Treatment

The main theme for this short is the desire for validation as the protagonist, Frank, has never had his music appreciated as no one has deigned to listen to it. However there is a secondary theme of the desire to be part of something bigger in this case Frank is a solitary lonely busker and so when the other musicians join in he is being validated as a musician and also part of a group. The genre would be musical mixed with a small biography feel.

The overall length of this piece will be from one minute to one and a half minutes, as animating so many people will take time and I wish to do this idea justice. This also gives me enough time to allow the music to build up at a decent pace so the audience keep getting surprised by what’s happening next.

The main character, Frank, is a solitary man who plays guitar so as to meet people and make money. However he never caught a break and so has lost his love for it barely going through the motions of busking. He longs for a spark in his life to make him happy and a reason to enjoy himself, luckily the other musicians in the piece will provide this and so frank will come more out of his shell as the piece progresses.

The target audience for this piece is general as I believe most people could enjoy it, however I acknowledge due to the lack of comedy and the heavy focus on music that it will probably appeal more to young adults and general music lovers. Because of this I plan on writing the music alongside a musician to best tailor it to my story, and as such will be able to control the feel of the piece even more as I help to build up Franks happiness and optimism in time to the build-up of the music and so feed that energy straight into the animation.

In terms of production I will be minimising the workload as best I can by keeping modelling down to a minimum so as to give more time to fine tune the animation. I plan on using free rigs such as the Morpheus rig, as I can create different looking characters that are still in the same style as each other and fully rigged without any time consuming work. This also leads into the environment as most of this animation will take place from a static shot I will only have to model and texture a small section of street and a few instruments. Using the Morpheus rig also leads into the design of the street as I will want the environment to match the characters.

I plan on retexturing the rigs so as to put them in shirt and trousers, then using hair in Maya I will make a dynamic tie so as to show more secondary motion and get more life into the animation.

In order to make the crowd I believe I will animate them separately and then composite them over the top of the animation as I believe this will be the most productive way of doing this and making Franks audience even bigger.

I will be doing all production in Autodesk Maya including modelling and animating, however any sculpting that needs doing will be done in either Mudbox or zbrush. The final composite will be done with Nuke.