Research Boards

To identify which James Bond film will be animated, two in-depth boards have been created to outline the main features of two films, including the villains, vehicles and the generic conventions of James Bond incorporated into the film.

"Dr. No" was the film debut for James Bond, as it is the first in the series. The level of violence in this film is a very strong contrast to some of the later films, as the level in Dr. No is much more modest and leaves more to the audience's imagination. Whereas, some of the later films are much more graphic after Quentin Tarantino (Dargis, 2006) displaying what an action film can really like. Perhaps, a trailer for this film showing much more violence would give this film a new audience.

Again, "You Only Live Twice", was one of the early films of the series. This film had many more explosions, fast cars and Bond gadgets than "Dr. No". After watching this film, there is a gripping storyline, which would make an interesting trailer given that the storyboard complements the film. The results found for this film were that, there are many villains to animate with plenty of explosions to highlight in the trailer. This is apparent in the contrast in the findings from "Dr. No's" research board. "You Only Live Twice" will be the film that will be used for the trailer, as there is a lot of room for imagination for this film.

After the findings from the research, the trailer should incorporate many of the James Bond generic conventions to ensure it appeals to it's same target audience. These would include there been many fast vehicles that James Bond will utilise, along with casual meetings with women battles with the villains to save the world. This would then all be complemented by using the James Bond theme, which is the classic riff that immediately tells the audience that this is a Bond film.

Learning the basics in 3DS Max

 

The castle screenshot above, was created to learn the essential basics in 3DS Max. The tutorial covered how to create and manipulate basic shapes. The different screens on the left and right are different perspectives of the shapes being made. It was soon made clear that when an object may appear that it is in line with another object, when looking at another perspective, it will show that it is nowhere near. The other views on display that appear to be in a blueprint layout, help distinguish how close objects are to one another.

The next exercise involved creating a snowman, introducing an environment for the snowman and then adding a snow effect, so that when played, the animation would display the snow falling across the snowman.

Some new skills included naming different parts of the snowman's body to make it easier, when locating objects by name. Plus, I learnt how to create groups of objects to create one larger object, this was the case when creating the hat. 

The snow was created by placing a rectangle above the snowman, and rotating the rectangle so that when time was added to the animation, the snow fell across the screen.

Organic Modelling

The next exercise incorporated Organic Modelling; the concept of making an object look more organic. For example, creating fruit, organic objects rarely have very straight edges, instead they normally have soft curvaceous edges and surfaces. To create two instances of the apple, once one apple was made, the clone feature was used and then rotated to make it look like a new object that had been created. At the back again, by manipulating the vertices to make it look more organic, a new shape was created to make the pear. This was achieved by converting the objects to poly's.

Spline Modelling

Finally, the last concept that was covered was Spline Modelling. This works by creating a shape using the line tool and then modifying the shape using different types of curves to manipulate the shape. This is generally used when the shape that is desired is not available as a template. This can be very useful if vertices need to be added to the shape later, parts of the abstract shape can be extruded or bevels before more in depth detail is added to the overall shape.

Creating Horizon Lines

When creating a horizon line, it is important to always use a sphere instead of a box or rectangle. This is because as the objects rotate, with a sphere the horizon line stays the same. Whereas, with a rectangle or box it will extend towards a point. This makes it more difficult to create shapes but also there is no ecological validity using rectangles or boxes; these are not used in real life. The world is not rectangular, it is spherical. This will be an important note when creating storyboards and the trailer for the assignment.

Reaction to the Brief

The assignment for this module is to create a 30 second animated trailer for a James Bond film. The exhaustive list of the 23 films made for the martini drinking MI5 agent, means there is plenty of room for interpretation.

My first reaction to the brief is excitement, the brief appears to be very flexible. The point of a trailer for a film is to entice an audience to watch the film, this maybe by creating suspense or humour. As the film is James Bond, his representation is a cool, dangerous ladies man who saves mankind from the world's worst criminals on a daily basis. In my trailer, I will deliberately exploit these points for James Bond fans.

My initial ideas for the trailer include planes, fast cars, explosions and plenty of gadgets. The first step towards reaching the objective of completing this trailer is to create a research board to identify which James Bond film I will creating the trailer for.