Film Treatment - Working Title "Hurricane"

Film Treatment – Pop Tarts Animation

Themes

In the film there will be two themes that are present. The first and most major theme is “Man vs. Nature”; a poor village in a very cold area now have to deal with Mother Nature who has brought a hurricane over the village, destroying many buildings and causing havoc. The other theme in the film is “love conquers all”; Even though his village has been mostly destroyed he still wants to find his family that he loves and that keeps him going even though it seems like everything is lost.

Genre and Style

The genre of the film will be Drama, there won’t be any action sequences in the film or other things like that, the film will be about the main character and how he reacts to the hurricane that hit his village. The script is designed to make you sympathize with the main character but still has a happy ending.

The visual style in the film that is being pushed is non-realistic; the style will be slightly cartoony. All the assets and buildings are going to be designed to be crooked; there will a lack of parallel lines in a lot of objects and assets in the scenes. Colours in the film will be slightly exaggerated, the same goes for characters. They will have exaggerated proportions, like caricatures.

Textures are a big part of style and the textures we will be going for are painted styling. This gives a nice look without it being too realistic, it also means that textures can be smaller as they will have less detail then super realistic textures which will decrease render times.

Animation Method

3D Animation is the main method that will be used to produce this film, we feel 3D animation will be best for the film as the idea is suited towards it; also our team are 3D animators so this is the best decision for our group.

Hand Animation will be the method of animation as opposed to motions capture, this is due to the characters in the film being stylised, so their animations will also be stylised whereas motion capture would lead to realistic animation.

To create assets polygon modelling will be used to create them but it is also possible that 3D sculpting can be used to create some assets and characters in the film. These will likely be done in Mudbox, 3D Coat or ZBrush.

Particle effects will also come into play as well; they will be used to create a snowing effect and could also be used to create lighting effects. Volumetric lighting is also a possibility during certain scenes in the script.

Rendering would likely be done using Mental Ray as this give the best look for all the default renderers in Maya or 3DS Max.

Speaking of packages, Maya will be the package our group uses the most; it will be used to create animation as well as rendering. 3DS Max could be used to create assets as these can be imported and exchanged between packages. Other pieces of software that will be used include Photoshop, which will be used to created textures as well as other preproduction assets.

Target Audience

The Film we are creating won’t have a specific demographic but will be catered towards non children as the film is in the Drama genre children aren’t generally interested in this type of film. We feel our target audience of older people will find it easier to sympathise with the main character.