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Production began yesterday, here's a summary of where pre-production took me.

Reference

The key thing here is not to look as good as possible, but to look as good as possible as created by a single person with 1 computer in less then 2 weeks.

The style that inspired me the most is from the game Another World/Out of this world (Europe/US), due to it's minimalistic shapes and animation.

Making good use of silhouettes, it's conservative in the amount of visible information, spending resources only on parts that matter to the story and thus forcing our minds to fill in detail where none is. Effective and requiring very little technical effort. Also note the use of shaded backgrounds against flat foregrounds.

Then there's Grand Central, from students at Gobelins.

Their work is minimalist, yet slick with gradients covering most of their flat-shaded surfaces. This adds scale and visual appeal without too much overhead.

There might be time to add gradients to the flat-shaded nature of things, but it will have to be a last and optional step. Shadows will be modeled, if any.

For the full gamut of reference, visit the Dropbox directory or GitHub repository

Shading & Lighting

Shading and lighting involves quite an extra bit of work which may not necessarily add to the value of the video. Remember, the prime purpose is to communicate how Pyblish works at the highest possible level, using the assembly line as an analogy. Anything that takes away from that message is harmful, and anything that accentuates it is good. Lighting does neither or harm; in that it instead forces the audience to spend valuable thinking effort on how pretty/ugly the video it.

Other than that is of course my own inexperience with shading; what you see in the above screenshots is close to how far I am able to go, and even though I can get assistance from others, rendering is still a computationally heavy process which ultimately kills creativity and perhaps most importantly - time.

The goal is to have this video finished before the end of the year (that's two weeks, including the Christmas time-sink). This includes modeling, rigging, animation but also music, sound effects and typography/motion graphics for the text-based narrative. I got an interesting comment on the proposed style - "With a style like that [flat-shaded] I would guess you could finish the video in a week". Sadly, shading is only a very small portion of a finished film and doesn't account for time taken animating.

Environment

I had some ideas for an environment, but alas modeling it in a flat-shaded style turned out to be more difficult that I had anticipated.

Tomorrow I will skip ahead and get on with modeling the character, as above, in a flat-shaded style, but also including a hip and legs, for shot 190 in which the argue in full-frame. Modeling will also include 3 different character, each with his own personality, as reflected by their alternate "folds", as they will all consist of origami polygons.

Pre-production summary

Finally, based on all of the above, this is what we've got to work with.

Styleframe

This styleframe is meant to encapsulate the look and feel of the main character(s) along with a potential shading. The final shading will most likely not contain linework however, merely shapes with a limited palette of colors.

Animatic

(click to play)

The animatic, including temptrack for music. The intro is yet to be decided upon, the purpose here is to move from "an actual feature film" into how the main character then is created throughout the assembly line. The key thing is impact for viewers coming from Facebook and Youtube - whose attention span is < 3 seconds.

Shading

The model will end up looking something like this; flat, simple and made out of origami. Origami adds another level of detail that would otherwise be difficult to achieve with such simple characters as seen in the animatic. Another benefit of animating in 3d is that we're free to add this detail at very little cost to neither modeling nor articulation.

Animation

Finally, animation tests - each one taking about 30 minutes from start to finish, the goal being to figure out whether to go for producing the film in 3d (Autodesk Maya) or 2d (TVPaint).

It's a tough call, they both add something valuable to the mix, but I ended up going for 3d as I'd like the animation to be smooth and realistic-looking, to counter-act the otherwise flat and 2d-looking shading.