Chelsea Butler

Fantastic Voyage Art Of

The Malaria Life Cycle from Chelsea Butler on Vimeo . Fantastic Voyage Art Of

This example was mainly just so I could to see what I needed to do to make the animation. As this is just a quick playblast, the final product will be of a much better quality. I think I need to now decide whether I should have the back grounds move, or the character, and then see if I can make the movements slightly rigid to keep in tune with the 8-bit theme.

So these are hopefully what I aim to use as the backgrounds for my animation. Each environment will represent a different stage in the "game". I also decided to use a marshland sort of environment for the mosquito stages as that is one of their known habitats. Admittedly, the liver environment was the most difficult to design, but keeping things simple has helped. Marshland Bloodstream Mosquito Midgut Liver

I took a similar approach to the sporozoite animation with this character, but due to it''s shape I had to tweak a few elements to make it look more natural. I subtly moved each cube for this animation, rather than making it exaggerated to fit with the short and stout shape of the cell. Test 1: Test 2:

The idea for this little test was to make it as 8-bit and pixellated as possible, so to achieve this look, I created two different positions/frames for the character and repeated them back to back to have that rigid movement. Below is a short clip of how the animation moves in Maya and underneath that is an animated gif to emphasise what I hope to achieve.

Texturing was quite fun to do today, and although I may of had to tackle some image size problems, I think I've managed to fix them and created my models to what I wanted them to be. Model A: Sporozoite Model B: Merozoite Model C: Mosquito

So that's my characters modeled and ready for texturing! I'm just keeping it simple to keep in tune with the pixelated theme of my animation. It took A LOT of extruding faces but all models are made from cubes in Maya. Model A: Sporozoite Model B: Merozoite Model C: Mosquito

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.

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.

Fantastic Voyage Online Green Light Review 1 by OhThatChels