The Reversion Movie

(Click on Thumbnails for Full-Size Images)

Are you ready for the trailer premiere?  So are we.  Just ten days to go before our trailer hits the web.
 

In the meantime, we have two new stills from the new 11-minute short film.  The first image shows our Unknown Soldier accessing a panel at what is clearly the lobby that we revealed in our earliest updates.
 

The second image is taken from another part of REVERSION and shows a portion of the interior of the Security Room.  This is a place where "sonar video records" (SVR's) are retained, as well as conventional real-time video surveillance. 

In the film, sonar recordings of all angles of an event (where you can look around an event from a single recording) play a key role in the film.

 

DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY:

The first still is taken from overhead to create a sense of scale and it allows us to appreciate the height that was built into the Lobby Set and the massive DNA-sculpture that adorns it.  This leads me to discuss something that is often taken forgranted in amateur animation productions.  And this is to create a "height scale".

For REVERSION, if memory serves me right, our height scale was 2 Blender Units is 1 Meter.

Taking this into consideration REVERSION ended up with two sets that were very massive.  I believe one of the sets exceeded a height of 100 feet in terms of height scaling.  Taking note of the height is not just about making sure your actors haven't turned into giants.  Taking this into account early on can help with ensuring the consistency of Texture Spaces and it allows for the intelligent planning of detail in all phases.

Is something really too small to take notice?  Pull out the height scale and check.

In contrast, the Security Room in the second still image is actually rather cramped.  Furthermore, there is an interesting story behind this room and section of the film.  Originally, the script had called for all the sonar recordings to be in an auditorium or viewing room, but given some story events before, during, and after this planned segment, creating a large auditorium with an actor wading into it would have slowed things way down.

There were other problems associated with horizoning, and whether any sonar videos that appeared would properly display at eye level.  Later, the entire physical design of the Auditorium had fallen into question, because in mapping out the facility it seemed the scale required for an Auditorium outstripped the rest of the facility and no longer seemed practical.

If your "map" has too many large rooms, and if you are making a film where characters "travel" then it simply means putting in too many large rooms slows things way down.

 

I believe it was Wes Talbott, our concept artist, who finally conceived of a smaller Security Room where it would still be logical to keep all the surveillance of events at the Congo facility.  After showing me a design of the room and a short note about how it might logically work out, we enthusiastically put it in.  It is important to note that by going through a very healthy discussion about what would work and what would not, we had avoided the massive wastage that would have resulted from creating the Auditorium.

The final result is that REVERSION's sets all take into consideration to a certain extent the amount of space and logically the amount of ground that can be covered whenever possible.  Although there is some time-lapsing in the picture, we hope to present an overall logical flow of travel throughout the facility.

Still, everything plays second compared to Story and Storyboard.  The Lobby and Security Room , for example, allow us to logically place cameras in high and low angles without much alteration to camera settings.