Scale world: my second story

2nd STORY:

(Backstory)

Bigs are running out of space on their world due to constant technological development and they're preparing to invade the Smalls' world.

Midi not present (just like above), their world is obscured by clouds and space dust.

No Big or Small that ever ventured down the scale made it back to tell the story.

Midis are just a myth.

Bigs can physically assimilate parts of their environment and they communicate through high pitched noises.

Bigs are thelepatic

Main character:

- the runt of the Bigs' world:

-a bit of an outsider because his shoulder crystals are smaller than average

-moss growing on the side of his face (unkept allure)

-has a bit of a flower power spirit

-shorter than others because he's been spending too much of his childhood in the mines, fascinated with the beauty of the ore

-in his spare time he polishes different stone parts of his body

-dreams of becoming a sculptor

-plasma crystal-based life form

(Story below)

Story follows the goofy Big marching to Small world

We see propaganda posters about Smalls

Our main Big doesn't really believe that Smalls are that bad and once on their world, saves a lonely scared Small

Scale World: my first suggested story

As the group didn't want to change much about the world we were given, my two stories had to keep the scale part a bit too literal for my liking so I decided to work around that and focus on the story.

1st STORY:
(Backstory)
With the purpose of keeping true to the scale idea, the Midi world does not appear in the middle of the scale but is rather situated at the base of it, long forgotten by the Bigs and Smalls.
Both Bigs and Smalls perpetuate their species by asexual reproduction(once per life cycle maybe).
Bigs and Smalls come from the Midis of the bigger world underneath (explaining the gravity pulling down the two worlds) and are the result of a disease.
The Midis built the scale to keep Bigs and Smalls from contaminating the others and separated them in order to avoid the possibility of conflict between them.
Midis now exist in Bigs and Smalls culture only as a myth.
Smalls have discovered a cure for the disease (by accident) and are slowly reverting the process of getting smaller and smaller.
The Bigs are too proud to accept anything from the "despicable" Smalls as they believe logic and knowledge will reveal the cure to them
Smalls are afraid that the fast expanding cities of the Bigs and their constant increase in size will tip the scales and destroy both their worlds so they insist on giving them the cure

(Story)
The story follows a Small diplomat as it travels to the world of Bigs in order to give them the cure
We see  a few Bigs trying to sculpt their legs smaller, in contrast with other Bigs that are obviously proud of their imposing statures.
One of these Bigs listens to the Small and travels back to Mini world with them in order to get cured.

Character design pointers

Pixar

"Think about the meaning of the word 'character'. You're supposed to breath life into these things, make them appealing and give them the magic that will allow people to imagine what they're like to meet and how they might move."-Neil McFarland

Ricky Nierva

Above: Ricky Nierva

Disney

Below: Sergio Pablos 

The most important point he makes is exactly what I've been telling my team mates every week (!): without clear knowledge of the personality/motivation/ etc of a character the design is not believable.

Below: Aaron Blaise

For future reference

From Animation Mentor

Below: John Nevarez

Scale world: my work

I was assigned the task of drawing the Big for our project so I changed the backgrounds to find the colours that work best with it:
(Note to self: remember to rasterize stuff)

Final scene (Mini will be placed under the "soft light" layer)

Each image took a lot more time than I expected due to trying out different brushes and textures.

Designs are inspired by Nuala's work (below)

Mother Nature - Shadow world: colour work catch up (1)

Below - the Babe tree


In these sketches I tried to give the tree world a warm, innocent feeling. As the new creation of mother nature, the sentient trees would have a very pure existence, almost child-like. They would be explorers and develop a strong fascination with old human artifacts they'd discover, hence the chair.

Mother Nature - Shadow world: colour task

By this point, our group coordination and communication dropped drastically and I'm aware it was partly my fault (too late now).

As I was unable to physically attend meetings, the information shared in our group chat was scattered and inconsistent. In addition, we constantly had things that didn't fit added to the project, making it confusing. I felt demoralised by this and made yet another mistake - isolated myself from the group. I shall do my best to not let this happen again as it is in everyone's best interest for all to cooperate.

This post has been waiting in draft for too long now.

The reason I felt more inspired by the icy environment is because the shadow creatures remove life out of the places they come in contact with. No life = No heat

For the inter-dimensional crack in our world I looked at stuff like below:

Sketching↓

 

Below scar and mushroom tree based on Alistair's stuff

 

Above right - sketch of the hobbit houses Caitlin wanted for the new creatures. While working on it I came to realise that it would be more interesting to move away from the idea of a house. My suggestion was something more along the lines of this image I found:

And the tree creatures as well would not live in houses. At night they would gather around giant bioluminescent plants and become rooted for a while to regain energy.

Image found on the internet to use as reference↓

Each tree creature has a branch somewhere on the back of their bodies that always grows a leaf or two. A couple of times per life-cycle they grow a seed that they need to plant = how they reproduce.

I am disappointed with my performance on this task but my awareness of what went wrong should help me in the future.

Mother nature - Shadow world: inspiration/research

It seems logical that in a world in which shadows can become dangerous, all bioluminescent life forms are greatly treasured. They must learn to work together with the tree creatures in order to survive. 

Note: tree creatures are not the only ones affected by the wave of new life, but most plants and other beings too.

Inspiration for the new plant forms

Waitomo glow worm caves - New Zealand

Swee Cheng's luminous mushrooms

Glowing mushrooms 

(thee creatures could grow them on their backs/arms)

Red Sea living polyps 

Bioluminescent Jellyfish 

(modified into a land life form and kept as pets by the tree creatures)

UPDATE:

Based on Caitlin's idea of a ram shaped earth golem I looked at golems everywhere (ex below) and could not think of a new way of making it different from all the ones I've seen. The group eventually decided to drop the idea, which I agreed with even though I was very fond of having an entire civilisation live on a moving city. The golem would take 1 step a day (due to its size), thus there was going to be an entire culture developed around that time of day when the creatures Caitlin wanted to introduce would have to follow a daily routine of preparing themselves for the "step earthquake".