Chelsea Butler

Not exactly the best image but this is a really interesting feature! I might consider using it within my project.

Figure 1. The Birds Movie Poster Alfred Hitchcock’s “ The Birds ” (1963) presents it’s audience with the consistent droning of frantically flapping wings and the cries of both birds and humans. Such a spectacle may have started off light-hearted, but as the film progresses, it has a series of rather drastic mood swings. Contrary to belief, some individuals would say that this film is used as a representation to many things such as the behaviour of women, the perils of futuristic machinery and how it may come to destroy us, or it could just be about rather malicious birds. Partaking on the birds representing women idea, it is notable that the overall film is mostly based around the emotions of women. Symbolism of the birds behaviours portray how catty women can be, with possibly the violent outbreaks relating to woman’s stereotypical catty attitude. As Xan Brooks speculates in a review, “ When teasing out the meaning of The Birds , many critics take their lead from the hyster...

Pitch Presentation Fantastic Voyage Animatic from Chelsea Butler on Vimeo .

Fantastic Voyage Animatic from Chelsea Butler on Vimeo .

Fantastic Voyage Initial Storyboard by OhThatChels

So I think that I'm going for an arcade sort of approach to the selection screens, taking things to the more retro side of gaming, I guess? I've included the main characters on the title screen and with the character selection screen, each playable character is seen as a silhouette until the cursor is hovering over them.

As the title says, I've created some examples as to how the "gameplay" might look like during the animation. I even included a power up! (More on that later!) Watch this space for more!

Here's an example as to how I could go about creating my environment. To make it more authentic to a side scroller game, I have included a "ceiling and floor" which I have brought into the foreground, and then I pushed the background behind by using slightly lighter colours. In a way, this emphasises the effect of a tunnel, which I wanted to convey here in particular to display how I thought the bloodstream could look. The little critter on screen is an example design for the sporozoite organism.

I have to admit, this project is pretty tough, and unfortunately I have been slightly struggling with grasping my concept. But I have managed to jot down an idea of how I could take it, and to demonstrate this, I have drawn up a few cell thumbnails to portray the style I could aim for. As I will be creating a "game" to show the life cycle, I thought about creating sprites for the cells and they could potentially become playable characters within the sequence.

UCA Animation Showreel from Chelsea Butler on Vimeo .

And so the design process begins! And I thought that I should start with some character designs, and for one of my main characters that will appear in the character select screen, I have chosen to create a mosquito, seeing as it plays quite a role in the malaria life cycle. Because I am creating a "game", I wanted my character to appear somewhat cartoon-y. I didn't want to over complicate the designs as I thought it would be best to keep it simple for when I transform the character into a game sprite. I looked at images of mosquitos and jotted down a few key words to aid with my designs. The outer shell of the insects body appears robust, hence the armoured outfit, and the limbs are thing and skeletal, so I played with the thickness of the arms and legs, including sharp edges on the armour to display his bad guys traits.

At the beginning of today's session, Meg showed us a clip from Disney Pixar's "Ratatouille" of the scene where Remmy is tasting food and reacting to it. So our task for today was to create a short animation to describe the taste of a food. We couldn't be literal about it though, we needed to be a bit more abstract in our approach. I decided to describe tomato pasta, to which I wrote down a few key words to help me out. I also needed to consider how colour play into it, and I couldn't be literal about it, so with my key words, I decided to keep the tone warm and smooth to emphasise what I perceive my food to be. 

Fantastic Voyage Online Green Light Review 1 by OhThatChels

Figure 1. 'North by Northwest Movie Poster' (1959) The more comedic side of the infamous director has finally come through in Alfred Hitchcock’s “ North by Northwest ” (1959). With charming characters and the classic camera angles, this film is sure to please it’s audience with an atmosphere as that of a James Bond spoof. As Hitchcock has become well known for his thrilling suspense filled features, some would consider this film to be a new perspective on the director’s style, pointing out the comedic aspects of the film. As stated in one review by A. H. Weiler, “ With a tongue-in-cheek attitude and a breezy sense of humour, they [Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman] are off in high gear right at the beginning as they spin the somewhat improbable yarn of a successful, handsome Madison Avenue executive, who is mistaken for a Federal intelligence man by foreign agents and forcibly pushed into a succession of macabre situations that shock, amaze, perplex, and anger our once-debo...