Brief

Brief

1.
My brief for this project is to create a 30 second sequence to be added into the film ‘The Ring’. In this film, there is a videotape which, when the film on it is watched, results in the viewers dying. The brief concerns one scene, where a dead lady comes out of the TV to kill a male character. This dead lady is to be edited out and replaced with a zombie-type character based on Susan Boyle. She should be singing ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ with the Britain’s Got Talent background displayed on the television. The purpose of this alteration is to add some topical humour into this suspense-filled horror film, as a surprise lighter moment.

2.
My brief is to add two new characters to the film ‘The Shining’. They are to be added into a particular scene at the end of the film, where the main character, Jack, played by Jack Nicolson, is chasing his son around a maze in the hotel grounds. In this scene, there is a lot of snow on the ground and Jack is stumbling down a long straight path in the maze. The camera follows from behind. My task is to create two 3D penguins, which follow behind him, sliding in the snow. Then, when Jack is shown lying frozen and dead in the snow, the penguins appear and peck his face, showing surprised looks on their faces.
The purpose of this addition is to add surprise and humour to a scene that is very well known and is full of tension and suspense.

Reason For Choices

When trying to decide which film to work on for my brief, I first made the decision to use a horror movie and had the idea of adding a humorous extra feature into the film.

1.
I really enjoyed the film The Ring when I first saw it and thought that there was maybe a similarity between the video being passed around in the film, and videos which are emailed around and shared on the Internet (‘memes’). I thought that it would be fun to use the Susan Boyle video as the basis of an idea because it was one of the most well known and watched this year. I didn’t think that it would be fair or original to use the real person but better to morph her into a zombie type of character.

2.
I have always liked the film The Shining as a classic horror film and Jack Nicolson
is brilliant in it. In the end scene and the style that it is filmed in, I thought it was easy to picture Arctic or Antarctic animals being added. As I wrote about Surf’s Up and Happy Feet for my contextual studies essay and report I thought that it would be fun to have a go at animating penguins myself.

How it will help me develop my software and animation skills

I hope by working on this production it will help me to improve in many areas. Although I would like to progress all-round I would particularly like to gain strength with my modelling, UV editing and lighting. As well as using Maya I would like to use Final Cut Pro to edit the film clip so that the 3D character fits in correctly. Final Cut is another program that I would like to progress with, so it will be useful to use in this assignment. In either choice of brief, there is a good opportunity for me to learn and develop my modelling abilities, which the area I most want to develop.