Buccaneer Animation Project

For this project we listened to a number of sound clips that were taken from interviews of people that had carried out sea rescue and their stories of what happened. We got into teams and each team was assigned a sound clip. The idea of this project is to get us to work as a team to create a short animated film that works with the story of the sound clip.

within are group i was given the role of the production designer, which meant i was in charge of the overall look of the film and the artistic style we wanted to go for. After a few discussions we all agreed to aim are animation to be a very similar style to the short animation film The Backwater Gospel.

The Backwater Gospel

I have always loved this dark, grungy and rustic style, so i was really excited about creating a short film in this style.

Concept work

I did some research into what things would look like but first i started with some concept pieces of the things that we had decided would be in the film, like a boathouse of some kind and what characters may look like.

The first image is of what i imagines the boathouse to look like.

This digital painting was a quick one of what the characters may look like. But more focusing the style on the same as that in backwater gospel.

More concepts of various things, but again trying to keep within the same style.

The idea was to have textures in this style painted onto 3D models that would be created in Maya. The easiest and best way of doing this was to use UV wrapping. This is where the 3D model in Maya is flattened out to a net which can then be taken into Photoshop and painted. the file is then loaded back in Maya and the textures appear on the 3D object. Here is a quick test i did of a simple post with a very rough wood texture applied to it.