Backgrounds:
Top to bottom:
10 cylinder engine for the whole gun base. I took the same design Russians do on their tanks
Gas pump connects the left side, transmitting fuel and water to the engine
Shaft transimitting dynamic forces generated from the engine to the wheels of the gun base (not shown on this graph)
Water main control room is modified by the civilians to send water to their shelters.
Heat disspensor is modified by the civilians to harvest the heat to boil the water for civil use and water the crops on the right hand side. This is the warmest place inside the base, this is also where that hot pot scene takes place.
The main cable transmits power from the power station
The Fan was used to cool down the base. Now it`s stopped becasue people need heat more than ever. That is why there are so many steam comes down from the upper floors.
Waste water goes down to the power plant to recycle.
Tokamak is one of the most promising approach to a sustainable, profitable nuclear fusion power plant. In real life we have not achieve this clean energy breakthrough, yet in our story they somehow did it before 2020s.
It is a very very advancing technology as it basically provides unlimited power. We are thinking to change it to something more primitive, like a traditional nuclear power station or a geothermal power plant.
We did this to show you that some decision we made looks like we just use real life objects as a SF assets. It is not true at all. We go deep into settings and almost obssessed with useless details. Our newly ideas for this projects is to design a group of advanced civil engineering equipments for the gun base. As the equipments we use nowadays is unable to support such great structure plans.
We even started to seriously think what is a more scientifical way of ground breaking visual effects style that we are going to use:
We believe to build a grounded world, such details is needed and is way more attractive than orally speak out the settings. Those settings are not as powerful as the gun or the cloth our character are wearing, but they create an unnoticing feeling for audiences and overall they perform in a deeper way.
And it`s fun. I mean, a rocket powered crane, how cool is that.
Characters and more.
There`s more coming in the future. We plan to do a full design on the bullet(protagonist’s shuttle) designs of background characters and more.
Why we put the plane together with the characters? Because animators need to perform everything like an actor/actress. There is certain ways to show a happy person, there is also a certain way to show how a plane fly. We treat our little plane the same as our characters. It serves a lot.
Most of the big artiliary has an issue of unable to ignite all propell fuel at the same time, causing great loss onf propell power. Schwewer Gustav, world’s biggest artiliary has this issue, causing it has far less power than it was designed to have.
Leo
Leo`s storyworld is based on magic.There’s no actual settings of where the magic comes from and it is almost a war crime to combine a SF world with a magic one.
So we changed his idea from a magical flying bird to a landkruzer.
Only this one does not run on lands, it runs on Ice clouds. Like Leo`s storyworld, we divided the world to two part.
We had two storylines, each for our parts in this project, and we designed the ending to have both side involved. I wrote it down as it`s a very easy thing to do but it`s not. We sat at the table, we ate chips and we spent about 4 afternoons trying to figure out how to make the story goes well with both of us involved. Here’s the meeting record of our ideas.
Sadly, we met setbacks, suggestions, mainly forcused on our length of the animation. Two storyline requires at least 10 minutes of animation to juts barely tell the story right. So we had to delete Leo`s idea one by one until one day I asked him, is it okay to remove all of his ideas.
I know what you feels, I also think it`s not fair for him to do so. I asked him several times about these decisions, he is always the generous one, saying that as long as our characters and animation look cool enough, he won`t complain a thing.
We kept his two worlds idea, and we will shatter the ice layer at the very end, kind of what he want for his story to ends.
Stories and how did we end up here.
This is a part of our storyboard that is supposed to be our prologue. We have a detailed world setting and we want to show it to others. These four scenes shows starvation, natural disasters and more wars. if you read our storyboard in my another post, you’ll see there are far more scenes about the story and its settings.
We followed the school’s advice to choose only the essence of the story, so here comes these three:
I would like to tell the story in detail here:
First part: The girl was drilling ice with an engineer. It is a daily job for them to get water supply for the whole colony. The girl convinced the engineer to allow her into this ‘saving the world’ project.
Second part: The girl finds out that she actually needs to do a time travel to save the whole world. She then starts training and preparing for the trip. This is the most important part of the story as she understands what hero is here for, what she`s actually saving. The term ‘world’ no longer being a vague concept or a title on a world map, but a very precise group of person she loves and willing to protect.
Third part: All traning and preparing is nothing if you don`t do it real. The girl starts the time jump and certainly the plan fails and she’s about to die. She then understand what it actually cost to be a hero, the fear of losing life, the burden of duty on her shoulders. She understands the idea of heroism and finally did the ultimate sacrifice.
This is the journey of her mental development of accepting and becoming a hero. We want to make sure that our audience can follow up her decisions as being a hero and save others is not a normal thoughts in common folks. That is why we choose to elimate the information gap between the audiences and our protagonist. They receive the amount of information at the same speed, they ask questions and get answered at the same time as our protagonist. So that hopefully audiences can find the decisions protagonist made reasonable as they stands on the same side facing the problem. There`s only a very thin paper between asking too much and calling it duty for heroism.
If you watched the animatics before, You may wonder what`s the role of protagonist’s mother in this plot. She is what we called a ‘pioneer’. She died a couple of years before becasue of the time travel plan failed. We designed her to be the hero our girl is trying to become and understand. we want to make this connection to be known but weak. A invisible bond between her and her mother that somehow leads herself to the same track.
She will be giving the answers to our question and she is the one who gives the message of our story.
1, Value the trip itself instead of valueing the final outcome.
2, Family and friends support in the back support us to do great works
3, No matter how much it takes, laugh at setbacks and get through it.
We want these messages to show up not only at the final part but also throughout the whole story, instead of merely saying it but showing it through protagonist’s life.
Let`s hope that can be done.
Creating in crevices.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XOdown20MKeOCOAQN5VMzpt6Lq00vpQm/view?usp=sharing
This link above contains a storyboard. If you could kindly download it, it would help all of us. If you don`t want to waste your 10MB on your PC, here is a very blury version of it.
This storyboard will gets to become a real animation. Because of the constant setbacks from my teammate and from the school. That is, unhelpful comments and suggestions to the plot of the event, most of them demands to rewrite everything. Constant and discouraging questions about my abilities of finishing this projects on time. Demanding to have one`s own input in the TEAMwork yet does not accept any orders from the director.
I tried to be nice for 4 weeks and I find myself keep throwing away my brightest ideas for this project. During the making of my last two project (Explorary practice and personal project, GSMD project), I followed school`s advice and delete most of my work in the middle of making. These decisions impacted extremely heavily on the time planning of the entire production process, often requiring me to stay up late to catch up with the site in the final weeks to redo the deleted sections to the school’s input. It is a reasonable and common stage of any creative making process yet I reject to do it for the third times. It is not only me cannot handle the change such dramatic and tired, but also I cannot do this to my teammate, eradicating all of their hardwork and ask them to redo another. I have no problem sitting in front of my computer doing animation for a whole week straight not walking out from my dorm, I cannot ask others to follow as they have their own life.
So I spent 4 weeks doing nothing, but luckily we get rid of the trouble and now we are working very hard to cover up the 4 weeks losses.
I mean, we spent only 2 weeks to make a 7 minutes animatics. Just imagine what we can do if we have a full 6 weeks from the start.
SF and chitchat
There is a very big difference between hardcore SF, soft SF and space opera.
Soft SF, is based more on the story than the science part, it doesn`t need too much realistic scientific support as hardcore SF.
Hardcore SF, compare to soft SF, values the science very much. It has to be very scientific and realistic that it`s almost believeable enough to make people trying it in real life. That is the reason why some directors uses suggestions from scientists and professors when making SF movies.
And space opera is just traditional opera stories but changing horses to space ships.
Sci-fi has many authors who categorise their work as science fiction stories because of its wide audience and because it fits into the context of today’s readers who are rapidly advancing in technology. However many of them lack a realistic and believable scientific background. This is not to say that their work is inferior or boring, however the sci-fi that we seek is more focused on real and valid scientific settings that make people realise that these designs are actually achievable in reality. We need that sense of realism, and a sense of recognition from those involved in science when they see our animations.
Are we doing a hardcore SF animation? I can hardly answer that now because there are very high standards we need to achieve to be categorized as a hardcore SF genre. But it is certainly our goal to make it as realistic as possible.
That is why me as the director has to be very concise and careful about what we are going to draw. I cannot afford a real scientist to help us to solve a time machine problem so I have to learn a lots of things about the ‘technical’ part of this project.
We had a timeline for our world settings, we carefully designed the dates and time of the events so it makes sense and realistic.
I made a pdf talking about merely the background settings.
If you read those you’ll notice that I mentioned the aspect ‘no atomsphere’ in the settings. One of the result of taking away atomsphere is that all aircrafts that we use in real life won`t work as they are powered by the lift force.
Without air pressure there are no aerodynamics anywhere on earth. So we have to design a whole bunch of aircrafts for our characters to use. You may notice that some of them looks like our space shuttle in real life and others uses mere rocket engines. We designed this ‘rocket culture’ for our world becasue well, traditional planes won`t work.
I wrote an article about the gun base and how it should looks like at the very early stage. I did it so my teammates may have a better understanding of what we are doing. Here are some of it:
- gun barrel
Considering that the main purpose is to accelerate the projectile, the barrel design should focus on the following points:
- (b) A long enough barrel to accommodate the long acceleration section of the projectile. In this regard, effects such as the deadweight of conventional gun tubes can be ignored, and excessively long tubes can be supported by additional structures such as mounts. If tube recoil is used, then the barrel should still not be too long, and if the moving barrel is to be supported, the mounts should not be directly connected to the barrel.
- A barrel with sufficient thickness and strength to withstand the ultra-high chamber pressures of firing. Externally, the added strength can be expressed by adding a ring of metal to the outside of the traditional barrel.
- Tube recoil is considered, and the nests are specially designed so that the nest aligned with the barrel recoils along with the barrel when fired, while the other nests are in place. Muzzle retractor is optional. Consideration can be given to adding a muzzle retractor to exaggerate the muzzle smoke during firing and at the same time share part of the recoil.
- Retractors and Re-entrants
As noted above, the parker neighbourhood device and the nest of rounds are together. The rotating shaft of the nest is the hydraulic parker and the hydraulic reentrant is above the nest of rounds to be fired against the barrel.
- wheelbarrow
It is proposed to use a five-round rotary nest with five rounds loaded in advance. If necessary, new cartridges and charges can be loaded from the exposed nests on the pre-fire side, and the exposed nests on the post-fire side can be de-cased or guided. The overall proportions of the nests are longer than those of the revolver’s nests, and each nest is filled with a cartridge at the front, followed by a separate charge of propellant. In addition, there is no separate breech for each chamber, and there is a uniform, self-locking breech and firing pin at the rear of the chamber, which is aligned with the barrel. The firing and firing pin reset cocking structure is basically the same as that of the revolver.
- projectile
In the case of a line-bore gun, it is proposed to consider a split-body design, where the outermost body (the butt) rotates with the rifling and separates after discharging to reach the cruise track; the inner part, including the manned module, does not rotate, and the engine at the rear end fires after discharging to continue accelerating and extends small stabilising wings to stabilise the direction of flight.
- propellant
It is proposed that reference be made to the Paeonia self-propelled gun’s split charge, with the last section of the charge at the end being self-contained with its own primer and centre tube.
Do you see it now? There is a reason why we set our story in 2020s but not some far futures, there is a reason why our designs looks not advanced but like real planes. There is a reason why we use a big gun to do space travels instead of opening a magical portal and throw people inside. It`s not we cannot have magical-machine-ideas, it’s because it is way more fun to build up a real world instead of rogue fiction. We spent time and effort behind all those ideas to make it real.
It`s never just a gun.
Ver.5 in the making…
3 BY 3 info but detailed (mostly about the chosen one)
The idea comes from my own preference for armoury mechanisms and the radical, simple, consequence-free solutions that humans have taken to solving problems in the last century. In more detail, this form of thinking comes from the design philosophy of World War II military ordnance. Before the invention of the targeted high-speed missile, the evaluation of the armed forces of each country was almost always “the bigger the better”.
Japan built the largest battleship in history, the Yamato, which was so large that it was called a hotel on the sea, with several kitchens and air-conditioning systems, and so luxurious that it did not look like a ship for war. Britain designed the Tortoise heavy assault tank, which was too big and thick to have enough speed to be used on a real battlefield. The United States built the B-29 Superfortress, the largest bomber in the world at the time. The worldview I designed continues this design philosophy and exaggerates it to the extreme.
Ordnance armaments were city-sized and capable of destroying a country in a single blow. You may question why this outdated, wasteful, and ridiculous design philosophy and history is continued in my work, but it is because mankind is always repeating its own mistakes, and it is because this philosophy led to the destruction of human civilisation in my story.
There are numerous films and animations using this style even way before the WW2. This idea was known as BDO (Big dumb objects) among science fiction lovers, It is used to describe any mysterious object, usually unknown origin and has immense power, in a story which generates an intense sense of wonder by its mere existence.
The idea is more liberal than the one above, it doesn’t touch on some of the more sensitive topics of today’s world, but rather aims to do the best it can in terms of graphics and design. This project is designed to simply explore the beauty and limits of 2D animation, with no storytelling requirements.
The idea came from my love of action films. My project last year was about an action scene, and I think I’ve progressed so much in this area of design that it’s time to make another one to prove my progress.