The Skies Below Animatic (latest version)

Finally an animatic on the blog! It’s taken a while but the animatic for The Skies Below has been under constant development and it’s still not finished yet. Still though, it’s about time I posted something on it so here it is:

As it stands it is still quite incomplete. It’s evident that the character designs are not present in all of the shots because like the animatic the designs were also constantly changing. Things yet to come for this animatic are the layouts, the redrawing of several other shots for some consistency, the animated version of the intro, part 2 of the crash sequence and the finished Father character. The music that plays for the intro is the first draft of the final score, the rest of the score is being used as a placeholder. This project can be described as very ambitious but I am very prepared to tone down the complexity of the action if necessary.

I’m hoping it makes more sense now as in the previous versions of this animatic the fast paced nature of the story made it unclear and a little un-readable in places. One durastic change did take place in the story where-by the God ‘character’ was removed from 2 shots as it took the story away from its original point; faith, rather than proving the existence of God. I think the faith aspect of this story comes across much more in this version and should be even clearer once everything is complete.

Character: Monster 3

I made a few adjustments on the face of the monster character and ended up making it more complex. Looking back at fighter pilot helmets I added the breathing euipment that a fighter pilot wears in exactly the same place on the monsters face and split it under the nose for the mouth, creating a more prominent chin.

Purple was the original colour of the original concept, but it’s still dubious as to whether this will work with the colour of the layouts. The face is almost there but very reminiscent of Gundam but that’s probably just because of the winged ears which I would like to remain part of the design. Feedback suggests that the monster looks like a good guy and a bad guy which is ok, if you know what the story is about. But as I’m expecting the deeper meanings and metaphors of the story to stay hidden I’m going to try and make it look like even more of a bad guy.

Below is the monster’s body shape- it’s based off of the shape of a gorilla but it’s pretty similar to other monster designs out there.

The pistons that sit where the calf muscles would be on a human help to maintain the mechanical look throughout the body. I also added wheels on the feet and attached them to the heels as well. The feet were going to be 747 landing gear but they looked like roller skates...

This is a looser sketch I drew to resolve how the monster would take off from the ground. The start position for the 100m sprint is the best way to do this it seems. I think I prefer this slightly more exaggerated and twisted version.