During the first week of the project, the team met and settled down our weekly working schedule and decided each members’ role according to each one’s skillset. This is the year-long animation project and the team is going to make a 3-minutes POV animation telling the story of a witch/wizard bringing life to magic ink. The story comes from the pre-package made by previous animation team and we need to work upon the rough design and make a complete short animation film.
Yifan will be the producer of the team and responsible for managing the overall progress. Clare is the 3D artist in the team and will be mainly focusing on creating 3D assets the film needs. Qin specializes in 2D arts and will help the team to create 2D effect of the ink on paper and also concept arts. Neal and Zi will be the programmers in this team and help with the pipeline and other techniques possible needed in the team.
After getting familiar with each other’s skillset, we found out several challenges for this project. The first is that there is no animator in this team so for the animation part we have to use motion capture or other techniques. Also the transformation between 2D and 3D will be another challenge.
For the coming week, the team will work on two areas. The artists will start to find references and make concept arts and design stories and the programmers will start to explore the production pipeline and technology that the team may need in the future production.
At the same time, the team comes up with a team name that represents the team’s goal and feature, Inkling. The name is borrowed from Nintendo shooting game Splatoon, where characters are squid-like creature that shoot colorful ink to each other. We think this represent our work in the team as we are going to bring life to the ink in the animation.
