short. With the style similar to that of Nickelodeon’s “Jimmy Neutron” and my main inspiration from a viral video called “The Present”.
It will tell the story of a stereotypical male teenage who tries to act cool. When his younger sister wants to play, he keeps up this facade until a point where he loses his cool and is mean to her. At this point the younger sister runs away upset, followed by the older brother following her shortly after. They eventually meet in an area of natural beauty which reunites them as friends and they have fun together. At the end of the short, both siblings arrive back home and continue as they were before, with the older brother giving his sister a little wink to reassure her that he is just acting cool. I intend to not have any character voice within the piece, but instead just background music that I will create myself that follows the flow of the short to add to the actions of the characters.
To start my research and development, I began looking at the best softwares to use to develop my concept. I will need software that will allow me to make 3D models of characters and the environment, and if this can’t be done easily on one software, then I need to find seperate softwares that integrate. I originally looked into Cinema 4D, however a lot of reviews have said that, although it is brilliant for creating still images, Maya would be a lot better for a full scene. Therefore I have chosen Maya for parts of/if not all of my piece. However Blender is also a very interesting competitor that I still need to look into properly. For the next week I have set myself the task of looking into tutorials for both pieces of software and comparing which would be better overall,and if some aspects are better than others within both separate softwares, then can they both integrate together. I have found a multitude of tutorials for Maya and Blender that both teach the basics of the software and the basics of the sort of things I will need to know (such as 3D modelling, texturing 3D models, animating 3D models and the same for environments).
Additionally, I have looked into various music softwares (such as Reaper and Tracktion 4) so that I may design the background music for the piece. However I recently discovered that a family friend is doing fairly well for himself as a musician by creating his music on his PC using a piece of software called Reason. Online he is known as “Etherwood” and has a few million views on YouTube on a few of his songs, hence I have reached out to him, and he has agreed to come and show me what he knows on the software so I can begin to teach myself.