Final Major Project: Proposal

I want to create an animation around the theme “Man Versus Machine”. My animation will be about a postman who’s about to lose his job to a robot, which results in him trying to prove his worth by racing the robot to see who can deliver all the post the fastest, resulting in the postman and the robot falling into a fountain at the end of the road, short circuiting the robot.

The environments will be the inside of the post office and a small town set. The town set will be very simplistic as the shots will be fast as it is a race scene.

The target audience will be children and adults as I intend for the animation to be simple enough for children to enjoy but relatable enough for working adults too.

The animation will be in a similar style to Pixar in terms of character and environment design. The 3D objects included in the animation consist of several houses, instanced repeatedly to create a town, a car which will be recoloured to create variety, a parcel room, a large crate, a small parcel and various props to bring the town to life.
The objects will be create using polygonal cubes. It will feature two fully 3D characters; the Postman and the “Post-Bot”. The Postman will be designed with running in mind, with long limbs and streamlined body. The Post-Bot will be designed to be bipedal and an imitation of the Postman. The characters are going to be created with a combination of ZBrush and Maya. I will be using Adobe Photoshop to texture the characters and Maya’s own Substance textures for roads and pavements.

The characters and cars will be animated. The cars are just to create the illusion of a busy town, whereas the characters will be the main focus of the animation. I intend to animate the characters using Maya, beginning with the Blocking Pass, moving on to In-betweens, Splining and finally it will be rendered using Mental Ray along with Mental Ray’s Physical Sun and Sky.

The sound will consist of diagetic sound effects (car engines, running sounds) and non-diagetic sounds (Royalty Free music from the Youtube Audio Library). I also intend to have limited dialogue in the animation for the protagonist, the Postman. I intend to write a simple script alongside the storyboarding process.

I have been inspired by one of the Team Fortress 2 trailers, “Meet the Scout” along with other fictional speedy characters such as DC’s “The Flash” and Sega’s “Sonic the Hedgehog”.



My Objectives are:

• Designing a streamlined character ideal for running/action.
• Designing a robot character capable of running/action.
• Creating three fully rigged and textured 3D characters one of which is a robot.
• Modelling a small town/street scene in a cartoony style
• Research into run cycles.
• Research into realistic robots / stylised fictional robots.

Technical Requirements are:

The software I will be using will be Maya for the animation. Badmanjam’s Slap-On Auto Rigging System for rigging. Zbrush for creating initial character sculpts. Photoshop for texturing. Photoshop for creating image sequences. Camtasia Studio 9 for compiling the storyboards and final animation. I will back up my work online and on external hard-drives and spare computers to ensure minimal data loss. Deliverables Length and format - film, TV, large format/ other please specify 1 Minute 1080p HD Quicktime Delivery format 1080p HD Quicktime OneDrive Documentation - Production Schedule Research Plan Plot Synopsis Script Graphic deliveries Moodboards Storyboards Character Designs Character Sculpts Proof of Concept Character Sheets Other supporting materials – Research 3D models Animatics Referencing materials Audio (ambient sounds / music and character sounds) Animated turnarounds