I look for a compelling storyline that gets me wanting to progress or sometimes I buy a a game based on the prequel for example I played the first Assassin’s Creed a few years ago and I ended up buying all of the sequels after because they always ended on a cliffhanger that made me want to progress and find out more.
Another reason why I buy games may be because of the brand/name of the game for example I buy Call Of Duty Games because of the producers and the series, because they set the bar so high in all previous games I tend to expect a high level of quality.
Police in America use games to train themselves to be SWAT and they use the game to gain scores anything above 90 is suitable for joining the SWAT force, video games have been proven to improve hand-eye coordination as well as improve reflexes therefore making the police force more deadly and capable; below is a link to ‘Vinnie’s toughest cops’, the episode outlines how bad crime is in Baltimore in America and how the SWAT force and police force training including a part where they train with a video game. (This part is further towards the end of the episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOHGfM6pxg4
I started by getting some of the old assets and placing them into one C4D file, the screenshot below is from the start of the animation process where I was positioning the gun box to pop through the ground.
I started by key framing the location of the box and moving it to where I wanted it to go, the screenshot below shows the moving pattern of the box and the gun while it is keyframed and moved through the house.
The next screenshot is showcasing the box moving up so that it holds the gun up for the character to grab during the cinematic.
The screenshot below is the basic primitive room with a light on it the little black point in the middle is where the animation should take place and the gun box should come up through the ground for the character to grab.
The screenshot below shows the process I went through to create the character I started with cubes and put them into a subsurface division it is supposed to be a basic robot and I will eventually add some blue glowing effects to it so it looks like it is hovering or being propelled forward.
The picture below is towards the end of the animation production where the character was being animated and keyframes into position, the character will enter the room then grab the gun and zoom back off, this is the character flying in for the first time.
Below is how it will look when the character grabs the gun, in the final version I’m planning to have a little blue spark coming from his hand so it looks as if the robot is magnetising the gun to it’s hand.
The slideshow is just a rough show of how the final product will look.
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Below is a quick video on how I did the rigging on the robot character.
Above is a screenshot of my project rendering in one of 2 views.
This is one of the views that will be used it shows the gun rising from the ground and the main character picking it up and flying back off to war.
Evaluation
I started the original idea as a space ranger fighting scene but soon ran into some issues involving polygon count and render time, this meant that I had to scrap the idea and start again, however due to the time in which I noticed the issue it meant that the new idea had to be done quickly and still following the space ranger idea. Originally I planned to feature a bar fight scene and have a gun pop up from a secret box under the floor which the main character would then grab and start fighting with, this has to be scrapped as I had got close to completing and was too far into the project to look back through everything I had previously done to try and find which version was ok to go off from, instead I settled with a scene which could be used as a prologue to the original idea, so I kept the gun rising from the ground scene and came up with a slightly new story, the main character is now grabbing the gun from their home meteor and is getting prepared to go into battle. The new animation idea had to be rendered and made from scratch (only keeping a few models like the character and gun) in the space of about 2-3 weeks, the planning could’ve been done bit more efficiently and I could’ve set out certain times in college to do certain aspects of the animation. I also had a slight issue with coming up with an idea to begin with so I settled with the first theme that came into my head and worked up from there, I wouldn’t say I have much knowledge of Cinema 4D but what I do know is more than other software such as; Blender or Maya, however Cinema 4D still proved to be a somewhat reliable piece of software that allowed me to produce and finish my animation.
During the process time I was very limited in what I could make as the issues I came across seemed to be very specific to me; therefore I wasn’t able to get help from tutors or the internet and had to find out the answer alone, i was also limited by the fact that I currently don’t have a working computer at home and had to create all of my assets in college time which was a massive pain as my USB stopped working in the last few weeks and I had to put up with switching between Dropbox and Google Drive.
The final product didn’t look as good as I had hoped because ambient occlusion and global illumination caused each frame to render incredibly slowly and would’ve caused me to be unable to complete the project in time. I originally wanted the main character to have little glowing rings that would signify that those areas are magnetic in order for the animation to make sense, but because of the effects not working I had to settle with a slight light going from the rings, also I originally wanted to use a sketch and toon effect to make the colours look softer and polished off professionally, this idea also had to be scrapped because of render times and the capabilities of the macs being pushed too far.
All together though the final product suits the target audience as the gun signifies violence and action aimed at older teens more towards the adult age range, and the robot flying and space setting continues the space ranger original idea and still shows the audience that this game/cinematic is about space fighting and wars in space themed places. Furthermore I enquired with a few of my peers what they thought about my cinematic, I had lots of mixed reviews as I asked them to be brutally honest and find any and all issues with the finished product, according to them the product “had bad optimisation but good quality rigging and smooth animations,” when asked about the idea itself they said it was “too simplistic” and “could’ve been more in-depth, however it was executed well and you did a good job of trying to implement the original idea into the new one.” As you can see the cinematic had mixed reviews and did had some issues that could’ve been ironed out if given more tim, but also had some good things too; therefore I would say that it would be good to send it out into a focus group of people to test out if I was correct with the target audience and to find any other improvements that could be completed.
We witnessed a study that showed the behaviours of children and the correlation between parent behaviour and child behaviour, a parent beat up the bobo clown doll and then the footage was showed to the children, sure enough the kids went into the room saw the doll and copied what their parents did, some of the kids also took it a step further by holding a gun to the clown doll and using a hammer to hit it. This helped to define the fact that children take in a lot of the information they see or get from their parents, they are like sponges to information.
Frankfurt prison experiment
Several college students were hired as actors to be either guards or prisoners in a made up prison and it was meant to show how far a human would go when issuing pain and suffering upon other humans, several of the prisoners were cracking and wanted to leave and started to revolt against the leader of the experiment, the guards didn’t seem to show any changes until a new volunteer was brought in and soon realised how bad the prison was, this subject then went on a hunger strike and was kept in ‘the hole’ for several days. some of the guards seemed to show some restraint when it came to this subject as they were willing to starve them self and be locked in solitary just to prove a point and go against the experiment. The results showed that humans had high tolerance for suffering and most of the guards were alright with everything but some were not. It was also fascinating how the prisoners who were strangers ended up banding together to try and oppose the common enemy, as one prisoner was given the chance to leave and having only been there for a few days the guards were shocked to here his response that he did not want to leave as he could not leave the others behind.
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