The Style.

Here comes a post about what style we chose for our movie. It’s not a very big subject to write a lot about, but I feel that I should because it is pretty crucial to our movie. We never had a really big discussion about it, but very many small ones. This is because the style came very naturally for us because of the storyboard. It sat the standard and something to go after.

After Knut’s drawing of different styles for the girl we knew that we wanted to go for a semi-realistic type of style. Since many people interpret words and sayings their own way, I will try to explain what I see as a semi-realistic style.

In the one end of the scale, you got what I see as the more cartoony ones. Like the Madagascar movies, Up and Over the Hedge. The animation is very cartoony, loads of squash and stretch and very exaggerated. The colors are very bright and clear and gives a total awesome look, but a bit unrealistic.

In the opposite end, we got the more realistic movies. Square Pixtures movie called Final Fantasy: The Spirit within. A Japanese movie that was released in 2001, and was aiming for making it as realistic as possible at that time. The main character Aki consisted of 400 000 polygons and had 60 000 hairs. And all was animated. They used a render farm with 960 workstations, something we don’t have. So this style is a bit hard to achieve for a couple of students.

Now that I have established that, it’s easier for you to see what I am talking about. Our main character, she gets a bit of realistic style. We are going to have a SSS (Subsurface Scattering) material on her, so the skin gets a realistic feel. But for the hair, we are using just a modeled hair, not realistic looking at all. But we are using a cloth modifier for the dress, to get a bit of a realistic feel there.

The first scene, her room, got some very bright colors and got a purple tone. Things are realistic modeled, but the height of the roof is not. We had to get more space between the floor and the roof to get the look we wanted. The lighting is a bit bright, just so you can see the smoke better.

Note: these are only test renders, not the finished thing.

The scene where she is outside is going from realistic to really unrealistic. Since we did not want people to understand that she is in her imagination, we starts off with a bit realistic feeling to the texture and lighting. But when she is getting closer to what I refer to as “The Heaven Street”, it is getting whiter and whiter, and the things as lampposts and garbage containers disappears.

Note: these are only test renders, not the finished thing.

The animation can be done in many different ways, but here we are going for a much more realistic way of doing it. Although the girl and the teddy got possibilities to squash and stretch, we do not want to use them as much.

So, to wrap this up. Our movie is trying to be realistic in some ways but in others not. I think that we have managed to get the right feel with the style we chose. Something is always being changed in the last minute, but I think that we are pretty clear on what road we have chosen.