Upcoming Short Movie Animated Exclusive with LightWave

[eagleeyed]

Hello and thanks for reading.

This is a project I have been working on for quite some time and now as it is hitting action point I decided I would tell the LightWave Community about it and my intentions.

First off I am planning for this to be a web series animated exclusively within LightWave and it's provided tools. Character animation will be something I will try to do with no help what so ever from plugins as a main example of this.

Anyway, I am going to copy and paste my storyboard and outline of content, any feedback would be appreciated :)

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Episode 1 of The Final Volt will only scratch the surface of the main storyline. However it will still successfully introduce some of the main characters, the setting of the story and what the general story will be about. Here is the storyline:

The year is unknown, with humans becoming extinct hundreds of years ago the world has changed greatly, however one of the human’s greatest achievements still lives on, the robot with full Artificial Intelligence or AI. They have taken over from where the humans left off, they live the same lives we do, they live as communities, they work, they shop and they sleep. Politics also exists, a main factor in this story. There has been a silent war going on between the Government and the Rebellion for years, the Government wants their programming to stay the same as their makers, the humans created them, however the Rebellion wants to change their programming for the better, to make the general public’s lives easier. By changing their programming a normal robot will be able to modify themselves, to give themselves extra arms to make tasks easier to even allowing Jetpacks to be attached to them.

There is one model of robot that is vital to either side’s success, this model of bot; the Alpha series is immune to failures caused by programming bugs. If a normal robot attempted to upload new programming and it had a bug that bot would instantly die, the Alpha bots however do not. If the Government was able to secure all 100 bots out of the reach of the Rebellion, the Government would win; the losses to the Rebellion would be huge if programming changes were attempts. However if just one Alpha series bot is secured by the Rebellion they have the potential to be victorious.

In Episode One we meet the Rebellions field team consisting of Bolts, one of the main characters in the series, and a Soldier and a Navigator, both who are killed off in this episode by the Government field team consisting of General Emission, another main character in the series, and three soldiers, two of which are killed off in this episode. We also meet some of the members of the Presidential team, including the President himself who we will never know the real name of, we meet Suze Sharp who is a spy working for the Rebellion, she is found out at the end of episode 1, and we get a brief glimpse of Suze’s assistant Kathy, who takes over Suze’s position from the second episode.

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Well that should give you a brief outline of what it is going to be about. It is going to be set in as photo-realistic world as possible except for the whole robots thing.

You will definately see me over the coming weeks asking questions about how to do this, how to do that as I am working on a tight deadline for this to happen.

Anyway, thought you would like to know about it.

My website (www.eagleeyed.net) will be up soon to show off the progress of the project.

Thanks for reading.

[ben martin]

The plot seems cool despite the fact that there is already a feature film involving a robot civilization/culture but !hey! in the end that means nothing, how many war and love movies are done every year? Isn't always the same issue? :)

Are you planning to do it all by yourself?
Model, Texture, Animate, Illumination, Render, Graph Composite, Audio FX, VFX, Music, Edit and all the rest? :stumped:
Well about animation you are smart enough to clearly avoid human motion. (Only robots right?) :question:

[eagleeyed]

The plot seems cool despite the fact that there is already a feature film involving a robot civilization/culture but !hey! in the end that means nothing, how many war and love movies are done every year? Isn't always the same issue?

Yeah, that is the problem, I think you are talking about 'Robots' by Blue Sky Studios, correct me if I am wrong. That is the problem, it is hard now to have a truly original idea in this day and age. However this one wont be for kiddies. :D

Are you planning to do it all by yourself?
Model, Texture, Animate, Illumination, Render, Graph Composite, Audio FX, VFX, Music, Edit and all the rest?

The daunting thing is yes, as it is a school project I have to do most of the stuff on my own. This will be one of my first projects so it is going to take me a while however I think this is the best way to learn. As for the audio part, I currently have a Cert III. in Music Technology so that relieves the strain for that. I finished recording one of the characters about half an hour ago.

Music, I have been taking Piano lessons for a year so I can do that, editing yes, texturing, yes but they will not be very good, I am looking for someone to help me with that. Animation, yes. Modeling, all I can say is I have having difficulties with at present, I have come to favour the Spline method of modeling though with Spline Patches etc.'

As for the human motion thing well spotted but I have figured that out too hopefully, I have already filmed all the shots in real time on the school oval with people actually walking like the robots so I should have something to go by. I have also video recorded all voice recording sessions so I have facial expressions etc.

Thanks anyway for taking the time to read, really appreciated.

[jnddepew]

it sounds like you're really serious about making this short film. good luck:thumbsup:

[ben martin]

Well, what can I say?

It's a beautiful dream and I truly hope you can fulfill it!

There are some examples in "Youtube" of short-films done by one (two) persons top.
Here you have the best example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unUEsNe3wxs

It's going to be a huge task but never give-up!

About this kind of initiatives I can only say that if somehow; someone could join all persons like you in a place maybe great thing would come out, unfortunately these kinds of initiatives never worked and people still working all alone!

Good work! :)

[eagleeyed]

Ben, thanks for that link, I found that movie really impressive.

I am realizing more and more by the day how big this task is, however I honestly can not see me giving up now, I am too far into it.

Thanks for all your feedback.

Jnddepew: Thanks, definately am serious, I have been planning it since this time last year, however I have only just started to work on it. I am up to version 77 of the story though, it has gone through a lot of changes since the initial concept.

However, just a friendly reminder to everyone, learn from my stupid mistake, make sure your Backup program is actually doing what it is supposed to be doing. I use a 2 320GB harddrive for my animation at the moment, soon coming time to add another couple. I have a direct clone of each, only external for backup use. One decided to die on me, the only with all the models on it, I thought fine, the backup drive would have it, but after having a look at the drive I noticed the program had been using both external drives to backup the one less used harddrive, only containing renders and video files. Basically I have had to start from scratch again, and now I do all my backups manually.

[archiea]

Very ambitions.. much luck to you. In the Spielberg film: AI, I enjoyed the window into 2000 years into the future where our robot creations have out lived us. meanwhile the Matrix shows a much earlier and more violent stage of that transition. I find that the infiltration of technology in our everyday life (like the iphone) makes the exploration of that in science fiction a worth while endeavor. I hardly see it as you copying a specific idea, rather than it being a hot topic for our society today.

I like how you have incorporated a logical rift between the robot societies: original human programming vs a robot/AI derived programming. I suggest that you read some books on philosophy to offer you some insight into the human mind. You can use that as a basis for the 'logic' that the government has for maintaining the human sourced programing. from there you can derive your own philosophy for the rebelllion porogramming, offering much depth to the fighting factions.

I mention this because your synopsis offers an incredible opportunity to create an asimov worthy sotryline, instead of a matrix-derivative one; which BTW i am not accusing you of particulary.

I thought one of the reason why the matrix sequels failed was because of the lack of depth that the original framework allowed for. The kinda fortune cookie dialog from morpheus works as this archetype wise kungfu/yoda master. Yoda had depth because of his lying about Lukes father, as well as how in the prequel how the ill fate of the jedi even eluded him. Also, the fact that yoda's strengh is inward, not outward (like in being a tall, uber cool looking, samerai sword and rayban sunglasses weilding hero alal morpheous), and how in empire he was portrayed as a cankeroud old coot.

So while the fortune cookie wisdom served well in the first matrix, it ran out of steam in the subsequent films because it created a weak framework to suspend the 'world" that two sequels insisted in digging deeper into.

So I think your film has potential to sidestep the derivative tendency of sci fi junk food, and offer something that is rooted in the depth of philisophy. Say where you explore the merit of human philosophy and think through the frame work of your story, where the Govt faction is really going to have to make its case as to why the pehaps faulted human psyche based programming serves the robot society best by acknowledging that they are imperfect (hence human) while the Rebellion programming, while perhaps superior, offers no room for error, thus perhaps causing problems for the robot society. You can parallel that with perhaps a more facist manner of governing, where the individual robot's actions are more restricted by the rebellion philosophy, because to avoid any 'errors" they have removed the individual's ability of choice in some areas, replaced with the "logical" choice. You can couple that with the Robot's uber-developed AI now being able to create its own art, and how that is threatened by the Rebellion programming because things like art are considered "illogical".

I hope you see this as food for thought. the ideas is to ground your character's motivation into something that is facinating without a single frame being rendered. If you can frame your story in an actual argument where one has to defend basically the human condition as a form of "programming", i think you have yourself a worthy story that can survive subsequent episodes. With characrer's who's convictions are well grounded, you can continue to dig deeper and even offer valid reasons for character arcs that may even swich sides, since the frame work for their philosophies are well defined.

thanks for sharing, and good luck!

[eagleeyed]

All I can say is WOW, thanks for such a detailed and motivating response to this, really appreciated.

I am unable to give your post the in depth reply that it deserves at current, I am currently struggling to meet the time demands of this series itself and am behind, however everything you have said I will definitely take into account, I have already laid out the next several episodes in the series if I continue to make it after this first one, however as only Episodes 1's script has been written and finalized as current your suggestions should make it in.

Thanks again.