[Project Related] Pre-production for the Project

The Royal Armories Project is something I have neglected talking about because I wanted to talk about everything in one big post, however because alot has happened in the past few weeks I feel I should dedicate a post to the pre-production of the project and then later talk about the actual animating process and finished animation.

The project consists of 3 people; myself, Anthony Price and Will Padgett. We each have been given different roles in the pre-production, I was in charge of the Script, the mood board and the Background concept art. Anthony was in charge of the concept character design, getting the voice actor and musician and also putting together the presentation for the pitching of the idea, and Will was in charge of finalizing the script, the storyboard and animatic and also the budget.

I finished up a draft of the script while Will did the storyboards, we worked together bouncing what should happen and where it should happen until the storyboards was complete and I could finish the script, Will wanted to change the narrators lines abit and finally it was finished, here was the draft I created, and here is the finished script. After sorting the script out I decided to do a piece of concept art for the animation, it ended up being the inside of the mine, because it would be dark inside a cave, I decided to take inspiration from the video game Limbo, I finally finished the cave and I think it turned out fine:

Anthony and Will were both really happy with the outcome and told me to do a few more backgrounds, before I did that I created a mood board to get the right colour scheme in the backgrounds, the mood board consisted of gameplay footage from the video game Limbo, here is the mood board. Once creating the mood board I began creating the second and third background, the outside area of the cave and the Blacksmiths, I finished them and they turned out perfect:

Once creating these two concept backgrounds, I took a break from creating the concept art and then worked on other work. While I was creating the second concept art, Anthony tried a test of the animation using the first background I created, needless to say it worked out really well, here is what it turned out like. We were impressed with how the project was looking, by this point me, Will and Anthony had nearly finished the animatic and the presentation was almost competed. The voice actor got back to us with his lines, we inserted the lines into the animatic and finally after a day the animatic and the presentation was completed, the following day was pitching our idea to the Royal Armories.

To see how the pitching went here is a post about.

Now that the pitch is over and we got a budget, we took a break from the project for a while, Will and Anthony attended a few budgeting meetings to acquire the budget, after finally deciding on a set budget we needed to write it up and send it to Sarah. Now that all the pre-production was sorted we will begin the animation process shortly in the coming weeks, after that I will update the blog on how we are doing.