OUAN406 - Designing a City

When it came to designing the city for the animation piece, it was unclear to me at first how I would approach the task. I had many different ways that it could be done, all through different means and would take varying amounts of time. At first I thought I would build it out of 3D, however, as doable as this would I would have to make it very simplified to the point where the city would lose it's character when I shot it, and I didn't have the time to create a full 3D city by myself. At this point it occurred to me that I'm putting too much emphasis on the design, when I need to make time to shoot the actual animation, so balancing the time here between design and production became something I needed to address. I needed something simpler.

Another idea that I came up with is creating the landscape in Maya. I feel I lacked the experience and ruled this out straight away from my list of options, as I would need to access facilities that were unavailable to me during certain parts of the Easter break such as when I go home, and the hardware I own isn't powerful enough to run software like Maya to the extent where I feel I can be productive. A software I am capable of using away from University however is Adobe After Effects CC. Which I also feel I am fairly competent at using despite the possible need for some assistance from the web when I hit a brick wall, for example. Nothing too complicated. My idea to keep with the overall aesthetic of the animation is to produce the buildings the same way as the interior environment and cut my designs of them using the CNC router and the laser cutter. The idea here is consistency. Even if I can't create a full 3D model of a city (which does sound ambitious now I've said that) I can try to emulate it - even to a lesser degree, by manufacturing 2D cut-outs of buildings and layering them up in After Effects before having a camera pass through them. This would give the illusion to the audience that they are moving through the city, and I feel like if I do it right, then I should have no problem using this technique.



I've started to manufacture various buildings, looking closely at the Gothic architecture from my mood board on decorative windows etc. I've tried to include cathedrals, towers, bridges etc. that I can layer over the top of one another and hopefully portray the fantasy of a city alive. Touches of steam, whether and lighting should help to create this fantasy city. Here's what I've got so far;