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Project Development

After yesterday and today I'm feeling a lot more confident in the my general story idea. I like the pace and tone and now just need to find out what the ending means to me. I had several ideas about what it could mean including the guilt of selfishness as the character sits alone in a dead world as well as the feeling of loneliness and that no matter what my character did she was ultimately alone which I know can happen to people all over the world. However, yesterday we had a fantastic workshop with Mark Grindle where we got to talk about our ideas and hear his feedback. To him, my ending was comparable to the digital age and the loss of ourselves/humanity in a digital environment and I really like that concept, especially considering it's in a 3D setting.

As for the story itself, there's one image that keeps sticking with me so I quickly drew it out today in Photoshop in about an hour to try and get it solidified in my head. I like the idea of the camera being close up on one individual polygon and slowly pan up to our character walking away.




Although there are a couple of other ideas that have been floating around my head today. When I decided I wanted to use the character's wireframe to show her falling apart/dying, I immediately thought of the music video for The Chemical Brothers song Wide Open. 


One part of the video I had forgotten about was that the dancer found her heart inside herself and saw it glowing and beating. For my character, I knew that she would leave a trail of pulsing red polygons but I hadn't much considered how I would show that she was eventually cured other than the pulsing of the polygons would stop. I had thought about using a light on her head, a metal device that was a part of her, to also pulse red in time with the lost polygons but would turn blue when she was cured. However, after watching the video again, I thought about incorporating the heart into my character. As she started to lose polygons we could see her heart pulsing in her chest and when she was cured it would change colour to symbolise that. This also takes away the head device image which I'm not sure worked in context with the rest of the film. 

For the character, I want to simplify her design as the whole story has been simplified and streamlined. I sketched up a simpler design taking inspiration from Chell from Portal 2.


This design had the "Health Monitor" and integrated wrist monitor but those ideas may be scrapped in a future rendition. This version also has a tattoo inspired by the lead character in Mirror's Edge (Or at least what I remember of it)


Still lots of things to think about and work through. I want to draft up a rough script so that I can keep the idea straight in my mind. I also want to keep sketching out character ideas, keeping it simple to match the story, environment and style.
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