Proposal

For my thesis proposal I want to explore a conceptualized surrealistic CG-animated short about dreaming, or that state of the unconscious. I want to explore the extremes of a visual spectrum of story telling by focusing on aspects such as look development, camera work, particle interaction and visual storytelling.

The loose concept will be that of a woman falling through space while interacting with various elements, falling through different layers and aspects of space. The main protagonist will be a woman falling through space in super slow motion, perhaps 2-300 frames/second animations. The background elements will interact with the figure, morphing both its position in shape as well as its materiality. The interaction and visual presentation will be both surreal and hyper-realistic at the same time, shifting between an alternate reality and back seamlessly.

I want the entire short to be one continuous shot where there are no cuts but instead shifting foreground and background elements as the character falls through different levels of time and space. I want to include usage of surrealistic imagery, such as the figure falling through the skin of the sea as it shatters beneath her like a plane of glass. Varying interactions like this will occur as the figure descends further, eventually crashing through back into reality in the form of a safe and familiar environment.

I will put a lot of time and though into lighting and camera work, creating a work whose narrative lies in the visual look of the film, as opposed to cause-event linear storytelling. A particular focus will be the seamless shifting between realism and fantasy, as if to personify the blurry line between fantasy and reality upon waking.

Technical aspects

I will be using zbrush and mental ray to model and shade the character, realflow to simulate ocean, water, smoke and other particle interactions, blastcode to simulate shattering and breaking, maya to simulate particles, soft and hard bodies, ncloth, dynamics, rendering, etc. I might use Vue to render background matte paintings for some shots. I will be compositing in either after effects or nuke, time allowing.

I am using ballet photography as reference points for the character animation, in super slow motion shifting from position to position in order to fully explore the movement of the human form