Making Giants - The Idea

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : Howdy, Joey here at School of Motion. And I want to welcome you to part one of this video series, where we're going to be going through every single step of the process in the making of a short motion design-y film. We're going to go through coming up with the idea of gathering, reference materials, doing thumbnail sketches, cutting an animatic modeling, texturing rigging, animating compositing, and sound design. It's going to be a very long series and hopefully you're going to learn a ton. One of the things we're trying to do at school emotion is push past the limitations of a single tutorial mindset where you kind of learned maybe a trick or two, and maybe that's helpful. Maybe it's not. Maybe you're just watching that tutorial because it's kind of entertaining. This is going to be a serious learning endeavor, and hopefully you get a lot out of it. And please let us know if you do, don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this series. And there are a lot of them you can follow along. You can mess around with the project files and see exactly what we're doing in these videos. So thank you. Hopefully this goes well, fingers crossed. And uh, here we go.
Joey Korenman : So where do you start with a project like this? It's just so big. It's massive because you can make absolutely anything you want. There's no client and there's only a deadline because you say there is, and the thing is done when you say it's done well. In very broad terms, there are basically two ways to approach something like this. Let's call them top-down and bottom-up so bottom up is the way most things get made. You start with a concept and then you move on to a script, maybe some style frames and mood boards, stuff like that. And then you storyboard the whole thing out. You cut an animatic and maybe you find some music you like for attempt track, and then you animate and then you composite and you sound design and you finish the thing. So you start very broad and you end up refining and sharpening the piece along the way.
Joey Korenman : But the start of the process is the initial concept, a different, but no less valid way of doing this is to start at the top. Albert Omoss talks about this a bit in episode 69 of the collective podcast, which is awesome by the way, uh, sometimes you have a vision in your head of some cool half-baked thing and you just need to get that vision out. But, you know, it's, half-baked, it's totally without context. So you make up a context for it. Like maybe there's some cool artwork that inspired you or a new tool you want to try out. So in a way you can start with the execution and then back into a concept that makes sense. This is what I did for giants.
Joey Korenman : I've recently inspired by low poly artwork. I follow Timothy J. Reynolds of turn his left home.com w has such a hard URL to say, I follow Tim on Twitter. Uh, and I've become a big fan of his work and of his style. Low poly is pretty popular these days, and it really has some huge advantages. If you decide to use it as a style, you can get away with a bit less modeling and texturing because you're really just going after the basic form of something and with the right lighting and rendering and compositing, it can still be very, very beautiful. So I wanted to try creating a piece that told a bit of a story and had some emotion to it is so much of the work we do as motion designers. These days is clever and well executed, but sort of emotionally dead inside. I mean, I love a good explainer video, just as much as the next person, but I thought it would be a great creative challenge to try and make the viewer feel a little something if I could pull it off.
Joey Korenman : And finally, I wanted to try out X particles for cinema 4d, which I know seems very shallow just to try and shoe horn, some emotional concept into an execution based around a desire to play with a new toy. But there it is. I really wanted to learn X particles. I started to have this vague vision in my head of a cool desert scene with like a low poly plant or a flower standing in the shadow of this enormous obstacle. And then growing up the side of it to overcome this gigantic thing and it's path. So step one, for me in these kinds of situations is just to saturate my brain with reference. I find that it helps me generate ideas when I can sift through a bunch of cool artwork and I might get ideas about color palette or composition, or I might get derailed and ended up with a new idea entirely.