Final animation:
Planning
I plan to base my animation on the poem “Dulce et decorum est” by Wilfred Owen.
I already have a basic idea of what I want to do.
Short version:
Images of war while an old soldier talks to his friend and ends up with poem’s words.
Longer detailed version:
Darkness. Then the sound of a match getting fired. A dark room becomes visible, a soldier sits at the table with his old friend. Little lighting, a dim candle lights the scene. The man sits on the chair and lights up a cigarette (or just sits down at the table with his friend if the cigarette part is hard to do in maya). We only see parts of the soldier, like maybe the leg of him when he sits down, the hand lighting the cigar, his mouth as he takes the cigar to it. He won’t be revealed just yet.
Monologue starts.
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high
zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est”
“If you could hear..” (camera films his mouth speaking)
Cuts to a scene of war in which a helmet is dropped and a man falls to his knees.
“At every jolt..” (cut back to his mouth speaking – lipsync)
Cut again to men shooting from behind sacks.
“The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”
Cut to war scene. A soldier coughing blood. Dialogue continues. “obscene as cancer” (shooting sound) zoom in on a bullet that travels in the air. Cut to a man’s chest being shot, he brings his arms slowly to the wound. “bitter as the cud” Cut to a young man screaming for his friend (the man who just got shot is the friend). Zoom out from the man. Another cut of the field where men died. Bodies on the ground. Death walking amongst them for few seconds, raising it’s arms in a cold embrace.
The camera zooms out and we see that the image was a reflection in the character’s eyes. He breathes heavily and is frightened. Looks around in despair and then catches his breath and looks down.
The image blurs into the soldier now, old, sitting at the table, looking down in sorrow. He looks at the camera (we, the audience, become the friend) “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est”. He then lights off the candle. Darkness again.
“Pro Patria Mori”
This plan would mean having at least 4 models. One of the man being shot, one of the young soldier, one of the old soldier and one of death. However! I plan to model only one full body of a soldier. The man being shot won’t show his face so I can use the uniform (especially since all soldiers have the same uniform). Then for the young and old main character, I will keep the same body, just change the face. And finally, death which will be a separate model. So in total I will have to model 2 full bodies and 2 different faces. Manageable.
I already did a few sketches:
Also researched briefly what style I am going for.
Next Step: watching war movies like Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge, War Horse etc to see how they did it.
After doing more research I decided upon a disney infinity style.
Initial design which I am quite happy with:
Some expressions and different faces:
Animatic with sound:
I tried making the cuts blurred but it actually made everything confusing and hard to follow so I think I will stick to the blunt cuts or maybe try something else like sweep in or a mix of all 3 in the final editing stage.
Colour treatments
I plan to have a more green-yellow based coloured scene in the present while during war, I am going to have a colder palette, with more blues and greens, less yellows. to keep everything tied up though I will keep the green tones throughout the whole piece, which is also typical colour of soldier uniforms.
Bunch of props:
Initial storyboard:
After the feedback I got, I realised I am too ambitious and this would take too long to make. So i decided to scrap the first frame where the soldier and his friend are seen from a wide shot. That way I don’t have to model a whole scene and I can focus on the battleground scene.
Modelling:
Soldier:
I wanted my character to have that Disney Infinity look but still function well with skinning and rigging and human movement so I had to go a bit off my initial design. It ended up having the neck/torso area too big but I didn’t bother to change it again.
Soldier retopo:
I sculpted and polypainted the soldier in zbrush, then exported it in maya, retopologised the soldier with maya, uv’d it and then baked the base colour and normal maps with xnormal. Once they were all baked I took them to photoshop and stitched them together based on the number of shader I was gonna use.
There are two versions of the soldier, one old and one young in his soldier outfit. The face is the same though.
Rigging:
For rigging I had a very generous person gift me an advanced rigging tutorial (maybe a bit too advanced, there was no need for nose controls and upper head controls but I did it anyway for fun). Most useful controls were mouth controls, eyelids and jaw, as well as eye controller.
For the body rig I used advanced rig 5 which did the controls for me, I just had to skin the character.
Death:
Simple model with little polycount and minimal colours sculpted and textured in zbrush and zeremeshed inside zbrush instead of maya as I won’t be really needing that much movement from this character.
Environments:
I modeled the environments from scratch (except the trees in the war scene which were a free 3DS max model I downloaded) and textured in Mari using hand painted textures as well as some images off the internet which I painted over and altered a bit.
The ground has a custom substance shader which I downloaded and set up to look like dirt. I tried going for a displacement map (or height map) to get a more realistic look but for some reason it wouldn’t work so I stuck with normal map for now. I might try out different shaders, see if others work.
Props:
I also modelled the bullet, war sacks, candle, matches, rocks and gun which will appear in different scenes. For the war scene I also made a few fog textures in photoshop and set their transparency to get that green gas look in the distance.
Dead Soldiers:
I took the base head I did and with the help of the already existing facial rig and soft selection I changed their faces to look a bit different and I also added a moustache to one of them. I also changed the face texture to a more bloody one as well as the eyes to a more milky, dead look. Charming.
Lighting:
With the lighting I had two colours in mind. Orange sunset for the tavern scene and dark green for the war scene.
I will adjust the lighting in the war scene more accurately for each scene when I start animating each scene.
I am aware that the texture on this wall is smeared, it must have happened while texturing in Mari, I will fix it later on.
Animating:
I already finished the lipsync parts, will move on to the war scenes.
Animating
My biggest challenge was to animate stills. Animate the soldier looking in the distance. His head would only move slightly but it would move nonetheless. I also had troubles with timing, not within the scene, but when it came to editing everything together. Turned out some shots were too short, some were too fast, some were too lingering.
Despite following the storyboard, my timing was all over the place. Made me realise that I need to make my preproduction way more detailed, like a rough animation almost, to capture all the details that will be put into the scenes and to get a feel of how all shots work together. Because after rendering everything, it is too late to fix major issues. But now I know!
Post Production
Altering the look of the animation
I altered the images in ps, using automated batch option. I wanted to separate the war scenes from the soldier talking so I added a poster filter which added lines to the scene, making it look more 2D.
Final animation:
iulia matei art 