Nelly Luckett : BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester

So fantastic voyage is over and it brings us to the end of a rather packed year. This project was by far the most intense that we’ve had, and presented me with the most challenges but equally resolved to be the most rewarding. My film is not perfect, neither are my characters or modelling, however I can safely say they have come a long way in the short few weeks and I have learnt a lot. Despite a large a amount of technical issues along the way, I have still managed to produce what I believe to be an overall successful film with a charming and informative style. There are a few things I would like to go back into and fix. These include animation glitches, which although small, annoy me hugely; solving the unknown skinning problems with Charles’ hand which causes random spikes to appear on it; as well as cleaning and sharpening up some of my matte paintings. These are all thing which would improve the overall aesthetic and style of the piece, but I simply ran out of time to do them....

While I'm putting the finishing touches to my animation and getting everything exported and packaged up, I thought I'd release a little Sneak Peek of the final thing, so here you go!

This is one of the sections of animation that I managed to get rendered out properly. This caused me to notice a few things that need to be fixed: Clarissa is way too dark, so she needs lightening in the hypershade, or the gamma needs correcting (I'll fiddle with this and see) The background looks fuzzy - this is a photograph rather than a scan of the background so will be rectified when I scan them today Her globe "brain" still isnt glowing like its meant to. I'm gonna have to find a different way of doing this, probably through compositing. 

This is the final soundscape for Clarissa and the Cardiac controllers. I am rather happy with this, but would like to stick some more detail in it when I have more time, however this works well at the moment.

This is not the final background, I am waiting to scan those in on Tuesday at uni, however I wanted to test the transparencies animations and start getting the files set up. This test told me two things: I need more than one directional light, otherwise I get the strong shadow that's seen behind the hand The glow on the "brain" sphere isn't working. I need to find a new way to do this.  So I need to do these changes before moving onto the final renders.

After having lots of problems with skinning and rigging (a lot of which were due to inexperience, much practice needed over the summer methinks), I finally have a working rig for Clarissa, to decided to animate with her to eliminate any bugs with the final skinning. Anyway, here is the test animation.

I found some unposted half finished concept art, so decided to finish it while Maya was doing other things, so here you go. There's others I'm yet to finish too, so they'll get posted in the next couple of days.

I decide to make two different versions of the heart exterior. I think I'm happier with the second version more. Its more anatomically accurate and I think this is important for this age group.

I've made quite a lot of progress in the last couple of days with modelling and rigging. Feeling like I'm getting there now. Clarissa Heart

Fantastic Voyage Pitch Presentation by Eleanor 'Nelly' Luckett on Scribd

I decided to start trying to create my Charles character in Maya to help me figure out how I wanted him to work and what shapes would work best when actually translated into maya. So I came up with 3 final shapes for the bottom of him. I'm intending to do the same thing for Clarissa too as this should help me figure it out for final concept art as well as giving me a basis to help work out my story boarding from.

Fantastic Voyage OGR by Eleanor 'Nelly' Luckett on Scribd

I decided to help myself with character development by making the characters out of plasticine first. Here is my first complete character. Enjoy!

I've spent the last couple of days considering my art style for this project, and how to make it interesting and engaging to 16 and 17 year olds. I feel that it would be very easy to make the animation feel childish which is something I definitely don't want to do, so I started exploring bridges between my natural styles and potential style influences, which lead me to arrive at the style of the game Don't Starve.

I began creating some basic influnce maps around ideas and elements that I would/might want to include in the animation. These started off with finding textures for the heart, so I could consider colours, representations etc. I then began looking at plasma and the similarity between the shapes that plasma beams form and the veins that surround the heart. I also decided to look at the idea of the heart as a "pump" and what real world pumps look like. I decided to focus on Victorian, highly mechanical pumps as these are far more interesting that the small, compact pumps we use these days. Looking at the pumps reminded me of the illustrations of Heath Robinson, who drew absurdly complex and impractical contraptions to perform simple functions. This is not something I want to include in the project as it obviously has to be factual, however the drawing style is very interesting and may prove influential to some of my art direction. He even made some...

This is my intial exploration of the potential design routes for my current ideas.  I am starting to think about having the AV node represented as a control room, with a big, catastrophic disaster happening, leading to the Controller having to quickly save the day. I haven't yet decided if I want the control room to literally be inside the heart or as a metaphor for the heart. This is something I intend to explore over the next few days. I started trying to design my Controller character. These are the designs for if he is made from pure energy. I plan to get the more mechanical designs done tonight and uploaded.

Today I decided to do some more research on the exact part of the cardiac cycle that I am interested in, specifically the Atrio-Ventricular Node. This is the part of the heart that delays the beat in order to ensure both ventricles contract at the same time. I also found a really interesting website (the American Heart Association) which has a really useful animation showing different arrhythmia: https://watchlearnlive.heart.org/CVML_Player.php?moduleSelect=arrhyt