Well. Me and my mouse. Computer mouse that is, and I wielded it with abandon; firing up various pieces of software, generating concepts and storyboards and spreadsheets and whatnot.
Now that Maurice Moore and his team are doing the hard production work, thought I might share these concepts with the interested world, lest they fall into digital oblivion. That, and I thought they're kinda cool, in a geeky sort of way.
Before presenting the media, however, a few explanations are in order.
Intro Scene
During preproduction, it's the natural order of things that the director bring his/her vision to the story. Translated, that means re-writes to the script. Typically, this is a good thing for the project, for a myriad of reasons.
For Sixufus, Maurice thought we needed an additional scene at the start. An introductory scene. It adds interest and backstory, perhaps enough to even give our main character a little much-needed sympathy. Because this was fresh on my mind, I generated a few images that I thought were appropro.
In our story, the main character, Darwin, has multiple personalities. All of Darwin's personalities know that the others exist, and there's a fair amount of argument, banter, and unpleasantness that goes on between them.
These interchanges, though interesting, would lose some (if not most) of their impact if we just used voice-over. We need to see them; their expressions and their gestures (or lack thereof), in order to understand Darwin, to see what it would be like to have a group of people living inside of you, and them rarely agreeing on anything.
Thus was born the "Sixufus Location". It's not a physical place (though it resembles one), but a meta-setting. A place where there are just the six characters, around a table, and nothing else.
Technical Details
I'm the world's worst hand-draw artist. However, I do know how to run software, generally speaking, and that's what I used to generate these images.
The intro scene stuff was generated in Poser 7, using the toon renderer. Has a nice hand-drawn look.
The "Sixufus Location" concepts started life as Poser 7 scenes, which were then imported into Vue 7. Added a stock table, some chairs, and a pistol, then rendered 5-second animations, using radiosity. I then brought those clips into Adobe's After Effects CS4 and applied the Toon Effect for the final hand-drawn look. Heh, not perfect, but as Maurice says, it is what it is.
Finally
These are concepts generated by me, the writer. These are NOT concepts generated by Maurice Moore or his team, and the final film will look much different. That said, I'll then add that this will give you an idea of what my mind's eye saw as I wrote the script.
