Analysis of films that inspired me 

Final Fantasy tactics - War of the Lions, cutscenes

A huge inspiration on the visual style of my film. 

part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn6uRrsziEg

part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M4wz4F3gSs

part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzbCFgoLYkg

The cutscene has a very dark colour pallet with lots of browns and greys. The characters mostly wear colourful armour and clothing but its very desaturated.  

Cartoon style rendering is used to give the film a hand drawn look. Characters have shaded texture. The shaded textures boil as the characters move which adds to the traditional look, however the shaded texture is only on solid objects, not organic parts of the characters such as the face or hands.

For my final renders I will use the cartoon shader in 3ds max to create a similar style. My plan for the final render is to render out a separate graphite layer as an overlay to further create a drawn cartoon look which will create a boil between frames.  

FFTWOTL also uses fades from brown paper with the first frame of a new scene on, into the animated and more colourful scene. 

Th music score is a compesition orchestral tracks for action scenes and softer piano parts for emotional interaction between characters. 

The short is narrated by the main character in parts and then is heavy on dialogue throughout, helping to explain the plot for the game. 

Characters speak in an anachronistic way which ads to the authenticity of the world the story is based in. 

Retrospect: Developments of film production

Environment

One of the biggest problems with the development was the incomplete environment models for the film. In order to deal with this issues the environments have been drawn out by hand. However, in a 52 shot film this would have proved an incredibly difficult task. I looked back in to the storyboard and managed to narrow the backgrounds down to 18 drawings with each of the 52 shots included in these drawings. This means that some shots use the same background drawings.
This is very similar to another short film entitled The Cathedral which uses minimal amounts of modelling on the environment, the rest is complete hand drawn.

The majority of this scene was drawn in Photoshop. My film uses the same technique. Basic models were used for the characters to interact with and details were added later.

This unfortunately greatly limited the camera movement of the film, no tilts could be used, only pans and zooms. The zooms were actually used to differentiate shots that used the same backgrounds, shots were rendered at different zoom levels on the same background so that they appeared to be different shots.

Rose

Quite early in development I was experiencing problems with Rose's dress whenever she was animated moving quickly, particularly running. As Rose spends a lot of the film running this was a terrible problem. I looked back at Rose's design and decided that she might actually need something more practical. However, I didn't want to get rid of Rose's dress as I still wanted her to seem quite feminine. I instantly knew the style I wanted to go for:

Alice is the leading character of the Resident Evil film series. In her first appearance she had a very feminine look, however her legs were not restricted. This doesn't restrict the character's movement in the many dangerous situations she is faced with

Rose's dress has now been redesigned to barely cover her legs, but is still quite long and effeminate. The design of the dress is essentially the same but is now asymmetrical. The removal of Rose's shawl was another technical issue, simply to save time rendering cloth.