Monday 1 August 2011

1st Week: The Beginning

The first official week of pre-production has come to an end and the early project nerves have been swept away. I think I can speak for the rest of the team when I say that we were worried if a group project would really work. In the past all of us have struggled in some way with group assignments and this seemed like a big decision to make. But those anxieties were quickly destroyed after our first official  meeting. In a conference call this Thursday we all sat down to discuss how to start this project, within minutes we had a ton of ideas floating about and everything started to make sense. Ideas were given and discussed, thoughts came from everyone and it all felt extremely natural. In that meeting we made incredible progress and now we are focused on making this project extraordinary. We will not be releasing any narrative ideas as of yet but it is a very exciting time for the team and we are determined to not only make an animation that stands out from the university course, but hopefully has an impact on a bigger scale. 

The narrative ideas for our animation are still somewhat under wraps but we want to share as much as we can. We will therefore be posting weekly updates on this site to give you a glimpse into our work. As this is the end of our first official week why not start here?

From the very beginning we decided we wanted to make something within the sci-fi genre. We all love science fiction and so it was a fairly obvious choice. By using parody and pastiche we feel we can create a great short animation that demonstrates our passion for the genre. Before discussing possible ideas we all made influence maps and discussed the films that have been the biggest influences on us, this would create the base for discussion. We also sent each other films to watch, those that we feel are the most important to us and the genre. This list was extensive and included some fairly important films; 2001 A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Wall-e and Moon being just a few of them. We also sent an array of short animations and clips to each other in an effort to convey our ideas. Check out some of the videos below, these are all big influences for us.

Wall-e
The story of a lovable robot who falls in love, this film is filled with heart and humour. One of Pixar's greatest feature films, and accompanied by one of their greatest shorts, Burn-e.



Mike's New Car
A short Pixar animation demonstrating how great a simple idea can be executed.


Planet 51
A feature film that clearly shows a love for sci-fi. Watch out for a Giger Alien dog in the trailer.




Hopefully this gives you an insight into I thoughts so far, we will be posting more details on our narrative soon. This week has also been a busy time setting up documents and creating logos and idents for the studio. Below you can see our logo design sheet. The name of the studio came from a conference call were we discussed a ton of ideas and along the way ended up with Atom Pancakes. With both our identity and work we wish to convey our professionalism but also our enthusiasm for animation, storytelling and film.



We would also like to present our studio ident.


More updates will be coming early this week as we start to flesh out our narrative and discuss the details.

3 comments

  1. Thanks Ruben, I didn't want to discuss our ideas in too much detail at this point.

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  2. While I get the reference, don't you think your logo is a bit too close for comfort to Half-Life one?

    http://www.tutorialpark.com/wp-content/uploads/4/Half-Life-2-Logo.jpg

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