I mentioned yesterday that the main purpose of this blog was to talk about a short film that I’ve asked to do the VFX on…. So I thought I’d give you a brief run-down of the film and the work that I’m expecting to be doing on it….

The film itself is called Roy’s Odyssey (temp title at the moment - it might stay, it might not….), and it’s being made by a new production company called “Lost The Plot” (I’ll chuck up a link when they get their website up and running). LTP was formed by three recent graduates of the London Film Academy.

I believe it’s currently looking to be approximately 20 minutes long, although as it’s very early days at the moment (the script is still being written), this could, of course be subject to change.

The basic premise of the film is of a comic-book artist who used to be hugely successful, but who sold-out, and now spends his life doing pretty much nothing…. (apologies for any inconsistencies in my explanation of the plot at any stage - right now, I only know what I’ve been told in a few meetings with the director - I have yet to actually read the proper synopsis….)

There are four sequences that I know I’ll be working on so far (until the meeting yesterday, I thought there were only two, so I won’t be surprised if more crop up….):

The film opens with the main character dreaming that he is one of his comic-book creations. There is a big super-hero fight. This will account for two of the sequences - one where the two guys involved are flying. The director told me that his ideal sequence would be similar in style to the big fight in The Matrix (can’t remember if it was 2 or 3) where Neo and Agent Smith are fighting with all the other Smiths watching - the one with “the punch”. Now we’re (obviously) not going to get to that kind of level of VFX, but we’re going to very carefully plan out what we can and can’t do, and I’m determined that it won’t be horribly cheesy….

The second part of the fight takes place on a roof-top, and will involve a ’super-powers’ fight… This will involve lasers-from-finger-tips from one character, and lasers-from-eyes from the other. (I believe the cheesy-ness of this is meant to show quite how far this artist has fallen since his glory-days of being a popular and well-respected artist)

The other two sequences are back in the ‘real world’. The first of these is the guy’s gold-fish that talks to him. This will be a full CG goldfish for the shots where it’s talking (I did briefly toy with the idea of doing a mouth-replacement on a real gold-fish, but something tells me that we won’t be able to get it to stay still enough for that….)

The last sequence is another part of the artist’s imagination, where his old comic-book character comes to life (on the page) and talks to him. I’ll know more about how we’re going to do this one when I get a better idea of what kind of style the director wants the comic drawn in… Either we’ll go with pure hand animation, or it’ll be animated and the rendered to look drawn… More news on this one when I have more details at my end….

Anyway, that should give you some kind of idea of what I’m going to be doing on this film - ‘ll keep you updated on the status, and at some stage, I’ll dedicate a whole post to going more in-depth into each of the sequences, and how I plan to do them at the moment.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2005 at 9:22 and is filed under Roy's Odyssey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.