Final Major Project: Next Steps

This is the plan I made for the project I will complete in 2021, year three before christmas. It is not set in stone and will definately be changed in every way, however, this is what I currently imagine the project may contain.

One of my many desires for the next steps would be to work in a team of productive, organised, communicative, and quick teammates for the final major project. This will even out the workload, in order to relax some of the pressure of working independently and allowing us to support each other through the process. I will ensure to make an informed and thorough decision about the final project’s theme, plot and medium. I would like to employ an experimental approach to the final major project. My intentions include using 3D software to create a professional visual outcome to a high standard. During this, I will ensure that I have learned enough about the process to create that high level. For example, if weight painting is involved, I will need further practice and research of techniques. Furthermore, I will continue the project through developed and high-quality sketches, mood boards, character and environment design and artwork finished to quality renders.

For the final major project, I will decide from one of the themes that I included within my summer project. One that I am passionate about and can decide on a well-structured narrative. From each other the themes, PTSD, survival and difficult choices, I have planned a few possible plotlines that the theme could undertake, and the way that the animation would look. 

The project’s overall aim will be to connect with the audience on a personal level, provoking an emotional reaction. They watch passively while the protagonist undergoes a great struggle. An idea that I am interested in, concerning the theme of difficult choices, is a storyline where I immediately push the protagonist into a brutal and nightmarish scenario where they have an impossible choice to make. A moral dilemma, for example, where a child will be severely whipped for the crime of the parent, rather than having the parent executed. I have a strong image in my mind of a child sitting in the rain, on the muddy, soft ground, next to a raised column of (about 5) hanged men and women. Then he looks up at them and looks back down to the ground. He is sitting close to them which should increase the uneasy feeling the audience would have from the situation.

In this or another scenario, I also imagine the protagonist in this type of serious scene, but near the end of the animation, they are pulled out. The protagonist realises that they are in a group gathering discussing a hypothetical conversation. However, to the protagonist and to the audience, the scenario felt all too real. Then the last act of all would be someone talking directly to the audience, head-on (to the protagonist in first-person view). And they would say something like ‘What would you choose?” This would effectively break the fourth wall and ensure that the narrative was taken seriously and personally for the audience as they would be forced to ask that question for themselves.