Assignment Justification

For my animation, I decided to do a chase scene involving R2D2 and a mouse droid. In it, R2D2 comes across a mouse droid downloading data that it has to take to the Emperor. He starts to chase it, traps it by closing the door ahead, and, when it dodges him too much to be captured, R2 crushes it under the door.

The simplest model was the corridor, as the wall and floor are just huge, long flat panels of grey. The door was made by starting with a big, upright square. I then used a smaller one, and cut it out of the big one, to leave a large doorway. I then made a thin square and overlapped it with the gap, creating a sliding door.

For the mouse droid, I simplified the design. Both Droids have a certain feel of the lego version about them, but I'm pleased with the result, and I think they work together, and it suits my animation, because the story of the animation has a comedic style, and is quite a lot like the funny moments added into the cutscenes of lego star wars games. In the mouse droids case, the simplified design misses out the aerials on the top, and the raised squares on its sides.

The simplified R2D2 just makes use of a flat image of his details, wrapped around the matching object of the model, making the final image flat but detailed. The dome proved very hard to wrap properly, and although I have got it very close to how I want it, he still has something of a 'melty-face' look. I used UMV wrapping to add the textures to R2D2, and everything else has been coloured using the colour grid within 3DSMax.

I used 3 cameras for my rendering, only one of which moves. Instead of having one camera follow the entire animation, I chose to render different parts of the movie from different cameras, and put them together in iMovie to make the finished piece. I had to buy a newer version of iMovie in order to get all the effects I needed, but I'm pleased with the finished result.

Story Board.

The final animation may differ from this slightly, depending on how much time I have and how easy it is to animate, but this is the basic plan for what will happen.

Uploaded in photo form due to lack of a functioning scanner.

I've changed my idea for my animation, and decided against the AT-AT. I've been told that it would be too big and complicated for the time I have available, let alone trying to animate it. I should stick to things of a sensible size that I can get a good effect on, rather than spending all my time working on one huge model that will be difficult to both create and animate.

My new animation still involves R2D2 being awesome, but in a different way. Now, the scene is set in a corridor on the death star, with R2 chasing a mouse droid. It continues to annoy him, until he eventually overrides a door control and squashes the robotic pest.

Mood Board.

This a photo of it on my computer screen, because for various reasons this was the easiest way of uploading it. It also has a degree of progression to it, up to down, left to right, it vaguely suggests at the plot of my animation.