Story

The very first thing I did upon receiving this project was sit down and come up with a story for both my layout and my character. This was hugely important to start thinking about my layout and my character as integral together and this story might even start to shape the character and look of the layout itself. It is as follows:

A Victorian Grand Hallway. My environment is an overly well kept and grandiose entrance hall designed to wow the many guests the Lord and Lady choose to entertain. Having no windows or portals to the bleak outside world of the time the hallway is lit by many homely and seemingly expensive lights, the centre of which being the grand chandelier, a symbol of the families wealth and importance. My environment will have a rich and luxurious appeal to an audience and take them back to the pompous and overly empiric British architecture of the Victorian era.

My character in the piece will be the head butler who's primary concern and genuine will is to protect the upkeep of this room on pain of the death. He is a man who will stop at nothing to maintain his posture and upper class demeanour and this will be reflected in his movements which will be governed by the characters wish to always try to snap back into these rigid, dignified poses. However try as he might things go wrong in the room and this character obsessed with his posture is forced into some very uncompromising and undignified situations and poses whilst trying to no avail to retain some of the dignity and poise he holds so dear.

Concept

Now I had my story draughted i was ready to use my thoughts and ideas form this to begin to craft designs for my layout and some the props within it:

Now I had my ideas and final design for my layout, I next needed to apply my focus to the character I had created in the story section. I began by creating a rough storyboard for my animation:

I know had a good feel for my character and what my animation would be about. The designing phase was now complete and I was ready to start actually building my layout and probs and begin to jump into maya and start modelling. Just before this however, I went online to gather a collection of images that I would use as references for building my models and keep me on the track of victorian architecture, below are of a few examples of these:

Now to begin modelling.

Modelling

My scene was now modelled and had all of the props I was going to be needing for my animation. The next stage would be to begin UV mapping all of these modelled objects which is the in-between stage before texturing.

UV Mapping

UV mapping is the process of laying out face UV's on the surface of an object which will have textures laid upon it. UV's are crucial in assigning a set amount of texture space per each relative face and so really helps to avoid stretch or distortion in said textures.

Texturing

With my UV's all manually laid out correctly and ready to be textured, it was time to open Photoshop alongside Maya and begin to create the textures to lay on my objects.

Floor Plan

My layout was now complete. I had my objects, my room boundaries and they were all modelled, mapped and textured. Everything was ready to begin animation. Shown below are the orthographic wireframe floor-plan images for my layout:

Front View:

Side View:

Top View:

Perspective Lambert View:

Final Render:

My Layout design is now complete. It is time to begin animating.

Animation

I firstly began my animation in 2D form. this would allow me to get a good feel for the animation and movement in a medium I am much more comfortable with. I would then be able to transfer the poses and keys to the 3 dimensional animation software in Maya and make the whole process that much easier. As I have shown earlier in the concepting phase I had come up with my idea of a Butler obsessed with his posing and his neatness and rigidity put into situations of indignity and embarrassment. I had the narrative of a faulty candle or lightbulb which was my characters main enemy or problem and I would have him overcome this problem in a hopefully humorous way using a montage. With this locked down idea in mind I spent the next few weeks creating and refining this rough animatic:

From this animatic I was then able to go into Maya and begin Animating. Shown below is my final animation:

As can be seen the final animation is much shorter. This is due to time constraints. I had issues with a job going on at the time and this interfered with my animating stage which is why I have only been able to get the first section of animation complete in 3D. This is an unfortunate issue but I feel the 2D animation piece shows the story in great enough detail to cover the loss of the 3D ending. It would have been nice to finish and I will get round to finishing the piece off but I definitly feel that my layout which was the main focus of this project and also learning to animate which is something that can clearly be seen here in this movie. 

My layout and animation is now complete.